Can you talk us through Pylon and where the initial concept came from?
It's about this young boy and his little sister who are wandering through a field on a typical day in the summer holidays and they get confronted by a gang of older boys who force the boy to climb up the pylon and it all unfurls from there, really. It's a story about being young and those foundational moments you have in your life, particularly when you're a kid, that never leave you and those moments that rob you of your childhood or that make you grow up.
Am I right in thinking that Pylon is based on personal memories? How did that influence the creation of the film?
So, when I was a kid, my mum used to warn me very, very clearly about lots of different things, and there’s two that really stick out — one was don't sniff glue, and the other was don't climb pylons.
I grew up near Halifax in Yorkshire, and all the football pitches that we used to play on were up on the moors and often they would have pylons around the perimeter of the pitches, so that initiated a slight obsession and fear with pylons. The rest of the story comes from memories of the summer holidays when we would visit my uncle on the south coast in Bournemouth. We'd be out roaming around the fields or the neighbourhood, around the parks, and often we'd get into these scraps with local boys because me and my little brother were the unknowns.
So, yeah, the combination of those foundational memories from my childhood with this slightly strange obsession with pylons was where the story was born from, really.
How did you balance the fact that this is a personal story with crafting the film more generally?
Even though it's very personal, I feel like the story is universal to everyone in a way because whoever you are and wherever you're from, growing up is hard and it's a bit of an ordeal at times. I think everybody's had that moment in their childhood where they've been picked or made to prove themselves in front of a load of other people; everybody can connect with that feeling, whether or not they connect with the situation of the film or the particular details of the narrative.
There’s a strong sense of nostalgia in the film which is underscored by anxiety and tension. How did you balance these emotions?
I liked the tension of that hazy nostalgia of a perfect day in a quaint English suburban, rural setting which lulls you into this sort of secure feeling. In that first minute or so before the airgun pellets start getting fired at them, you feel like this is just an everyday summer day with this brother and sister and then something very sinister invades that space and so I felt like that was a really interesting tension to create. And then, of course, as the narrative unfolds it becomes a darker story and the weather is reflective of that, of this creepy, eerie sort of atmosphere. That feeling of nostalgia is important to lull people into that false sense of security and create this tension when eventually the story begins to move into these darker spaces.
The sibling dynamic is central to Pylon. What did you want to say about family and particularly sibling relationships, and how did the class element come into that?
Well, I think that family frictions and difficult family dynamics aren't exclusive to any class or any corner of society. It exists everywhere. But the thing that I take issue with is that a lot of the time on screen, I feel like we're presented with a narrative that young boys in gangs or young boys that behave this way are from working class backgrounds or they're from minority ethnic backgrounds or neglectful families with parents that either don't care about them or that abuse them. And while that certainly exists, it also exists elsewhere in the most everyday families and in the most everyday neighbourhoods, situations and schools.
I wanted Pylon to reflect that every family has its struggles and has its difficult dynamics. It's not about class. It’s about something more fundamental than that, something deeper.
What can audiences expect next from you?
So, the company that produced Pylon is Sixteen Films, which is Ken Loach's production company. Now that he's stopped making films, they’re working with up-and-coming directors, and I'm delighted to be one of those people because I'm such an extraordinary fan of Ken's work and he's a huge inspiration and influence on me as a filmmaker.
We are now working on my first feature film together, which is called Help Yourself. We are in the pre-production process with that at the moment. It's a daily grind, but we're enjoying it and excited to get going on it.
You can watch Pylon and see more of Barnaby’s work here.
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