Adapted from a short story by David Constantine, Andrew Haigh's new film 45 Years is about a complacently happy married couple, Kate (Charlotte Rampling) and Geoff (Tom Courtenay), whose lives are thrown into disarray when the long-lost body of Geoff's first love is discovered in the Swiss Alps, frozen and unchanged after decades in a glacier.

A beautifully told, quietly moving two-hander about an unexpected marital crisis, 45 Years features wonderful, lived-in performances from its leads, and further confirms Andrew as one of Britain's most talented film-makers. Ahead of its release in cinemas and on demand from 28^th August, the writer-director has put together an exclusive playlist of songs for Oh Comely, inspired by and included in the film.

Given that 45 Years doesn't feature a score, its sound design and use of music is crucial. Andrew told us about his process of selecting music: “Most of the music choices were in the script. I was trying to have songs that reflected the past and parts of their character.” He mentions a key song from the film, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by The Platters, which Kate and Geoff had played at their wedding. “I love their choice for their first dance, because really when you listen it's unclear whether it's a happy song or a really melancholy one. I've heard it being played at wedding parties before and thought, wow, I'm not sure if that's super romantic.” Andrew relates this idea to another song the couple like in the film, Go Now by The Moody Blues: “It has the perception of being romantic but then when you listen to the lyrics you think, 'my god, really?' I find that juxtaposition in music really interesting: that something might have the sense of being a romantic song but the truth behind the lyrics mean something different.”

45 Years: A Playlist Curated by Director Andrew Haigh (available on Spotify) 

I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire - The Ink Spots
Remember (Walking in the Sand) - The Shangri-Las
Suzanne - Leonard Cohen
The Old Man's Back Again - Scott Walker
Stagger Lee - Lloyd Price
I Only Want to Be With You - Dusty Springfield
Tell It Like It Is - Aaron Neville
Happy Together - The Turtles
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes - The Platters
Go Now - The Moody Blues

45 Years is released in UK cinemas and through Curzon Home Cinema on 28^th August. You can listen to the exclusive playlist here.

Photos: Agatha A. Nitecka.  

David Gordon Green has made so many left turns as a film-maker that he's found himself back where he started. After drawing repeated comparisons to Terrence Malick for his stunning debut George Washington and becoming a reliable source of underseen but critically admired dramas, David surprised many by directing the stoner action comedy Pineapple Express. A sizeable sleeper hit, the film heralded the unlikely second phase of his career. However, just as big, broad comedies like Your Highness seemed to define his work, the film-maker shifted direction again and moved into deliberately unassuming character studies. The latest of these is Manglehorn, a lovely, low-key story about a brooding locksmith with little time for anyone except his sickly pet cat. As the eponymous near-hermit Al Pacino gives his best performance in too many years, matching the understated charm that the film exudes. Ahead of its upcoming release, we spoke to David about his exploratory creative process.

You conceived of Manglehorn after meeting Al Pacino about another project. What quality did you want him to bring out of him with this film?

Al does a lot of larger than life characters and Manglehorn is smaller than life. I was really looking to do an intimate, very vulnerable character study, inspired by the meeting I'd had with him where he was laughing and soft spoken and had this wonderful modest quality. It was something that I hadn't seen in a movie of his in a long time. I was thinking about his old films like The Panic in Needle Park and Scarecrow, early Pacino work that I've always admired. As a big fan I wanted to find a good reason to get in the ring with him. I thought one way might be generating a great character for him first.

I found it quite telling that both Manglehorn and your previous film Joe are named after their protagonists. What's the value of focusing on just one character?

A couple of years ago I'd just had kids and wanted to live in a place and make movies in that place, so I moved to Austin, Texas and started thinking less conceptually about big budget explosive content and more intimately about the area I was walking around in. The locksmith shop in the film is just two blocks from my house. I could walk to the set every day. When you have kids you have this epic mindset – the universe around you explodes, in a way – and I wanted to focus on something that was less extraordinary and look at it through a microscope.

Do you think you'll ever have the urge to make films again on a larger scale?

Actually just last week I finished a movie that's like that. There's a bus chase on a cliff and big name actors and set pieces and everything. It's fun to have money and toys, and there are a lot of Hollywood things that appeal to me, but it's nice to strip all the conversation away too. On the movie I just completed there were hundreds of people I needed to refer to in order to discuss visual effects and action sequences and safety and set design and construction. For a film like Manglehorn it's just three or four people walking around looking at the light and moving some set dressing from one side of the room to the other. There's something really calm and peacefully collaborative about that. It's more meditative. I think I have the type of mentality that needs to bounce back and forth between things.

