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Interview: Clio Barnard on the Workshopping Process That Brought Ali & Ava to Life

Clio Barnard discusses her unique workshopping process, which directly involves the real-life analogues of her characters.

Clio Barnard on the Workshopping That Brought Ali & Ava to Life
Photo: Greenwich Entertainment

Over the past decade and change, British filmmaker Clio Barnard has established herself as a new bard for Bradford, a former industrial town in northern England that rarely finds itself in the cinematic spotlight. Across her three features set within the city’s confines that blur the lines between fiction and reality, Barnard foregrounds both the struggles and joys experienced by the town’s residents in their daily lives.

Barnard’s work produced in Bradford suggests a social-realist vision of the exquisite corpse, with each film picking up a spiritual or literal thread from its predecessor to provide a fuller picture of the town. Barnard’s 2010 feature debut, The Arbor, utilized actors lip-syncing to recorded dialogue as an aesthetic device to both dramatize and contextualize the life of late local playwright Andrea Dunbar. Her fable-inspired follow-up, 2013’s The Selfish Giant, came out of her encounter with a young child that caught her eye during production on The Arbor. (As tribute, she named her scrappy young protagonist Arbor.) In turn, Barnard’s friendships that developed during The Selfish Giant’s shoot inspired her latest film, Ali & Ava.

Barnard’s “social realist musical” charts the fictional incarnations of two locals who became active participants in the film’s development: local landlord—and erstwhile DJ—Moey Hassan and a teaching assistant named Rio. Their eponymous analogs in the film, Adeel Akhtar’s Ali and Claire Rushbrook’s Ava, diverge from reality by kindling romantic feelings for each other. This unanticipated connection presents the opportunity for each of the lonely lovers to confront the traumas of relationships in their past that manifest as roadblocks to their happiness in the future. Throughout Ali & Ava, music provides the conduit for each to express these feelings they cannot put into their own words. All the while, Barnard’s observational humanism gently reveals the difficulties of being vulnerable to another person at an age when one feels permanently ensconced in their established identity.

I spoke with Barnard shortly before the U.S. release of Ali & Ava. Our conversation focused primarily on her unique workshopping process, which directly involves the real-life analogues of her characters, and how that affects story, script, and visuals.

For this film, you did a workshopping process where the real-life inspirations for the characters are participating with the actors. What does that look like in practice?

There are different phases to it, I suppose. The first is the sketch of the idea, as I didn’t have a full script. I’ve worked with Adeel Akhtar, who plays Ali, and Rebecca Manley, who was in The Selfish Giant. Rebecca had gotten to know Rio, who Ava’s based on, while making The Selfish Giant. Adeel had listened to lots of recordings that I’d done with Moey Hassan, who Ali’s based on. I devised a workshop with Rebecca around potential themes, and then they improvised. We took just two days trying out different things. The scene in the car, quite a bit of that came from that initial workshop, as did the scene in Ali’s basement when Ava comes to visit him. And, I think, the scene on the doorsteps came from that initial workshop.

I’ll go away [after] and write a draft, and then we did another set of workshops in Bradford with Rio. She sat in the room with us, and Rebecca was working with me again. Shaun [Thomas] was playing Callum, and Rio was watching and giving notes. We were encouraging her to get up and get involved in doing some performing as well! But she’s a funny mixture of sharp, shy, and not shy. She’s very apt to say, “No, that’s not right,” very confidently. That’s what those two different workshops were like. Then, I went back to the script and spent time in my shed at the end of my garden where I am now. Using those workshops to build a script from, or going back to chat with Moey or Rio, there’s a kind of back-and-forth process.

Was Claire Rushbrook not involved in the workshopping stage at all?

She wasn’t. By the time Claire got involved, we actually had quite a honed script. Like I said, Adeel was involved from before the beginning. We had a more conventional casting process for Ava. We met Claire first and had a chat. We met a few different people from quite a short list—I think three people—with [casting director] Shaheen Baig. We did a casting workshop, and they did three different scenes that have been written but I then asked them to improvise around. They did the scene on the sofa with the headphones, and Claire just really made me laugh and moved me. You could see that there was a real spark between her and Adeel.

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I had wondered if Claire brought any expertise from her collaboration with Mike Leigh, who has perhaps the most storied workshopping process in cinema.

I love her in Secrets & Lies, she’s so brilliant. I don’t know whether she drew on that experience with Mike Leigh. I know that once she came up to Bradford, because the production was sort of up and running when we were in prep, she went and spent a lot of time with Rio and her family. She did this brilliant thing of creating this on-screen family, because her granddaughters are all non-actors who had never done it before.

What’s the goal of having real people so involved in the production process? Is it to make your performers feel like they’re channeling real people rather than characters?

Not really. I’ve been making films in that very specific way for over 10 years now. It’s more about meeting people, feeling inspired by them, and wanting to see their stories on the big screen. I would say these are fictional biographical portraits that are made in collaboration with the people who inspired them. The Selfish Giant was inspired by real boys I met when I was making The Arbor, and The Arbor is a semi-documentary about real people. It’s about lives that often go uncelebrated or unseen and wanting them to have a place on the big screen.

