EXCLUSIVE: The BFI London Film Festival closes Sunday with the world premiere of The Kitchen, a movie set in a dystopian London where an impoverished community is forced to fend for themselves in ramshackle apartment blocks. It marks the feature directorial debut of Oscar- winning actor Daniel Kaluuya and architect-turned-filmmaker Kibwe Tavares.
It’s a film that Kaluuya (Get Out,Judas and the Black Messiah,Black Panther), Kibwe Tavares (Jonah,Robots of Brixton) and Daniel Emmerson (Calm With Horses), The Kitchen’s producer, have spent the best part of a decade bringing to the screen.
This column’s about how three friends came together to develop a tiny idea that over the years has evolved into tale about a London that’s split in half — those who have and those who don’t.
However, through their eyes, it’s a London that, ultimately, offers a sense of humanity and hope.
To be sure, there were moments of despair as they struggled to articulate in cinematic form about their idea of London, and as Tavares put it, “What it meant to us and what our place in it is.”
The long and winding road to a triumphant ending was often draining. “How do we build our own thing?” Tavares asked.
“Starting something from scratch,” he told me from L.A., where he has been developing an animated feature for Netflix [he’ll be back in time for the LFF gala], “is always kind of hard, because you almost have to write a novel before you sort of write the film, so we wrote so many many different versions of this.
“Some that were more futuristic, that felt less grounded; some that were more grounded, but didn’t quite have balance. It took a long time to find what the final thing was,” Tavares told me as we discussed the process of how writers Kaluuya and Joe Murtagh (The Woman in the Wall, Calm with Horses) penned their screenplay.
“I guess we don’t have so much science in our movie now. It’s more of an economical and political future,” Tavares added.
Then, as the project progressed, Kaluuya’s role as writer and producer expanded to such an extent that he effectively became codirector. “I’m a director now,” he beamed.
Daniel Kaluuya. Photo: Baz Bamigboye/Deadline
In recent weeks, they’ve worked through the night into the early hours, holed up with editor Christian Sandino-Taylor (I May Destroy You) and VFX post-production teams to complete the film in time for Sunday’s world premiere screening at the Royal Festival Hall.
“Oh, mate, it’s been nonstop,” Kaluuya told me when we met in a private room at Soho House in Dean Street. “We’ve just been making sure everything’s tight, making sure…there’s just no stone’s been unturned. I did all that I could to make it what it wants to be.”
During the writing process, he realized, “Oh, shit. I need to get my ego out of this and get out of the way. “This film wants to be made, and this film wants to be told in the way that it wants to be told. And if I put myself into it, it’s a lesser story. That’s what I told myself.”
His conversation with himself has paid dividends.
Along the way, he and his two collaborators have grown immeasurably as artists.
Kaluuya came up with the first inkling of an idea ten years ago whilst waiting for Nev, a barber in the Holloway district of north London, to give him a haircut.
“There was this guy who was just showing off about stuff, about certain moves that he’d made, smash and grabs and stuff. I was like, ‘Wow, you’re talking really loud at the barbershop,’” Kaluuya recalled.
“In my head, I was like, I’d watch that film! I kept going back to the barbershop, then I never saw him again,” the actor-turned-filmmaker told me.
Kaluuya kept asking after the show-off dude, and discovered that he’d been involved in robbing a fortune in diamonds. ”So I was like, ”Wow,that says a lot about London.”
One day, he was on the set of Jonah, a short film his friend Tavares was directing from a screenplay by Jack Thorne.
In one of their down moments, he told Tavares, ”Hey,I think I’ve got this thing for a heist film.”
They met again later on with Emmerson joining them, and they began discussing the idea of a heist film. “So I said to them, I’m on it if we can make it. If you can just go and do a taster and make it happen.” So we each put in £200 each,” Kaluuya explained.
The barbershop in Holloway was rented for the day as their set. “We basically did Reservoir Dogs set in the barbershop. We put in some actors that I knew, and we showed it to Film4,” said Kaluuya,recounting their first major step.