How did that calmer approach apply to your working relationship with Al Pacino?

For many months before we shot I would fly to California and sit in his back yard and eat strawberries and talk about the character. We'd invite friends over and just read the script aloud, start to hear it and evolve it. There were some characters in early drafts that we decided not to incorporate. We wanted it to be organic, so we shot mostly in order and I didn't want to know how it ended necessarily. There was a screenplay, a roadmap for what we were doing financially and logistically but the film became very different because we found detours.

How did you come up with the name Manglehorn? It's evocative of folk stories.

That was part of the goal, to make something that felt like a fairytale. In an early conversation we said that we wanted to make a children's film. We got a little too melancholy for that, but still there's no profanity or violence or drug use. We tried to refrain from anything objectionable as a subconscious reference to the idea of a magical craftsman. I've always seen the locksmith profession in that light, like woodcarvers or the toymaker Geppetto or other things that might exist in a fairytale.

Were you interested in the symbolic idea of a man who can unlock any door but can't open up parts of himself?

Once you take anybody and start looking at what they do you invoke a world of metaphors. This was a situation where we weren't resistant to that. None of it was conscious but we started smiling our way through when we realised the fable that was unfolding had that little nod to symbolism. It was a very casual production process. It wasn't one of those calculated, storyboarded, pre-conceived type of movies. It was really just getting a creative, collaborative group of artists together and convincing Al Pacino to show up and then everybody felt their way through filming. That's a fun way for me to work, to carve time to do some unique weird shit during the day.

Have you always been that way, or did you have to establish your own voice to be confident enough to explore and experiment?

I think any film-maker evolves in their enthusiasm and their process. For me it's always changing and I wake up every morning with different interests. Sometimes that means to do a big movie or a little movie or a television show or  a TV commercial. I try not to think about the end result too much but I follow things that appeal to me, narratives that appeal to me, people that appeal to me. I just go with my intuition and instinct and sometimes everybody's happy and other times it takes me to strange and questionable places.

Manglehorn is released in U.K. cinemas and through Curzon Home Cinema on 7th August.

The release of Desiree Akhavan's debut feature Appropriate Behaviour earlier this year heralded an impressive new film-making talent. As well as being the film's writer and director, Desiree plays its protagonist Shirin, a confident-but-floundering newly single woman attempting to move on from her former girlfriend Maxine (Rebecca Henderson).

Between flashbacks that trace Shirin and Maxine's ill-fated romance, Desiree excels at detailing the minutiae of life after a relationship: the efforts to redefine one's identity, the abortive attempts at online dating, the fleeting melancholy of realising that an ex is wearing clothes that you haven't seen before, their life carrying on without you. In a film distinguished by its emotional honesty as well as its humour and wit, one of Appropriate Behaviour's most perceptive observations is the idea that heartbreak exists as background radiation in modern dating: to varying degrees, everyone's trying to get over somebody.   

Ahead of its release on DVD, we spoke to Desiree about making the film.

Appropriate Behaviour starts and ends with Shirin on a train. In superficial terms not much has changed in her life but there's a clear emotional shift. How did you approach the journey she goes through?

When you study screenwriting you're given all these books that tell you there has to be an inciting incident, a villain, a hero, an act one. I remember reading them made me want to gouge my eyes out. It was incredibly boring. I thought if this is what screenwriting is then I'm not a screenwriter. I loved writing plays, and I loved writing scenes and building relationships through character, so that's how I started: I wrote scenes between Shirin and Maxine. I built that relationship and the film was about examining it. Once I finished the first draft I shared it with my producer Cecilia Frugiuele and she said it was good but she wanted to know who this woman is, who is her family, what's her job. She thought I should pull from my own life. That's when it became a journey of how this girl changes without really changing. There are so many films that deal with coming of age and young people in Brooklyn, but I wanted to make something that was so specific to the way I see the world that no-one else would be able to lay claim to it. That's all film is: telling the same story over and over again through a different lens.

Throughout the film there are flashbacks to Shirin and Maxine's relationship but they're non-chronological. Were you trying to replicate how Shirin's mind works?

