Franz Rogowski: ‘If you talk about birds, you always talk about ethereal energy’

If there is one contemporary German actor whose name you ought to know, it’s Franz Rogowski. Thanks to a background in dance, the physical virtuosity of his performances is often the first thing to be noticed, but in his gestures, delivery, and gaze there are emotional pulses that resonate beyond language and genre. Indeed, one of his break-out moments was an extended karaoke rage-out to Sia’s ‘Chandelier’ in Michael Haneke’s Happy End. Rogowski has since collaborated with masters such as Terrence Malick, Christian Petzold, and Ira Sachs, and it has placed him firmly on the world cinema map, while his recent roles in Sebastian Meise’s Great Freedom or Giacomo Abbruzzese’s Disco Boy captured by cinematographers Crystel Fournier and Hélène Louvart reveal the power of his characters’ opacity. In Andrea Arnold’s Bird, and through Robbie Ryan’s signature embodied camera, Rogowski radiates a warmth as a cheerful loner looking searching for his family. It’s a warmth that is not what Bailey – the film’s 12-year-old protagonist – wants, but it is what she needs.

The story of Bird concerns the life of 12-year-old Bailey, but the film is named after your character, who is not exactly a main character, but definitely not a side one. Where do you position him within the world of the film?

You might have experienced this as well, that feeling that you’re always the lead in your own life. So right now, you’re the principal role in your life, and I have the same feeling on my side of the screen. So I knew that if I am Bird, I’d have to see the world from his point of view whether the camera takes the same perspective or not. But if you just see a character, it could even be someone who only has one line in one scene, coming in and saying, ‘I have to go. My mum died.’ It has no importance for the film, narratively, but now if you then imagine someone’s mum dying: this is a major event in anyone’s life. Then, we would have witnessed a little fragment, and just a small second of a life that from the perspective of that individual means everything. So in theory, it was easy.

How did you approach the character in practice?

Andrea didn’t share a script with me. She only shared songs and pictures of a lonely, naked man floating above trees and meadows, swimming and climbing trees. When she told me that I would be some kind of a Mary Poppins figure that would accompany a girl on her journey, so I was prepared to support someone else and not lead the story. That puts you in a different mindset, where you form a triangle with the camera trying to guide and accompany the lead; to sometimes appear and then disappear. In this case, I was more driven by empathy, and I also felt like I was accompanying not just Bailey, but also Andrea. Part of this world, part of her is also Andrea. And Bird is also a part of Andrea’s self. And she told me that in the beginning, that this is actually a very personal energy for her. It’s one of the animal energies that she feels in herself. When I agreed to this project, I also agreed to be her Bird and be by her side.

There is a mythical gravity around Bird as well, which, in the way I see it, feeds into the independent, self-sufficient kind of characters that you’re often portraying in films. Is this a fair assessment, to say that you’re drawn to such roles?

We live in a world that likes to put things in boxes so we can sell them and ship them, you know. And if you have a cleft lip and a bit of a naval voice and a rough face, they will put you into a space that allows you to be the outsider, the villain, or some kind of a stranger with a little superpower. I guess that this place has been given to me in society, but in my private life, I am also quite social and not always only at the outskirts. I like it, and sometimes it’s very nice to observe. I am actually a bit of a voyeur, but I don’t think the roles I play represent me as a person. What I do like is when I feel that a film doesn’t translate everything into words, but gives space to other dimensions of cinema by creating these empty moments in between. Maybe a part of the loner energy is just me enjoying films that don’t need to talk all the time.

Andrea Arnold’s scripts are very bare and there’s a lot of conjuring happening in the moment, during shooting. But was there any other prep than, for example, your exchanges of music and talks?

For me, there wasn’t. I had her number. I knew I could call her. But I accepted that as a challenge. I guess if someone tells you to come to a party without telling you anything about it, it’s probably more interesting to just go there and see what happens.

Arnold finds inspiration in life and social issues, which bleed through all her characters. I know fiction is important for your craft – inhabiting a character as a fiction that becomes real – is part of your process. How did Bird channel this relationship between reality and fiction?

