The Kitchen’s Kibwe Tavares on co-directing with Daniel Kaluuya

“We started developing this a long time ago," he explained. "And really, fundamentally we've got complementary skills and we sort of knew what we were aiming at.

"We've got different backgrounds and different approaches. So, then it's like, how can we lean on each other to create something that we've never done before?

"It's our debut, so how can we sort of lean on each other to just bring that to execute and to push beyond what any of us could do individually. And how do we serve the film best?"

He added: "But it wasn't like, this is your bit and this is my bit. It was more like a sort of, 'OK, well, we both need to support each other here'.”

The film had been a long time in the works, with the original germ of the idea originating back to a conversation between Tavares and Kaluuya while they were making the short film Jonah back in 2012.

"He pitched an idea and we had desires to move into longer format," Tavares explained. "And then we started to write and we started with these workshops – initially it was these workshops in the barber shop up in Holloway Road.

"I was keen to start working with more actors and Daniel was keen to write more. And we started really, from the sort of seed of this idea looking at this motorbike heist out the barbershop.

"And then that kind of started the conversations about London, and sort of the conditions in London, the idea that people doing these million pound heists are getting paid very little money and then how extreme the situation is to just afford basics."

Read more:

• The Kitchen soundtrack: All the songs in the dystopian Netflix drama
• Daniel Kaluuya and Kibwe Tavares unveil dystopian trailer for The Kitchen

The film is set in an imagined near future version of the UK capital and stars Top Boy's Kane Robinson as Izi, a resident of an endangered social housing community known as The Kitchen, whose life changes when he comes across his recently orphaned son (Jedaiah Bannerman) for the first time.

It originally premiered as the closing film of the London Film Festival in October 2023 and was given a limited theatrical release from last Friday (12th January) before its imminent Netflix debut.

The Kitchen is currently showing in select UK cinemas and will be on Netflix from 19th January 2024. Sign up for Netflix from £4.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.

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