It was about following a train of thought and what triggers a memory. When you have a breakup it's like being haunted by a ghost. You're in a moment with someone new and just the way their hand moves or the song that comes on or the food you're eating brings you back to a specific memory. You have this ex relationship on your shoulder, constantly reminding you: “Remember when you were happy? Remember when you were loved?”

Are the flashbacks subjective then? Even when they're in love Maxine seems a little aggressive to Shirin. Is that just her personality?

I always thought they were accurate but also Shirin is inspired by me and I'm an asshole. Who knows? The whole film is a flashback of mine. I say it's not autobiographical but at the same time I play the lead, so in a way it's all indulgent to one point of view. I tried to be as diplomatic as possible and to make it feel like that was the truth of what had happened, but if you get the sense that Maxine is a one-sided character then I haven't done my job well and we'll just say Shirin's bad memory at fault.

If the film isn't strictly autobiographical, do you see it as a heightening of reality?

It is, because of a few factors. One is that my life isn't interesting for a 90-minute narrative. It's not convenient enough. I wanted to draw parallels between characters and shape scenes to create a little arc in each scenario. The elements of my life are there but then characters and details had to change to suit the narrative and the story I wanted to tell. Also I rely heavily on my collaborators. I get so much credit because it's my face on screen, but my producer Cecilia is my work partner and had her hand in sculpting the script, while on set my cinematographer was a collaborator in how each scene played out and the same thing happened later with my editor. It's not just mine, so it would be insanely self-indulgent and false for me to say that this is a diary entry, because then it would be their diary entry too. I think the only way to make very personal work that is also universal and speaks to people who don't share your history is to rely heavily on others, because they add their perspective. They can tell you if you're going off the deep end or to go further. It's really necessary and it's a great joy.

What's it like to write, direct and star in a film all at the same time? Even with collaborators, that must be complicated logistically?

Well I'm a power hungry bitch so it works out really well that I get to wear all those pants. Also Cecilia had her eyes on the monitor the whole time. I didn't have time to watch playback so we were just moving forward; with other people's performances I knew exactly what I wanted, but there were a couple of instances when I looked at her and asked if I had it. One moment that sticks out in my head is the threesome scene. I watched one playback and it looked very graphic. I took her aside and said “This is too gratuitous, I've made a huge mistake, I'm going to pull back in the next take,” and she said to trust her and not pull back. I'm really glad I did because that's how we got what we have.

Your depiction of sex is interesting: it's not trying to titillate but it's casually graphic in the way that real sex is casually graphic. People have brought up Annie Hall when discussing Appropriate Behaviour but it's hard to imagine that sort of sexual honesty in comedic films of that era.

I think people are shooting sex differently now than they did before. There was a lot of dishonesty in the sex I saw when I was younger, but then films were very different in a pre-internet world. Now we have such a different dialogue – kids are coming out earlier, our relationship to porn is different – there's a frankness now and that's reflected in movies.

Sex in films never really got messy.

Or it was all awkward. The characters have a bad date and then bad sex and everything is terrible, but in reality sometimes things weave in and out of being pleasurable. That's the worst: when you hold on to the nostalgia for a moment you had two hours ago, hoping that the person will go back to your first impression of them. That happens quite often and I don't see it depicted in movies. Films lied to me about sex, and everything I learned about sex until a certain age I'd learned from watching a movie. It wasn't a conversation I had with my parents or something I could find out on my own. When I finally started dating I realised I'd been fed fairytale lies about simultaneous orgasms and never-ending love.

Appropriate Behaviour is now available on DVD.

In 2006 the playwright Alecky Blythe was researching a new work set in a brothel when she heard news reports of an apparent serial killer murdering sex workers in Ipswich. One of the stage's most notable practitioners of verbatim theatre – a technique in which plays are constructed from the exact words of interviewees, including every “um” and “ah” – Alecky headed to the area to speak to local people about the events. The material she collected didn't make it into the play she'd been working on, but over the next few years she followed the story's difficult aftermath, paying particular attention to the residents of the street where the killer had lived as they formed new bonds. Working in collaboration with the composer Adam Cork, Alecky turned her interviews into something genuinely new: a verbatim musical.

Inventive, funny, moving and unsettling, London Road received ecstatic notices upon its debut at the National Theatre in 2011. Four years later, the film version is an equally distinctive presence on screen. Ahead of its release in cinemas on 12th June, and the stage version's NT Live premiere on 9th June, we sat down with Alecky to talk about verbatim theatre and the complicated process of adapting it for a new medium.