Film4 provided the trio with development money. It was to be their first foray into production.
Emmerson was working as an assistant to Debra Hayward, who was producing Les Miserables with Working Title and Cameron Mackintosh. Later, Emmerson would produce Calm With Horses. Kaluuya had spent four years on Skins — acting and as writer and cowriter on two episodes. Tavares at that time was studying architecture, filming shorts, and dabbling with animation.
The seed money from Film4 was a big deal.
Kaluuya wrote a script, then went off to Sundance Film Labs to develop it.
He created this world that’s undeniably London, where those with less than nothing reside cheek by jowl in towering hovels where they queue up for basics like water and food. Squads of armed police raid them daily. Gangs in masks propel rocks as missiles to bring down snooper drones.
At Sundance, Walter Mosley (The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey,Justified: City Primeval) introduced Kaluuya to the idea of MOVE, the Black communal and back-to-nature organization in Philadelphia.
As Kaluuya dug deeper into his research, he realized that a lot of the kids doing the smash and grabs were known as the Fagin’s Kitchen Kids. ”Also, the north London area that I’m from is the area that Dickens was talking about. I was like, ”Oh, this is like a lineage.” A lot of the archetypes that ended up being a part of this film were just very London British archetypes .You can see a lot of Robin Hood, you can see a lot of Oliver Twist.”
Another idea he came up with, one that’s central to the film, is Life After Life, a burial service for the people of The Kitchen unable to afford to bury their dead.
Izi, the film’s sort of hero, played superbly by Kane Robinson (Top Boy) works at Life After Life.
The dubious concept of Life After Life is that they claim to turn bodies into trees. It’s where Izi meets 12-year-old Benji, played remarkably well by newcomer Jedaiah Bannerman, a boy who has lost his mum.
The heart of the movie is Izi and Benji.
Kane Robinson and Jedaiah Bannerman in ‘The Kitchen.’ Netflix.
Netflix
Robinson has soulful eyes. They tell you everything you want to know about what kind of father figure he might end up being to Benji. We root for them in the hope that they’ll be okay.
It was to take Kaluuya, Tavares, and Emmerson a long time to reach that point, the direction in which they had to take their film.
I visited the set of The Kitchen in May of 2022.
The screenplay was dense, as if the kitchen sink had been thrown into it. There were subplots about this, that and the other, all obscuring the central premise of Izi and Benji.
“We just had too many ideas in there,” Emmerson agreed. ”And the process of making the film was a process of distilling it and working out what the real essence of the film is. And the essence of the film is Izi and Benji’s relationship and the battle for community in the Kitchen. And basically, every idea in it had to serve one of those two things. And if it didn’t, then it couldn’t really live in the film.”
The three partners all concurred with that sensibility, with full support from top executives at Netflix and Film4.
“It’s about a kid that’s lost his mum and he wants family,” Kaluuya said to me. ”I feel like a lot of that with British Black characters. I just want there to be humanity within us and show that we are human and our universality, without compromising our cultural specificity .
“That was the goal of this, that was what I was on,” he continued.
“You can be unapologetically yourself and speak about the most biggest things in the world, and connect to the biggest things in the world, and I wanted to have a city, our city, London, to be a place for global storytelling in the same way New York is,” he said.
The idea of The Kitchen, he said, is being able to “articulate a reality that exists and an essence and an energy that is big and that matters in this world.”
Some might see The Kitchen showing a London that’s to come, you know, somewhere off in the future. But I felt that I was observing what could very well be London now, in certain parts of it.
The filmmakers insisted on researching London’s past to understand what London’s future might look like.
Kaluuya amd Tavares studied how the city looked after the Blitz and how it was rebuilt.
Emmerson told me that they spent a few days scanning and filming exteriors of the Damiers complex, with its button-shaped exterior, in Paris’s financial district. “We couldn’t find a location in London that suited the aesthetic that Kibwe and Daniel wanted to build, to give it that slightly otherworldly look,” Emmerson explained.
