LOST CITY

Daniel Kaluuya and Kibwe Tavares team up on their feature directorial debut, THE KITCHEN, a dystopian sci-fi set in an all-tooplausible future London. Total Film meets the duo and their collaborators to talk about bringing their vision of the Big Smoke to a global audience.

When Londoners get together the conversation inevitably turns to how the city ‘ain’t what it used to be’. The evidence provided usually includes house prices, the Circle Line and the gentrification of Brixton. Oscar-winning actor Daniel Kaluuya is no exception and asks Total Film, ‘What happened to King’s Cross?!’ The Camden native shakes his head and continues, ‘I grew up right up the road, and it’s been drained of its nuance, intricacies and identity. They made it generic to impress people coming off the Eurostar.’

Kaluuya has co-written and codirected the dystopian thriller The Kitchen, which takes place in a near-future London where social housing is outlawed. Most of the city is a pristine, bland nightmare devoid of messy humanity, but The Kitchen estate has endured despite the government’s best efforts. Kaluuya’s co-director (and fellow Londoner) Kibwe Tavares explains, ‘London’s like all these villages that are stuck together. And in our world, all of those have been eradicated, and The Kitchen is London’s last one. It’s the lifeblood of the city.’

The film follows Kitchen resident Izi (Kane ‘Kano’ Robinson), who longs to leave the place he calls a ‘shithole’. To be fair to Izi, the water and power are erratic, and the police brutalise residents and load their unconscious bodies into vans. Izi’s perspective on his home begins to change when he meets a young boy called Benji (Jedaiah Bannerman), who needs a place to stay and suspects Izi is his father. As Tavares puts it, ‘Izi goes on the journey of realising that actually there’s more to The Kitchen and he needs more human connection.’

That connection with Benji transforms Izi in ways he can’t foresee, and Bannerman is transfixing in his acting debut, eliciting tears and giggles with the smallest gestures. As a South Londoner, Bannerman also felt deeply connected to the material. ‘We didn’t force the London slang or the way people act because that’s how most of us talk and act in our everyday lives,’ he says.

Beyond the language, Kaluuya believes you can see plenty of the capital throughout The Kitchen’s 98-minute runtime. ‘You feel a lot of Elephant and Castle, of Ridley Road and the food market that my mum took me to at Seven Sisters. I wanted to capture the chaos, the sound, the vibration.’

Vibes aside, Tavares’ background in architecture meant the buildings themselves had to be characters, not just in the warm chaos of The Kitchen - contained within brutalist cement pillars and makeshift market stalls - but also in the sinister plasticky serenity where the wealthy reside but are rarely seen. For the latter, Tavares was inspired by London’s new developments: ‘They always hint at creating a social space, but it’s normally quite desolate. You can’t manufacture a community. It has to evolve and find its own life.’

Producer Daniel Emmerson, who has been working on bringing this dystopia to life with Kaluuya and Tavares for the past decade, is keen to give Tavares credit for the intricacies of this striking and worryingly plausible future. Praising his ability to look past what a building simply is, Emmerson says, ‘From the very beginning he was looking around the world, at social behaviour and the impact of buildings and space and how the state polices buildings and space.’ The (non-architectural) heart of The Kitchen comes in the form of Lord Kitchener (former Arsenal striker and bona fide national treasure Ian Wright), who broadcasts classic tunes to the residents from a vinyl-record-lined flat and reassures them they can survive so long as ‘We doesn’t become I’. The character is confined mainly to his broadcasting booth, which Tavares believes makes him ‘more intangible and more an uncle to all of them’.

The whole team insists that Wright was simply the best audition. Still, there was an added thrill for Emmerson, who beams, ‘Daniel and I are both life-long Arsenal fans!’ The same cannot be said for Bannerman getting to work with movie star Kaluuya. ‘The only film I’d watched was Black Panther,’ he says.

Kaluuya and Tavares already had an established rapport, having first made short film Jonah in 2013 in Tanzania, but the inspiration for their first feature came once they were back in the Big Smoke. At a Holloway barbershop, Kaluuya heard about how people on motorbikes made off with £2m worth of jewellery from a nearby shopping centre. The story began to form from that initial image, and Emmerson came on board. He recalls how, ‘Daniel wrote the basis of some ideas down and we shot some improvised acting with amazing young actors, and cut it together and showed it to Film4 who said they wanted to develop it.’ The story evolved and Netflix came on board, but the film’s team paid tribute to its origin, and Emmerson adds, ‘The barber in the film is the same barber that owns that barbershop! So it came full circle.’