London Road is perhaps the first verbatim play to be adapted for film. Why do you think there's been a lag?

One of the main reasons is that verbatim is by its nature quite wordy because it's interview-based. A written play might naturally have more action, which film requires as a medium. One of the challenges in making verbatim theatre is finding dynamism. I'm always looking for situations that are active so that you don't just have actors sitting on chairs talking, which is why I try to collect my interviews not after an event but as it's going on. London Road the show had a lot of movement compared to some verbatim, so it became a matter of pushing that even further visually. It's a big step for producers to realise verbatim can work for film and be a better approach than a documentary, which would be cheaper.

Has your relationship to the work changed over time? As you return to the text, does your increasing distance from it change how you see those events?

I think it probably does. It's easier to take some creative, imaginative leaps with the material because it didn't just happen last week. Things become a bit fuzzy. I have notes but you don't remember everything, and that allows you to be more free with moving it on in another direction. It's a good thing as long as you know the truth of what happened and the story you're trying to tell and you never deviate from that too much. If you take it too far out of context it breaks it.

Do you feel a sense of obligation towards your interview subjects?

Yes, it's a really big responsibility. I felt it even just in the very beginning telling them this was the first musical piece I'd worked on. It was difficult to explain because there wasn't really a template. It's not Mamma Mia!, it's not an opera, it's not atonal. By that point they knew me quite well and trusted that I would look after the work – I was taking it in an unusual direction but one that would help tell the story rather than get in the way of it. Later, the director Rufus Norris, Adam and I went to Ipswich before we made the film with pictures of the shooting locations, new cast members, all that kind of thing, to try to explain what we were doing. I thought it was important to do that to the people we were representing. I'm in touch with them a lot. If the work is active they need to be kept abreast of what's happening. It's their lives, which are ongoing and obviously the film will now have an impact on them. They've been brilliant, but I have sleepless nights about whether they'll be happy.

What first drew you to the residents of London Road as your main interview subjects?

Although I know why journalism is sometimes mentioned – I work in quite a journalistic way – I just try to come to a subject that people think they already know and shed new light on it. When I discovered what the residents were doing after the murders, I felt this was something that hadn't been talked about. We knew about the tragedies, which was a story that was clearly told in the media, but not the fallout. There were people who weren't in the eye of the storm whose lives had been affected too. Obviously this was to a much lesser degree than the family members of the victims, but I saw there were wider repercussions in the community that seemed to resonate. I was compelled by this, and these people wanted to share their experiences with me. It seemed like a story that wasn't being told.

Your subjects in London Road are the sort of people who usually only pop up in vox pops on the news to give a bit of colour.

That's right, exactly. They're never the centre of the story. It wasn't that I heard about the murders and thought, “Oh yes, I'm going to go and make a piece about the people who were affected by it.” It was very much an organic journey in terms of working out what the story was. I was paired with Adam in a musical theatre workshop run by the National Theatre Studio and I took this material that I'd collected from Ipswich, just as clay for us to work with, to experiment with the form. What we found was that the music seemed to help create this mood of fear that I remembered from Ipswich at the time. I thought the subject and form seemed to work together, and then not long after the workshop it was announced that the trial was going to be in Ipswich rather than at the Old Bailey, which brought the story back to life in the town. As the real life events happened I started to shape my piece around that.

Are certain sorts of stories are better for this approach than others? Your play about the 2011 Hackney riots, Little Revolution, also uses different voices to explore a community in crisis. Do you think that's something that verbatim is particularly suited for?

I think it is. Verbatim is very good at collecting shared voices and depicting different opinions. If there's an event, like a protest for example, it gives you a setting to go into. You can find the story from there. You could maybe say that all of my plays are about communities of sorts, even though I'm not conscious of it at the time. So there isn't really a protagonist in London Road; the community is the protagonist.

London Road premieres on 9th June via NT Live and is on general release on 12th June. Visit londonroadfilm.co.uk for more information.