We would meet on set, and then just spend hours just hanging around in time and space, drinking coffee. The set included a house that was built after images from her own house where she grew up, and we were surrounded by neighbours that would really live there. We wouldn’t use any intimidating film artillery, no cranes, maybe a little truck around the corner, but it really came across as a little student production, and that is also key to blending these two worlds of realism and poetry. I guess Andrea is like a mixture of a tiger on the hunt and a very patient gardener. She would create these spaces in which all the ingredients are right, even if the camera isn’t ready. Also, this kind of film can easily turn into poverty porn, where a director uses the strong colours of poverty to make something that is hyper-real for wealthier people to look at in the cinema. And in her case, these are her people. This is how she grew up. And she’s one of the very few that has seen both worlds, those of Cannes and Kent. I think all these different layers of her personality make her the director that she is.

What you said makes me think of Bird’s ability to retreat in the background and still be a very integral part of the film world. What was it like for you during the shoot, when there were these moments of waiting, did they help your role?

It helped a lot. I mean, you come on set, you’re very ambitious, you do your thing, and then you realise, ‘Oh, wow, okay, the camera is not even on me.’ Most of the stuff that I’m doing as Bird is invisible. Nobody will ever see it. But does that really matter? Actually, it doesn’t, because I’m Bird, so I do my Bird thing. Soon, I also realised how precious and rare Andrea’s approach is, to create a microcosm in which you just hang around and then, you know, sometimes you shoot and sometimes you don’t, but somehow everything turned into one big experience. I hope that I can also one day create that basis of resonance for other people.

It’s very easy to read your work through the lens of physicality, especially with your background in dance, but Bird is skipping, twirling, basically floating. Levity is very important for this character. And I really wonder, how did you work with your body and your mind to get a performance that is both expressive and also very subtle?

Wow, that’s so, so kind of you and charming. I often feel heavy as a donkey.

Don’t we all?

Yeah, yes, we do. You know, I’m longing for levitation, but most of the time it’s just my back aching and me feeling guilty… But you’re right, that the first images that Andrea shared were images of a guy standing on a skyscraper, and pictures of man floating above nature. And, yeah, if you talk about birds, you always talk about ethereal energy. So when we started improvising on the street, I would often instinctively choose to be slightly elevated when accompanying Nykiya [Adams]. So Nykiya would walk the streets of realism, let’s say, and I would walk the paths of fantasy. I would just slightly elevate my path and walk on a little wall next to her, or stand on a little staircase, a little fence, a little chair, a table, and always somehow make myself slightly altered or somehow weird in a way, to somehow break the logic of the space that we were in. Most of this material is invisible, but it inspired Andrea to make her next decisions along the way.

Obviously, we see a 12-year-old girl and a grown up man, but it never feels like a mismatch. There’s something about the size and weight of the character that just keeps changing and shifting.

That’s great to hear! Because, I mean, I remember trying on the costumes for the first time, all these beige and brown colours, and this weird military skirt and ugly sandals. And I was like, ‘Oh, my God, they’re really turning me into a terrible pervert, accompanying a little girl! I’m not sure I want to be that kind of Bird…’ It really was a costume that I had never seen before, one that would interrupt the connection to society that we usually create with the references that we are wearing on our body. This costume was so strange in so many ways that it put me in a very alien position on the first day, and I wasn’t sure whether it would turn out to be on the heavy end, or rather on this other end, where the otherness somehow stands for itself.

I was also thinking about the costume and how unlike it is, for example, the ones you wore for Passages which was as much a means of expression as it was an armour. But here, the materials and their weird combinations work to a different effect.

You should also talk to the costume designer, but in general, the references to these textiles were survival, Boy Scout, military, gender-bending, queer, and obviously, wearing a skirt as a man. But also, as you said, combined with some softer textures, like a wool pullover, socks, and the sandals were from an old guy with a camper van. The skirt makes him queer, which is almost the opposite of an old heterosexual man. Then you have these jumpers that make him, I don’t know, like German in a way… I think I felt terrible in that costume at first, but watching the movie, I felt it all made sense.