Is there a common thread between the lip-syncing technique you employ in The Arbor and the way you create fictional characters in a film like Ali & Ava? Both seem to use performance to capture that Herzogian “ecstatic truth” lurking beyond reality.

Definitely the process of The Arbor had a big influence on how I work on The Selfish Giant, and that, in turn, had a big influence on how I worked on Ali & Ava. They were all different from each other for different reasons. In The Selfish Giant, where the two lead children had never acted before, it meant that I needed to workshop it in a particular way. It was different from the way I did it on Ali & Ava because I had two very experienced actors. In some ways with The Selfish Giant, because those boys really were friends, there’s a lot of accurate biographical details. Luckily, both boys, who are men now, are both still alive; there’s a spoiler for The Selfish Giant. I suppose what fiction does is it allows you to broaden the scope of the story.

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How did you make the “social realist musical” something achievable in Ali & Ava and not just an oxymoron?

That was a very fun challenge in a way that I set for myself. Tracy O’Riordan, my producer, and I have semi-joked for years that we wanted to do a musical in Bradford. I suppose we did! Music was very much a part of the workshops, especially the one with Rebecca and Adeel at the beginning. Adeel is really into music, and he’s got quite eclectic taste. In the two or three years that we were working together on the film, we would exchange music all the time. It played a part in the workshop, and then I wrote it into [the different drafts of the script], which was fun. Moey, who Adeel’s character is based on, really was a DJ and does have a big vinyl collection. That’s a sort of gift to the character. Rio really did sing all the Irish rebel songs in the pub. I wouldn’t say she’s really into folk music like Ava though.

So that moment where Ali and Ava share personally meaningful music with each other by swapping their headphones came out of the improv and the chemistry testing?

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It didn’t actually come out with the chemistry test but in the first workshop. I think I’d written it as a sketch already. Then we tried it out, and it was really fun. Rebecca and Adeel had their headphones on with different music, and they fooled around and had a lot of fun. I then honed the scene a bit more. It’s so performance-dependent, that scene. You write it, and then it really depends on what the actors do with it on the day. Adeel and Claire improvised around that scene where they get up on the sofa, him helping her up, but then they had fun with it.

That moment reads as so real, but it also functions a great metaphor for the film at large. Do you have a guiding compass to know when moments like these can be both real and representational, straddling the delicate balance without breaking it?

It’s a tricky balance to achieve. It’s a constant process that goes on until you finish the final sound mix, because that can change things too. One of the things that I think in the film is possibly quite subtle is a parallel drawn between the violence and racism within Ava’s own family and the need for the family to confront it in order to be able to move on. In this one month that the story takes place, it’s cathartic for them because they have to look at the racism and violence in Britain’s colonial history in Ireland and in India. They have to face up to it. I think that parallel is there. I want it to be a delicate balance, because I don’t want to be on a soapbox. If I could just adjust a little knob now, I would turn it a couple of notches up.

Does the workshopping process also inform your visual choices?

It’s primarily for the performances and character development. I think, for Adeel, it was really just being able to sit in that character and feel free when he was on set—or, that’s what he talks about subsequently. I think sometimes what actors are doing is visual, like the sofa. I also work with somebody called Phil Clark, who’s a picture researcher but is really so much more than that. He and I work together at the script stage, quite early on, and put together an image document that went alongside the script. That sort of tells the story visually, I suppose. In the production office, we plastered the walls with the image document. When I was in Bradford, I worked with Kamal Kaan, a writer who took me to places that he felt were representative of Bradford that hadn’t been seen on screen before. Like the cemetery, which is called Undercliffe Cemetery, you can see those amazing twinkling lights out there with the moon.

That plays a part, as does spending time in the places where I know we’re going to shoot. For example, the Slovakian family who are Ali’s tenants are Moey’s tenants in real life. When I went to visit it, I thought I loved the house. By chance, we cast the niece of Moey’s tenants who live in that house. Because that character was originally written as a boy, we changed the gender of the character for Ariana [Bodorova] and shot in the house. And I suppose the other part of the process in terms of visuals is, of course, [director of photography] Ole Bratt Birkeland, who I had worked with before on The Arbor. We sat down together and were rigorous and thorough going through the script and thinking about how best to tell the story visually. In the edit as well, that’s another part where you’re taking dialogue out. Maya [Maffioli], my very brilliant editor, and I are stripping out dialogue [during the process]. How you can tell the story visually is what’s always on our mind as a creative team.

Overall, is anchoring Ali & Ava in the reality of Bradford important for both the performers and the audience?

Definitely. I think you can feel that when you’re watching something. You know it in your bones, that detail. Ironically, detail allows it to be universal and speak to more people.

People often envision a straight line running from specific to universal, but it’s really more like a spectrum. I think the two wrap around and meet someplace where the very specific becomes very universal in a paradoxical way.

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It’s true. That’s a lovely way to put it, the running around. Strange alchemy, isn’t it?

Marshall Shaffer

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based film journalist. His interviews, reviews, and other commentary on film also appear regularly in Slashfilm, Decider, and Little White Lies.

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