Among the reasons that many debut film-makers are drawn to coming-of-age stories is that adolescence is a defining, universal experience, the heightened emotions of which make it naturally suited to drama. In addition, such narratives provide the opportunity to create a work that is fiercely personal without necessarily being autobiographical. The danger, however, is that the path is already well-trodden

With that in mind, what distinguishes writer-director Guy Myhill's first feature The Goob from other entries in this overfamiliar category is its strong sense of place. Shot with a mix of professional and non-professional actors in rural Norfolk, the film depicts a region that is both dreary and dreamy: a deprived fenland made up of lonely transport cafés, transient farm work and amateur stock car races. Although his subject is the wiry, guileless 16-year-old Goob (Liam Walpole), Guy is equally interested in Goob's fraught mother (Sienna Guillory) and her bullying beet-farming boyfriend Gene Womack (Sean Harris). The film becomes a study of the three characters and their inevitable reckoning: as Goob is exposed to positive external influences he is brought into direct conflict with Womack, who represents everything he wants to leave behind. Ahead of its release we spoke to Guy about making the film.

You've been working in the industry for a long time. Why did you choose this story for your first feature?

The starting point was a documentary I did on the stock car scene in Norfolk. There's something about that world that I really like: these old men and their cars, going around and around and around, stuck. I was also aware of  migrant workers in the area. I know their habits and some people who work in that business. I felt there was a spectacle to be had from both of those different set-ups and then it was really a question of marrying into that some kind of drama.

Contemporary Norfolk is an area that is rarely depicted on screen. Was that part of the appeal of setting the film there?

Definitely. The project came through a film initiative called iFeatures who funded it with the BBC and the BFI, and they were looking for specific regional stories. This particular story seemed to chime with that. I don't think there's anywhere in the UK that looks like Norfolk. It's really unique. There's this flatness you don't see anywhere else. It's like filming the sea; you don't really have to try. It's just there, all consuming, all powerful. I liked the idea of setting an intimate drama against this huge great backdrop. I think it's a land full of secrets. It's got a lawless quality.

What are the biggest challenges of making a film on a relatively low budget?

Time is the priceless commodity. We shot it in about 24 days so everybody at the end was absolutely shattered, because there were days and nights going on too. It was the little things: a car battery would go down, so you're in the middle of bloody nowhere waiting for a replacement, but that can take two hours. I guess you can't control what you can't control, though.

Liam Walpole who plays Goob was street cast. What had you been looking for when casting him?

Liam's got this strange quality, and his movements are quite gangly. He looks like he's part David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth, part Mr Spock. He doesn't entirely belong. He's a very different man to Sean Harris, or to the actor who plays his brother who is much more of a macho sort of lad. Liam offered us this otherworldliness which is what I wanted. When we found him it was just brilliant.

While Goob is Liam's first role, actors like Sean Harris and Sienna Guillory are well established in the field. Did you work with them differently as a director?

What was great about Sean and Sienna is that they knew I wanted to bring in people like Liam who had never performed before. They appreciated the authenticity we were bringing in – the Norfolk dialect is very hard to pull off if you're not from there. What I got from both of them wasn't just generosity of time but incredible support in working with people who hadn't done anything like this before. What it generated was a real sense of togetherness. Sienna came up a week before we were due to shoot and we spent time with Liam, not doing scenes from the story exactly but improvising, trying to foster a bond.

The relationship between Goob's mother and Womack is on the verge of being abusive. How did you envision Sienna's character felt about the situation?

It's hard for her. Is she trapped? Yes she is. I think she'd been single too long. None of this backstory we wanted to share directly. We wanted to be quite impressionistic with it but I think it's a common experience in the sense that a lot of women or men with children who haven't been in a relationship for a while will often neglect their kids for the sake of a new partner. In Sienna's case, Mum, in my mind she'd been single for a long time, desperate to hang on to this bloke who's not a good fit, who puts her kids' lives in jeopardy but will ignore it for this need of a partner.

Do you think Womack is a bad man or an unhappy one?

Both. He's trying to do the best he can but he's coming from a bad place. Early in the film he humiliates a character when he could have killed him, so he's holding back. He's got that handbrake on. He's not a good man but he's trying. There's an attempt to be a father figure but he can't pull it off properly, and things spin out of control. I don't think he is happy. He's unfulfilled. There's a scene when he's outside the caff and he's at the roadside and these cars are moving backwards and forwards. He turns and sees Goob by a window looking out, and I think it dawns on him that Goob is going to have a different life to his, which is one of repetition. He knows he's stuck.

The Goob is released in U.K. cinemas on 29th May. 

Clouds of Sils Maria is a film 30 years in the making. Olivier Assayas and Juliette Binoche – its writer-director and star – first met while working on Rendez-Vous, Olivier's earliest writing credit. Rendez-Vous was a breakthrough for both of them: the film turned Juliette into one of the biggest movie stars in Europe, while Olivier was able to transition from screenwriting into a successful directing career.

