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Co-director Kibwe Tavares on how he created a hellish future London
When Ridley Scott started work on the visuals for ‘Blade Runner’s dystopian future, he drew inspiration from the chemical plants in Hartlepool near where he grew up.
The Kitchen’s directors Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya followed the same path when they began building their version of London for their new Netflix sci-fi. Set in a not-too-distant future where social housing has been all but eliminated, it sees Izi (‘Top Boy’s Kane Robinson) and Benji (Jedaiah Bannerman) navigating life in a tight-knit urban community known as ‘the Kitchen’. The police start throwing people out, but many who live there refuse to leave their homes – and start to fight back.
Even though they’re from different sides of the Thames – Kaluuya was raised near Caledonian Road, while Tavares hails from Streatham and Brixton – the filmmaking pair knew they wanted to make a movie that explored their relationship with a fast-evolving London. ‘And we started to build out from there,’ says Taveres. The director talks us through his approach to world-building his dystopian London – and shares some exclusive concept art…
One of the main locations in ‘The Kitchen’ is the market where its residents gather to get food and supplies, and to socialise. To capture its frantic buzz, Tavares and Kaluuya drew on their memories of visiting Brixton and Camden Markets as kids – as well as the shops on Streatham High Road and the Holloway Road. With ‘The Kitchen’, they wondered what it would be like if everyone who lived and ran shops in these areas was forced into one tight space due to the housing crisis.
‘What does it look like when everyone is fighting for space? What do the markets look like? What does the housing look like if it’s all in one mega-building? We wanted this place to be London’s last village,’ says Tavares.
For filming, the markets were constructed at Bethnal Green’s LEB Building, once an Electricity Board headquarters in the ’50s. ‘They gave us the freedom to do what we wanted there,’ says Tavares. ‘We built the market in the car park.’
To create the tiered, high-density housing in this scary cityscape, Tavares and Kaluuya travelled to Paris to visit the once-utopian Damiers Complex in the city’s La Défense district and film it (footage appears in ‘The Kitchen’. That 1976 housing project was a visual inspiration for the Kitchen’s apartment blocks.
The interiors, meanwhile, were influenced by Johannesburg’s skyscraping Ponte Tower and especially, the Tower of David in Caracas, Venezuela – two buildings that have been described as ‘vertical slums’. ‘It’s an unfinished building,’ explains Tavares. ‘Venezuela has a more extreme housing crisis than the UK, so eventually people moved in. In “The Kitchen” [we explore] how people live when there’s so much pressure on space.’
For the building’s corridor chase scenes, the filmmaker turned to Collins’ Music Hall, an old Islington theatre. ‘We built a few rows of apartments and then we extended up and down [using VFX],’ says Tavares. Eagle-eyed viewers will spot Caribbean and African flags and memorabilia dotted across the Kitchen’s apartments, markets and buildings, a cultural aesthetic inspired by modern-day South London. ‘We wanted the Kitchen to celebrate that,’ he adds.
Kane Robinson’s Izi works at the ecological funeral home called Life After Life, where people pay to have recently deceased loved ones turned into plants. These scenes were shot at the verdant Barbican Conservatory. In order to get to Life After Life, Izi drives across the Boundary. On one half of the street, you can see where the city has invested its wealth and luxurious buildings where the rich people live. On the other, there’s the Kitchen, where the homes are small, squalid and poorer people are piled on top of each other. ‘A big reference for the Boundary was Atlantic Road in Brixton,’ says Tavares. ‘The way that there’s the market stalls and the train lines above.’
Izi and Benji are repeatedly harassed by the police, who go to increasingly extreme measures to get the residents and community out of the Kitchen. The filmmakers wanted the police to look as plain and nondescript as possible, concealing facial features behind masks, while portraying them as a powerful and repressive force in the city.
‘You don’t know who the bad guys are [in the Kitchen],’ says Tavares. ‘It’s not like you’re informed when you’re being forced out. We wanted people to feel this ominous presence, without knowing who it is.’
To craft ‘The Kitchen’, Tavares and Kaluuya drew from a bevy of cinematic influences: from Italian neorealist classic ‘Bicycle Thieves’ to ’70s road-trip comedy ‘Paper Moon’ and Parisian social realist thriller ‘La Haine’. The biggest inspiration, though, was Alfonso Cuarón’s sci-fi classic ‘Children Of Men’ – and particularly its skilful transformation of real locations into a believably dystopian London.
‘They shot in real places on that film,’ says Tavares, ‘but changed the architecture, technology, and even the buses. A lot of it is tangible, things you can touch, and that’s a good approach. I want audiences to touch and feel and smell [our film].’
The film’s supporting cast has one notable, scene-stealing presence: footballing legend Ian Wright who stars as Lord Kitchener. The Kitchen’s resident DJ, he provides its inhabitants with news and spirit-lifting tunes. Wright’s history with Crystal Palace and Arsenal makes him a folk hero for certain sections of London, but says Tavares, it’s his advocacy work in the city that made him the perfect choice to be the ‘voice of the people, the voice of resilience and the voice of the Kitchen’. Ian right, right, right.
‘The Kitchen’ is in cinemas now and on Netflix Fri Jan 19.
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