Nick Broomfield

INTERVIEW | Serena Donadoni

Button-pushing British documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield is the subject of a retrospective at this year's South By Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, which screens his films Soldier Girls (1983), Driving Me Crazy (1988), Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1993) and Kurt & Courtney (1998). After a live webcast with IFC, Nick Broomfield answers a few questions about what drives him.

THE CINEMA GIRL: When a lot of people think of documentaries, they think of them as the film equivalent of journalism, something with an objective viewpoint. Is that what you thought when you started making documentaries?

NICK BROOMFIELD: I think that you realize very soon that objectivity really doesn't exist, and that it's very misleading to an audience to kind of pretend that it does exist. In a sense, objectivity, in its heyday, was when Britain had the Empire and there was that incredible BBC voice: the voice of reason, the voice of God. But I think that's been discredited and now people realize that if you gave two people a camera and asked them to make a film about exactly the same thing, they'd come up with two entirely different portraits. Which is fascinating, but I think it's confusing if an audience thinks both of them are "the truth." Because there is no "the truth." So the more an audience can see the ingredients of the filmmaker and the decisions and so on, the more they're able to assess the situation as to what is really going on.

TCG: You've made numerous documentary portraits about women rising to powerful positions or notoriety — Aileen Wuornos, Heidi Fleiss, Margaret Thatcher, Courtney Love — is this a particularly interesting subject for you?

NB: It is interesting. Women have obviously gone through a lot more changes and have had a lot more interesting history in the last two decades than men. I think men haven't changed in any kind of noticeable fashion. So I think those changes in their roles is very interesting. Obviously the whole feminism movement changed a lot and opened up a lot of opportunities for women that didn't exist 20, 30 years ago.

TCG: Do you see any similarities in these women?

NB: Not really. Probably Margaret Thatcher and Courtney are as controlling as one another. But I had very different feelings about them. I was very fond of Aileen Wuornos and Heidi Fleiss, they were more the victims than the other two, who were probably great bullies.

TCG: With your film on Aileen Wuornos, you seemed to serve as an advocate, whereas in other films, your role was to expose something.

NB: I think one's role is different depending on what you find on each film, so I very rarely go into a film with an agenda. The research is really done during the film, and I guess the film reflects that process. So your role's always different on each film, hopefully.

TCG: When you began putting yourself in your documentaries as an on-camera participant, were you conscious of shifting the nature of your films to be about the film-process?

NB: I think it became more of a diary, it became a way of getting more dimensions in, too. It was a way of allowing the subject to define itself by its behavior within the film itself. Sometimes people say much more about themselves before they allow you to do the interview, when they present you with the face they want you to see. Your initial dealings with them, the way they are and their reactions to you and what they won't talk about, is often much more scripted than what they will talk about.

TCG: For you, is editing the point where the film comes together?

NB: No, I normally have a very clear sense of the structure before then. Normally, I would have a beginning, middle and end very firmly in my head. But within the scenes, you find little secrets. In a sense, I think you just have to keep looking at the material, and distilling the material until it's completely in your head, and then little bits of scenes will come to you, and it's those bits that you remember that should be, I always find, in the film. Sometimes you make a film out of the most obvious bits that are very statement-oriented or whatever. But then after you've been working and working and working, you'll find other things that have a resonance or a depth that the initial statements probably don't have, and those are what, hopefully, end up in the film.

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