Three decades later, Juliette approached Olivier about working together again, pitching a loose idea about three women in different phases of their careers. A character study of someone reluctantly moving into a new chapter of their life, Clouds of Sils Maria draws on their shared history: the actress plays Maria Enders, a decidedly Juliette Binoche-like star who faces a crisis after agreeing to appear in a restaging of the two-hander play that made her famous, except now playing the older woman rather than the ingénue. Ahead of its release we spoke to Olivier about making the film. 

Superficially at least, there are clear similarities between Juliette Binoche and the character she plays. Did you try to differentiate between the two, or was that tension interesting?

Juliette and I are friends but we're not that familiar or intimate – I've never known what her everyday life is like. I know her but I also fantasise her. I imagine things about her. Some of them are true, some are totally off the mark. So when I'm writing a character like Maria Enders I know that I'm playing with my own assumptions as well as the assumptions of the audience, the way the audience imagines her. I'm playing on this border between fiction and reality. I'm also opening a space for Juliette because it's something she had never really done before, playing someone who's similar to her. She could have fun simultaneously being herself and the actress she might have been.

The film depicts the logistical side of being a movie star. Did you feel an obligation to show that world as you've experienced it or could you be speculative about that also?

I describe it more or less as it is, the business side of it. When you're a movie star you become a cottage industry, selling yourself. You have to continually respond to offers to accept or turn them down. You have to attend functions, film festivals, for which they provide the hairdresser, the make-up, the Chanel dress, and you have to look glamorous. You're a movie star for a few hours and then you go back to your everyday life, which is mostly about hard work. Maria is struggling with a role that questions her own essence and identity, but sometimes you could be in a plain bad film where you have to try to find a way of lifting it up, or at least surviving it.

Clouds of Sils Maria asserts the idea of the primacy of the actor, where a shining performance is almost something above the actual text. Did that come from a natural sympathy for the character, or is that that how you feel about acting?

What I wanted to express  first is how tough it is to be an actor and the sympathy I have for them. Their job is ultimately about understanding fellow humans. They have to find within themselves the path to those emotions, to experience them if only to understand what's going on. It's not a path towards artificiality, it's a path towards the very texture of human nature, and that's something actors are left alone with. When you're a writer you try to invent complex characters but you're on both sides. You're doing the questions and the answers. When you're an actor you deal with the reality of specific emotions. You have to transform what the writer has devised into truth.

Throughout the film Maria debates modern film-making and superhero movies with her assistant Valentine, played by Kristen Stewart. Does either character represent your thoughts on the subject, or were you showing the viewpoints these characters might have?

I have to agree with both of them because their conflict is not really a conflict. It's a difference of perspective. It's the take on those movies from two women of different generations – one who is a curious viewer and one who is in touch with that culture because it's her generation and she's never really questioned it. The film doesn't really embody my views on blockbuster film-making but instead my view on the passing of time. What happens when time passes is not that you lose touch with the world but that your experience it is different from someone twenty years younger than you. In terms of blockbusters I'm really on both sides too. I can enjoy watching them even if I'm usually slightly disappointed because they're very repetitive. I certainly don't look down on them. At the same time I can see that they are a manifestation of our obsession with teenage culture.

The relationship between real life and the film is also raised with your inclusion of Chloë Grace Moretz's character Jo-Ann, a young movie star hounded by paparazzi. Did that enter into your consideration when casting Kristen Stewart, an actress who has lived that experience?

Kristen could have been either character and she by far preferred to be Valentine. It gave her this oblique angle on celebrity culture – there was this shift of perspective which freed her in a certain way. It's a film where you never lose sight of who's playing what. In most movies you try to forget that the actor is playing a character. Here that's part of the film. You are constantly seeing Juliette, Kristen and Chloë in addition to seeing Maria, Valentine and Jo-Ann. It's the opposite of when the Dardenne brothers made Two Days, One Night, where the whole point is about trying to forget that movie star Marion Cotillard is playing a factory worker in Belgium. What actors do is try to reinvent themselves, to make it feel like they've been always that character and nothing else, to become one. Here I didn't want them to do that. I didn't want them to become one. I was happy with them staying two.

From its electrifying opening sequence onward, in which two teams of teenage girls face off in an American football match, every moment of Girlhood pulses with life and colour and youth.

