Keeping ghosts at bay

Published on Sunday 17 December 2006 00:38

INTERVIEWING Nick Broomfield is a surreal experience. The award-winning British documentary maker who revolutionised the form by inserting himself into his films - some say to irritating effect - seems naked without his boom mike.

Turning the tables on someone who is used to asking the questions in such experimental documentaries as Aileen: Life And Death Of A Serial Killer, Kurt And Courtney, Biggie And Tupac and, most recently, His Big White Self, is an interesting process.

Unfortunately, it's nigh impossible to hit upon the real Nick Broomfield. He has been making films for more than 35 years, and uses his peculiar combination of bumbling faux-naf and puffed-up smooth operator for his own ends. It's a much imitated technique (think Louis Theroux, Jon Ronson, Sacha Baron-Cohen) which has been the hallmark of Broomfield's interviewing style for the past two decades, whether pursuing Margaret Thatcher or flirting with Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss.

"I don't know why people get so hot under the collar about it, or why it seems to threaten them so much," says the 58-year-old about his onscreen personality, which has been described as egotistical. "I'm not ruffled by it. When you try and do something different, people don't always like it. Maybe sometimes I have a manner that must piss people off. Too bad... I apologise. Not everyone is going to love you all the time. But I think the notion that there is a real truth and that documentaries are objective, or that you don't need to acknowledge the presence of the filmmaker, is just outdated."

Broomfield's latest film, however, based on the 23 Chinese cockle pickers who drowned at Morecambe Bay, marks a significant departure. Not only has he removed himself from the picture, he has made a feature film instead of a documentary. It's only the second time he has done this and he has done it well. Ghosts is a powerful and unremittingly grim retelling of events that led up to the incident two years ago.

"I was interested in how these Chinese came to be in Morecambe Bay," says Broomfield, who spent a fortnight of the 10-week shoot driving thousands of miles around China meeting the families of the victims, some of whose children have been forced into prostitution and hard labour to pay outstanding debts.

"It's the story of how they came to the country and what they were doing and the fact that they were working for major industries, supermarkets like Sainsbury's, Asda and Tesco, not irrelevant little private employers."

MAKING THE documentary about the US serial killer Aileen Wuornos last year, in which she granted Broomfield her last interview before she was executed, marked a turning point. It left Broomfield, who was called as a witness for the defence, emotionally exhausted, which contributed to his new direction in filmmaking. "I didn't do another one for a while," he says, adding that his next film, about the Haditha massacre, in which US marines allegedly shot 24 civilians in Iraq, will be a feature film in a similar style. In a greater departure, he recently met the Nelson Mandela Foundation to discuss making an animated feature film about Mandela's life.

"I remember at an opening of the Aileen film in New York, my publicist was like, 'You've got to stop doing this. I can see you've had enough', which I really had."

Still, during that time Broomfield began writing Ghosts. It follows the life of Ai-Qin, played by a Chinese ex-illegal immigrant, as are most of the principal parts, from her six-month overland journey from Fujian to her arrival in England, for which she pays $25,000. From working in a duck-packing plant to picking spring onions and resisting working in 'massage parlours', Ai-Qin finally ends up on the quicksands of Morecambe Bay, working at night to avoid local cocklers, desperate to make more money to send home to her son.

The rest we know. Broomfield went undercover with Ai-Qin while shooting the film, working shifts in factories and fields; an experience which left him feeling like he was "going to die".

"I remember picking spring onions for about eight hours, then getting three hours' sleep and then being hauled up to go and work in a book factory. I was always being fired because I was too slow, partly because I was filming as well. It was very, very tough."

All of the stories in Ghosts are grounded in fact, from the actors' own experiences to that of journalist Hsaio-Hung Pai, who went undercover living and working with Chinese illegals in Norfolk and with whom Broomfield worked closely on the film.

In the end, Ghosts isn't so unlike the rest of Broomfield's oeuvre. It's based on meticulous research, intimacy - he is renowned for spending months getting to know his subjects - and improvisation. As always, he worked with minimal crew, only five people. Broomfield starts filming his interviews before they begin: filming a person's entry to a room, the drive to their house or, as in his best-known case, the wait.

Fifteen years ago he chased Eugne Terre'Blanche, the white supremacist Afrikaner, for weeks, befriending his driver to try to get closer to him. Eventually, when the invitation came, Broomfield made his crew wait it out in a nearby caf. When they finally sauntered in late to meet Terre'Blanche, they got their rise, and the whole process was captured on film. It has since become a classic Broomfield moment, as well as a landmark in documentary filmmaking.

Today he's using a similar technique, asking me lots of questions, holding eye contact for long periods and telling me anecdotes about a film he made in Scotland in 1976, called Fort Augustus, about a monastery ("I love the monks, they're a really special crowd") before I've even had the chance to open my mouth.

When I ask him what he thinks of the Nouvelles Egotistes, filmmakers such as Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock and Louis Theroux who have popularised his reflexive style, he rolls his eyes and says: "What, the ones who have followed in my footsteps?" He says the proliferation of this kind of docu-filmmaking also spurred him on to do something different, though he is "a huge Borat fan".

Does he miss seeing himself on film? "Not at all," he says. "It's kind of a relief. It's tiring and I don't actually love appearing on camera."

Broomfield admits he is obsessive and married to his work, which both pleases and confounds him. Still, when I ask him how he copes with the emotional fallout after making one of his films, he seems at his most cheerful.

"Maybe there's something wrong with me because I can do it," he says. "It's intense and you have to put all of yourself into it, but that's quite fun, actually. I'm just greedy for stories."

• Ghosts is released on January 12