The sci-fi elements of emails appearing on your bathroom mirror and dead bodies of the poor repurposed as compost were absent in the barber’s tale. But the most essential aspect to include for Kaluuya was the moral complexity around the heist itself. ‘A lot of time a crime isn’t what’s being done,’ he explains. ‘Whether something is a crime comes down to who it’s been done by or who has it been done to.’

NATURAL JUSTICE

The residents of The Kitchen have had their very existence deemed unlawful, and as Kaluuya puts it, ‘People do seemingly illegal things for really great reasons. That’s what I saw growing up.’ Total Film mentions a recent news story about a prison break, and Kaluuya jokes that his first instinct was to root for them and think, ‘Just go!’ But conversely, some reactions Kaluuya has seen to Hope Ikpoku Jnr’s character, Staples, an activist who hijacks vans of food to pass around the residents, contained problematic mischaracterisations. ‘People would say he was a drug dealer. I’m like, “There’s nothing that suggests that but someone’s prejudice.”’

The predominantly non-white residents of The Kitchen face unending prejudice and abuse, but they have a joyous and distinct swagger that is born of wheel culture. First-time actor Bannerman may not have had drama experience, but ‘I was good on a bike. I just didn’t know how to wheelie. And then after I learned how to wheelie, I broke my hand and now… Yeah, I don’t really wheelie any more.’ As a young actor, it’s challenging enough to star in a huge movie, but poor Bannerman had even more to endure. ‘I had a broken hand filming the heist scene,’ he recalls. ‘It was physically hard.’

Though Bannerman may have lost a little enthusiasm for riding bikes, Emmerson found some of London’s finest to capture the biking world: ‘There’s a guy called Mac Ferrari who runs an organisation called Bikestormz. There’s a lot of amazing young bikers in London that are doing their wheelies and their tricks and we tried to work with them as much as possible.’

Wheel culture extends beyond robberies and young Kitchen residents showing off their skills while grime is pumped from speakers. In a rare moment of letting his guard down, Izi takes Benji to a party where people skate and dance the Electric Slide. Kaluuya explains, ‘The roller disco is also speaking to the wheel culture, and the old-school stuff is a vibe that people hold on to because there hasn’t been a better idea to take its place. A bottle of water’s probably an idea from back in the day, and no one’s thought of a better one. What is better than the Electric Slide?’

Izi loosens up a little at the roller disco, but he is a decidedly taciturn character. He barely socialises and only discovers his long-term friend Jase (Demmy Ladipo) has a child when he wakes up on his sofa after a few too many. But even without rapper-turned-actor Robinson saying much, Emmerson believes that in ‘the physicality of his performance you can feel the weight of the world on his shoulders, in his gait and the way he carries himself. And then, as he opens up incrementally to Benji, it’s really subtle and really moving.’

In one such scene, Benji just describes how much he likes a retro lamp with a hula-girl base as Izi beams at him. But Bannerman is reluctant to accept too much praise for the moment he and Robinson improvised. ‘It started to get awkward ’cause I was losing the thread and running out of things to say!’ he laughs. ‘I was just going on and on until they finally said cut.’

Nurturing young talent capable of improvising powerful cinema, not only in Bannerman but across the entire ensemble, has long been a passion of Kaluuya’s. Earlier this year, he became the Associate Artistic Director of the Camden Roundhouse to create more opportunities for young Londoners to get into the performing arts. One of the ways he thinks London ‘ain’t what it used to be’ is that, ‘It’d be harder now for me to get into it in the way that I did, so I just did something about it.’

‘PEOPLE DO SEEMINGLY ILLEGAL THINGS FOR REALLY GREAT REASONS’

DANIEL KALUUYA

The Kitchen’s residents don’t have many options available to them, and it’s hard to leave the film optimistic about the future of that particular London. In the present, many of the city’s residents may enjoy a whinge, but Kaluuya’s dedication to his art and city is what makes him a local icon. He grins from ear to ear, basking in the glory of a 10- year passion project coming to a global audience. ‘I want shit to be thrilling, and I want working-class characters in British cinema to have pleasure,’ he says. But most of all, he admits, ‘I made it because I just wanna watch this film.’

THE KITCHEN STREAMS ON NETFLIX FROM 19 JANUARY.