Barry Keoghan And Franz Rogowski On ‘Bird’, Andrea Arnold’s Unique Process, And The Meta Nod To ‘Saltburn’ Keoghan Couldn’t Resist – Cannes Studio

Barry Keoghan and Franz Rogowski took to the rooftop of the Palais yesterday to visit the Deadline Studio in Cannes, and the high vantage point seemed fitting; the pair are on a cloud after the triumphant premiere of Andrea Arnold’s Bird, in which they both star.

Keoghan tipped his hat to this publication for laying the groundwork for the role. “It was a Deadline interview I’d done a while ago where I said I wanted to work with Andrea Arnold,” he said. “So the call came in and I met Andrea for fish and chips in London. She said, ‘I’m not going to show you the script. You’re not going to know what it’s about.’ Even before that sentence, I said, ‘I’m in.’ I’d be in any time, you know. I really mean it when I say she’s one of the best out there, and she captures performances that are just second to truth. From non-actors–”

“Like us,” interrupted Rogowski, whose career has hit hyper speed in the past few years, with roles with Terrence Malick, Michael Haneke and Ira Sachs under his belt. “Like you and me.”

“Like us,” laughed Keoghan. “[Andrea] has this ability to go into certain communities and just be accepted. People forget about the camera, and as an actor it just elevates you massively to work with non-actors and to dig deep and be exposed and vulnerable.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” said Rogoswki. He was on set when the call came through, and promised to meet her four weeks later after he’d wrapped. Instead, Arnold jumped on a plane, and the pair met for dinner—a rice bowl this time. “Suddenly I was part of her universe, which felt incredible because I’ve been an admirer of hers for decades now. Wow, I’m so old.”

Arnold was strict about withholding the script from her cast. “It was interesting to know that we couldn’t prepare our roles,” Rogoswki said. “It was more about listening to her songs, looking at the pictures she would send, and just being a part of her painting without preparing performance.”

“It makes you go to instinct and be spontaneous,” said Keoghan. “The beauty of it is you have to discover. There’s no preemption, there’s no rehearsing. It totally makes you not be guarded, and when you’re not guarded, that’s when we see pure and rawness.”

Arnold’s process is also exploratory, says Rogowski. There are many more versions of the movie left on the cutting room floor, because the director likes to explore many aspects of her characters and decide in the edit what makes the final cut. “What you see is the tip of the iceberg,” said Rogowski, “We’ve created a lot of material that isn’t in the movie. We shot chronologically, and we tried a lot of different things. The material that has survived the edit is marginal compared to the material we captured on set. In photography, it’s not hard to take a good picture, it’s hard to choose it. You take 1000 pictures, and a good photographer is the one that deletes 999 of them. That’s what Andrea does.”

He also recounts a story about a scene shot on a meadow that took five hours to orchestrate. So unobtrusive is Arnold’s process, that she one day charged the cast and crew with waiting while a group of local kids finished playing on the meadow. “We just crossed the meadow, and that’s it. But it takes us five hours, because the kids own the meadow. It’s not the crew that owns the children.”

There’s much more from Keoghan and Rogowski in Deadline’s video, above, including Keoghan and Rogowski’s thoughts on the touching central performance in the film by newcomer Nykiya Adams.

But one aspect of the film that needed urgent interrogation was a hilarious moment in which Keoghan’s character, Bug – who is deciding which music to best play to a hallucinogenic toad in order to get it to slime – wonders if bad music might be the key. “What’s bad music? Like ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’?” Bug asks, off camera. It’s a knowing nod to the grand finale of Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, which caused a stir last year, in which Keoghan’s character prances to the beat of Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s 2000s dance classic.

Did Keoghan forewarn musician Ellis-Bextor that he didn’t really mean it? “No,” laughed Keoghan. “That wasn’t my idea by the way. But we love a cross-universe reference in this world, don’t we? It was only put in there in ADR, but I think it’s a nice nod. It breaks the fourth wall, in a way, and the fourth wall is broken a lot in the movie. It feels right. I think it fits.”

The Deadline Studio is presented by Neom.