Writer-director Céline Sciamma’s thoughtful yet boisterous film follows shy sixteen-year-old Marieme (Karidja Touré) as she joins a gang of girls in her economically-disadvantaged Parisian banlieue. Neglected by school, parental figures and their community, the quartet rely upon each other to weather their oppressive, underprivileged circumstances.

We spent a day in Paris with Karidja Touré and Assa Sylla, and what follows is an extract of pictures from Liz Seabrook's afternoon with them. The full photoshoot and interview with director Céline Sciamma will be published in the forthcoming Oh Comely issue 25.

Girlhood is released in UK cinemas today.

All photos by Liz Seabrook.

Since moving to London three and half years ago, I’ve travelled by bike. I moved without a job and couldn’t afford public transport. I took four hours of cycling proficiency classes under the Tower Hamlets cycle scheme to get my confidence up and haven’t looked back. There’s such a freedom to riding a bike: you can travel quickly and easily, even though you might arrive places a little damp sometimes.

Worldwide, there’s been a huge surge in cycle culture and huge conflict also. Bikes have been banned, knocked down and cyclists have kicked back. In his new documentary Bikes vs Cars, Swedish director Fredrik Gertten visits a number of cities across the world to explore the issue more deeply. I caught up with Fredrik for a quick chat.

The world premiere of Bikes vs Cars was held at South by Southwest in March. How was it?

It was fun! We organised the first ever outdoors screening at SXSW. We had bikes that pedal powered the screens and a big slow ride for an hour all around Austin. It was amazing!

After that I went to Mexico where the film is touring and we had bike rides in almost every city. It’s a fun and interesting movement. It's not a group of young radicals, it's much more complex with people ranging from sports enthusiasts to university professors – anyone who’s become fed up with cars.

At the end of the film you show bike lanes beginning to be introduced in São Paolo. Tell me more about where they’re at now.

There’s been rapid change in many cities and São Paolo is one of them; when we began I didn't know it would happen, but it did. In the future, I think cool and modern cities will be more bike-friendly and the mayor of São Paolo has understood that. However, since then there's been a court injunction against the bike lanes, so it's been stopped for a while and they've had big protests. People who lose their parking spaces get really angry!

Bikes are a part of São Paolo's transformation, but often when big changes happen there are a lot of people who don't understand. Car dependent people think they are losing out but they're actually winning; there will be more space for them in the end if more people move over to bikes.

Where’s your favourite city in the world to cycle?

My favourite is my own city, Malmö in Sweden. Whenever I come back from a journey I always feel blessed. It’s also amazing to cycle in Rio de Janeiro along the beaches, but there is not a full grid of bicycle lanes, so suddenly you're swimming with the sharks and that's scary. It’s just fun to bike in foreign cities. You see much more, you move much faster. If you go to Barcelona and rent a bike you can really get to know the city. In London you can ride along the canals and find quiet little side streets.

What is it that you love so much about bikes?

Bikes are so flexible. If you cycle past a shop and see a beautiful shirt you can stop and park. If you're in a car you can't park so you have to keep going. A car isn't flexible. People out in the city on foot or on bikes are good for the economy and local business. They stop and shop and consume so much more. When I was in Mexico City, the coolest restaurants in the city have bike racks outside and they're always filled. If you attract bicycles you can maintain a good business.

What are you thoughts on London’s infrastructure?

There's been a drop of 9% of cars coming into the city. The next step in London is to switch delivery cars to cargo bikes. It's much more flexible. Here in Malmö you can move your whole flat with bicycles! The only way for cities like London to grow effectively is without the car or it'll become gridlocked and won't work. You also have to make it safer to bike. My daughter worked in London for a while and she was too scared to cycle in town. If she felt safe, she'd have been on a bike every day. It needs to be safe and accessible for everyone. It’s also about happiness and quality of life; it's no fun being stuck in a line of traffic waiting. Always late!

In which city have you noticed the best progression?

I was recently in Mexico City and you can see more and more people on bikes, but the best? Probably Paris. New York and London are good too, but Paris has made the most impressive change. The whole election campaign was about traffic and mobility. Traffic is a really core political issue that everyone in Paris is talking about. So not only are they already a great bicycle city, but they also have great ambition to be even better. There's still a long way to go and a lot of conflict, mainly to do with money. A genuinely safe infrastructure costs a lot more than just a narrow white line down the side of the road.

Bikes vs Cars is being screened nationwide as part of the U.K. Green Film Festival.