Upbeat Arnold travels hard 'Road' to success

By ADAM DAWTREY

Her unflinching low-budget debut "Red Road" won the jury prize at Cannes last year, but Andrea Arnold couldn't be further from the stereotype of the pretentious European auteur.

A 45-year-old former kids TV presenter from the working-class fringes of east London, she memorably accepted the Oscar in 2005 for her short film "Wasp" by exclaiming, "As we say in England, this is the dog's bollocks!"

She doesn't appear to have a cynical or misanthropic bone in her body. In fact, despite a 15-year struggle for acceptance as a film director in Blighty, Arnold is so upbeat about every twist and turn of her career ("fantastic" is a favorite word) that she'd make Pollyanna seem prone to discouragement.

Of course, Arnold's got a lot to feel positive about. Hailed as the latest discovery in the great tradition of Euro art cinema, she's been nominated for a BAFTA and is taking "Red Road" to Sundance this month. Her next project is being developed by Paramount Vantage and BBC Films.

But her optimism is not just a response to an upswing in her fortunes. It's the essential quality that underpins her work, making her far more than just another technically talented peddler of social-realist misery.

Set in Glasgow, "Red Road" is a thriller about a woman who stalks the killer of her husband and child, lures him into graphic sex, beats herself up and accuses him of rape. Yet in Arnold's world, things always turn out better than she leads you to fear. She looks into the darkest places, but only to seek out flashes of grace, beauty and redemption. Every camera move expresses some kind of emotion, and her compassion for her characters is profound.

"People call 'Red Road' bleak and grim, but I don't think so," Arnold says. "I believe that no matter what happens to you in your life, all around you are amazing things."

"Andrea puts a bit of sparkle into everything that's horrible and dull," declares exec producer Gillian Berrie. "Red Road" was made for $2 million in what Berrie describes as "bloody awful" Scottish weather. "She works like a Trojan. I don't think she realizes the warrior that she is," Berrie says.

Arnold's entire career is a triumph over adverse conditions. Raised by a single mother in Dartford, a town that defines the phrase "cultural wasteland," Arnold got into dance and drama at school, entering disco competitions and getting cast in the '80s kids TV show "Number 73." She played a bubbly roller skater with a perm and a shiny gray suit that made her look like an extra from "St. Elmo's Fire."

But all the time, she was writing, imagining lives for people she saw on buses and street corners. Realizing this was her vocation, she quit her onscreen job and headed for a year of film school in Los Angeles.

Back home in 1993 with no local contacts, she took work directing wildlife shows. "I love nature. When you film polar bears and rhinos, you learn how to capture things when they are happening," she says.

Her shorts eventually won her the chance to make her feature debut with Lars von Trier's Advance Party trilogy -- three movies by three directors, sharing the same characters and actors. "Red Road" was the first, setting the bar so high that it created a problem for the other two. The second is still going forward with director Morag Mackinnon, but the third is on ice after Danish helmer Mikkel Norgaard dropped out.

Meanwhile, Arnold is experiencing the head-spinning demands that come from suddenly being so hot. "I've learned that having made a film, you have to get involved in making people want to see it, and that's something I didn't really think about before," she admits. But she's trying to concentrate on writing her next project, produced by Kees Kasander.

"It will be a small universe with very few characters, set in southeast England," she says. "I get sent a lot of scripts now, but I've worked so long to be able to make movies that I want to make my own."