I didn’t know Tavares until we met on set last year. But I’ve known Kaluuya since early on in his career, and I remember meeting Emmerson on the set of Les Miserables. I admire the toil they’ve put into making The Kitchen work.
“I think part of the journey with a debut film,” Emmerson told me “is that you’re all learning and the time has to allow for you not just to make the film, but to learn the best way to make the film.That’s what the process is of making a debut. That that’s what we, all three of us, went on during this journey.”
If the film has a European vibe, it’s because ever since Kaluuya had that light-bulb moment at the barbershop, he’s been on a mission to learn all that he could about the art of cinema.
He admitted that he came into the industry with little film knowledge. The HMV store in central London had a closing down sale that lasted for something like two years, and they would sell DVDs for the equivalent of two dollars each.
Kaluuya had heard people talking on the set of Skin’s about Shane Meadows’s films, or City of Gold. “I was like, “All right, let me just buy them. And I bought them all, hundreds of them, and I would just watch films in my room.”
He was ready for Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, and saw it in a theater. “I couldn’t believe I was experiencing one of my favorite films in real time,” he said.
Laughing, he told me “I started being a cinephile and watched all these French films and showed them to my friends I grew up with. So I was chill with them and I’d watch shit with them and I go, “What, do you like that?” They’d go, “Nah, I don’t understand what’s going on.” And I would always know. I don’t want my friends to not understand what I make. That’s crazy to me.”
So, he began showing them European movies so they’d feel more comfortable when he took them to premieres and stuff.
“They loved it. We started having conversations about why they loved this and that film, and X, Y, and Z are talking to them at premieres like, ”Oh yeah, yeah,” he said, smiling.
He was interested in what films spoke to them “because they are who I want to reach.”
And with The Kitchen, “I really wanted to marry what I love about European cinema and what I love about American cinema. And I love the kind of delicacy of European cinema. I love kind of how unafraid they are to go deep and just to like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly … but then I love how evolutionary American cinema is. This is just my take, obviously, because I’m still in the beginning of my journey, cinema-wise. It feels like European is more revelatory and American cinema is more evolutionary. With American cinema, I love how direct they are about their emotions and their feelings and what’s happening in their head,” Kaluuya told me as we discussed movies we’ve loved and how the post war French New Wave influenced the American films of the 1960s and 1970s.
I felt a sense of hope speaking to him, a hope that he will be part of the British New Wave.Tavares and Emmerson, too.
Correction, they’re already the British New Wave.
Kaluuya, Tavares, and Emmerson deserve their moment at the BFI London Film Festival with The Kitchen garlanded as closing night film.
The journey has not been easy.
Kaluuya worked for it. It didn’t just happen.
“I respect that,” Kaluuya responded “because a lot of time people just herald people who are finished, they’ve already arrived. “It’s people that grow, that’s what I value.”
He cited Beyoncé as an example, where “every time she pops up, I go, ‘Oh, my God, you’ve grown. You are an artist. You are a living and breathing artist.’ Because she’s mainstream, people don’t respect the artistry and what’s happening when you’re seeing this woman.”
Kaluuya felt the same about Robinson, and how the actor and musician has made a “giant leap” over the years from the early series of Top Boy to the work he’s doing on it now. “When his name came up, I was like, ‘Wow, he’s grown so much.’ He’s done so much work on his acting and his ability, and I was just so impressed. You see how rare it is that people put in the work. He’s put in the work and that’s why he’s where he is in terms of ability, in terms of presence, screen presence.”
I smiled and told the debut director that I felt exactly the same way about him.
The Kitchen will release in UK cinemas and then launch on Netflix.The film was made in association with Film4, who also supported the film’s development, and was produced by Emmerson and Kaluuya for respective production companies DMC Film and 59% Productions.
And how cool, by the way, to cast Ian Wright, former Arsenal star-turned-TV pundit and radio presenter, as Lord Kitchener, the voice of The Kitchen, who broadcasts warnings of police raids.
Oh, and Nev, from the barbershop where it all happened, has a special cameo.
https://deadline.com/2023/10/daniel-kaluuya-breaking-baz-the-kitchn-1235573830/
