The film was shot over six weeks in summer 2008, and Arnold initially wanted to give the actors the pages day by day, but relented to costar Michael Fassbender’s wanting the next week’s pages each Friday. “I liked her straightaway.”īesides casting an unknown, untrained performer in the lead role, Arnold wanted to make the film in an unusual way, by showing the script to the cast as little in advance as possible. “When she came along to the audition, I remember her poking her head around the door and grinning,” the filmmaker noted via e-mail. And I don’t know what it was, but about three or four days later something made me pick up the phone and call her back.”Īrnold was glad Jarvis did. This can’t be happening to me.’ She asked for my number, but I said no, and she gave me her card. “At that moment I didn’t actually believe it was all true,” Jarvis recalled of the casting agent’s initial pitch for the project. Jarvis, who had never acted before, was discovered when a casting agent saw her arguing with her boyfriend on a train platform in Essex, where she is from and the film is set. Though she is eager to point out the ways in which she is not like Mia - Jarvis’ parents are divorced, but her family life was much more stable - she was an unemployed dropout before the film. 29Īt the center of “Fish Tank” is newcomer Katie Jarvis, who was 17 at the time of filming and is now 18. 27 and opens in New York on Friday and L.A. It screens Monday at UCLA, will be available on cable video-on-demand on Jan.

It also won two prizes at the British Independent Film Awards and shared the New Lights award at the AFI Fest in L.A. It premiered at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, winning the Jury Prize, just as Arnold’s previous film, “Red Road,” did in 2006. Written and directed by Oscar winner Andrea Arnold, “Fish Tank” is equal parts raw realism and lyrical expressiveness, bringing together the urban grit of “Precious” and the age-imbalanced coming-of-age story of “An Education” with a dash of the dynamism of the original “Fame.” After her mother’s new boyfriend takes an extra interest in her, encouraging and supporting her in ways no one has before, she begins to mature and transform. Alone in an abandoned apartment, she finds her freedom, moving with a grace and muscular authority that might otherwise never find expression. She leaves an angry voice mail for her friend, argues with a girl’s father, yells at her mother and younger sister and picks fights with a group of boys and a separate bunch of girls.Īnd then she dances. As the British film “Fish Tank” opens, a scrappy teenage girl named Mia whips around her low-income English apartment block.

Katie jarvis