Director going Wilde for her adopted city

A new film shot largely in Bradford is set to further build the reputation of writer/director Clio Barnard. She spoke to Film Critic Tony Earnshaw.
Clio Barnard on the set of her latest film The Selfish GiantClio Barnard on the set of her latest film The Selfish Giant
Clio Barnard on the set of her latest film The Selfish Giant

Clio Barnard wheels her bulky luggage into the foyer of the National Media Museum and throws her arms around one of the many people that await her.

She has returned to her adopted city for a preview of The Selfish Giant as part of the National Youth Film Festival. It is her second feature film and one populated by local folk, not least the two teens she cast as her leading actors.

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The travails of a nightmare trip from London to Yorkshire – a truncated rail journey followed by a mad dash via taxi from Doncaster to Bradford – evaporate, as she is welcomed into a genuinely warm embrace.

“I’ve grown to really love Bradford. If people are rude about it I come out fighting. It’s not defending it because I don’t think it needs defending. It’s like I’m pointing out what’s brilliant about it.”

It was Barnard who resurrected the reputation of local playwright Andrea Dunbar in 2010 with The Arbor, both a filmed biography and an absorbing memoir that restored to life a young woman whose 29 years were marked by deprivation and abuse.

The Selfish Giant is as traditional a movie as The Arbor was unusual. Very loosely adapted from the 19th century tearjerker by Oscar Wilde – the fable of a grumpy giant whose selfishness is tamed by the innocence of children – it is set in a bleak 21st-century northern town and harks back to the social realist film explosion of the 1960s.

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In Wilde’s fairy tale the giant’s beautiful garden becomes an icy wasteland when the children are banished. In Barnard’s film the setting becomes a scrapyard and the giant is a manipulative adult who intimidates the boys into working for him.

“Oscar Wilde’s fairy story is really about what gets lost when children are excluded,” says Barnard.

“Part of what fascinated me was to take a whimsical Victorian fairytale and put it together with this quite tough, contemporary real circumstance that the kids are growing up in. It seems like there’s a disconnect.”

Selling the film to her financial backers was not particularly difficult. Partnering once again with Tracy O’Riordan, her producer on The Arbor, she presented what she called “the seed of an idea” to Film 4 and the British Film Institute. It was agreed that she should develop it, write a treatment and finally a script.

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Her concept was sufficient to raise £1.4m. “Not huge,” remarks Barnard, “but it seems big to me just because I’d never made anything that big. I was completely supported by the financiers.”

And by her friends in Bradford. After going through a casting process for The Arbor Barnard, O’Riordan and casting director Amy Hubbard went back to the same schools for their junior stars.

They found 13-year-old Conner Chapman on the first day at Buttershaw School. All agreed he was special. Co-star Shaun Thomas, aged 16 and from Holme Wood, also stood out – even more so when he volunteered to read lines with other potential recruits.

In the film the roles of these two unlikely best friends – volatile motormouth Arbor (Chapman, named after Andrea Dunbar’s home) and docile, horse-loving Swifty (Thomas) – were reversed with the introverted Chapman playing the leader and the gregarious Thomas his acolyte. Think John Steinbeck’s George and Lennie but with Yorkshire accents and much swearing.

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“It’s really important to know that they’re both acting and that they’re definitely not playing themselves,” says Barnard. “They might be playing aspects of themselves. And in a way they’re playing against type.

“When we did the rehearsals Shaun would say ‘Why would I take orders from a little skinny 12-year-old? He’s half my size. I’m a boxer. It just wouldn’t happen’. It took a while for Shaun to dampen that down and settle into being Swifty and not himself. They’re both brilliant kids.”

The film has already raised eyebrows for the violence of its language – a flurry of F-words and, the ultimate linguistic taboo, a C-word – and for its unapologetic placing of itself within a British milieu dominated 
by Ken Loach and Mike Leigh.

Comparisons with Loach’s Kes and its dogged hero, Billy Casper, take Barnard into raptures. She compares Loach’s 1969 classic to Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. Of her own film she is more modest.

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“I see it as existing within a genre of realist fables about children for children.

“There are lots of different places that an idea grows from and one of them was from a bit of a frustration on my part in terms of what was available in contemporary cinema for children to watch,” she recalls.

“I was watching films with my kids while I was making this that are realist fables. They use symbolism and metaphor and they’re still very tightly structured but the aim is a kind of naturalism. I suppose in some ways The Arbor critiqued that and in a way this embraces it.”

The language of Barnard’s duo of ragamuffins is, however, balanced precariously on the edge of what might be considered acceptable in a children’s film, albeit one with a 15 certificate. In retrospect does the dialogue go too far?

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“If I’m really honest I wish I’d done a pass on the script where I’d taken some out,” says the director with refreshing rectitude.

“There are points where I thought the kids were improvising and then I looked at the script and I went ‘Ooh. It’s in there’. There’s one scene where I think it is actually every other word. There probably is too much of it but I think it’s quite accurate.”

The Selfish Giant (15) is on nationwide release.

Talented filmmaker

Clio Barnard’s debut film The Arbor, an experimental documentary about Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar won widespread critical acclaim and a number of awards including Best New Documentary Filmmaker at Tribeca Film Festival, Best Newcomer and Sutherland Awards at The London Film Festival and The Guardian First Film Award. She was also nominated for the BAFTA Outstanding Debut award.

The Selfish Giant premiered in the Directors Fortnight section of the Cannes Film Festival this year where she was hailed as a bright new voice in British cinema.

She is a reader in the film studies department at the University of Kent.

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