Nick Broomfield

Summary

Podcast Summary: Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin

Guest: Nick Broomfield
Date: December 3, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this episode, legendary documentarian Nick Broomfield joins Rick Rubin for a comprehensive and candid discussion about his filmmaking career. They explore the evolution of Broomfield’s unique style, his approach to documentary storytelling, insightful behind-the-scenes stories from his most famous films, the ethical complexities of nonfiction, and the shifting landscape of documentary production. The episode features memorable anecdotes—from smoking joints with eccentric lawyers and being strip-searched at prisons, to uncomfortable confrontations at Hollywood galas and filming with ex-Marines. Broomfield emphasizes deep empathy for his subjects and the necessity of embracing complexity in human stories.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Finding Stories: The Genesis of Iconic Documentaries

• Eileen Wuornos (Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer)

  • Broomfield describes how he was drawn to Wuornos’s story, initially as the only woman among a list of serial killers for a series he didn’t want to make. (“Eileen was, for a start, the only woman on the list… I started doing some research.” - 00:24)
  • Steve Glazer, Wuornos’s lawyer, becomes an unlikely film character: eccentric, incompetent, but beloved by Eileen.
  • The crew’s misadventures, including being arrested and strip-searched at Broward Prison, led to unexpected kinship with Wuornos. (“We were outlaws. We were like stars. She thought we were gonna be performing as a band in the prison that night.” – 05:09)
  • Broomfield discusses the profound bond he developed with Eileen over years (“Her letters were like 13 or 14 pages.” – 05:37), and her status as both perpetrator and tragic victim.

• Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam

  • Getting access to Heidi took patience and a willingness to simply “be useful” around her store.
  • The film’s supporting cast—like Madame Alex and Yvonne Nagy—often eclipsed the main subject in terms of intrigue and narrative power.
  • “You can make a film about a serial killer and her lawyer is more interesting than she is.” (35:15)

• Kurt & Courtney

  • The idea was sparked by an article recommended by Rick Rubin. Access to Nirvana’s circle was near-impossible; Broomfield describes chaotic production with a makeshift crew.
  • “I remember one of the guys was somebody I'd met at Whole Foods… then he had a friend who I remember one morning going into their room, and they were in bed with one of the subjects who was badly on drugs.” (44:10)
  • Discusses the difficulty of finding a story arc in unconventional or resistant subjects.

• Biggie & Tupac

  • The “way in” was LAPD detective Russell Poole’s theory alleging police and Death Row Records involvement in Biggie’s murder.
  • Highlights the near-impossibility of narrative closure in certain true crime cases (“…inconclusive in that the LAPD have never… It's still unresolved, you know, it's unresolved in the movie.” – 74:13)
  • Memorable interview with Suge Knight inside Mule Creek State Prison, including signing waivers to have his kneecaps shot out in a hostage situation. (“I saw my ERSW cameraman sort of turn green.” – 70:32)

• Whitney: Can I Be Me

  • Originated from an offhand pitch after seeing executive disinterest in another project; Broomfield knew nothing about Whitney at the start.
  • Focuses on the tension between the “Nippy” her friends knew and the “Clive Davis creation.”
  • “So I just sort of said, Whitney, apropos of nothing. Suddenly I had all the interest…” (52:30)
  • Reliance on archival footage and the technical shift from his earlier, more observational films.

• Soldier Girls and Haditha

  • Reveals the complexities and contradictions in military culture, focusing on tough-love characters like Sergeant Abing.
  • “His Purple Heart was left for Joan Churchill in her suitcase.” (49:01)
  • On dramatizations with non-actors—former undocumented Chinese workers and US Marines—Broomfield explores direct cinema’s power to reveal deep truths.

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2. Broomfield’s Documentary Style and Philosophy

• Prefers immersive, open-ended storytelling—entering situations without fixed ideas or agendas.
  • “I think I would do all the research… but also go into every film with a pretty open mind, without any fixed opinions or things I wanted to prove…” (30:56)
• Advocates breaking the fourth wall and including himself in the narrative.
  • “I found I've learned more by the sort of semi disasters that I've worked on than anything else.” (13:33)
  • “Your adventure of making that story is so much more complex and revealing than… when you were writing your treatment.” (17:39)
• Emphasizes the “gray areas” and messy contradictions of real people.
  • “…it's the gray areas that are often much more interesting than anything else.” (58:24)
• He sees himself more as “Clouseau”—bumbling but determined—rather than a laser-focused investigator. (96:03)

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3. The Role of Empathy and Relationships

• Close, ongoing relationships with documentary subjects (“You stay with this sort of rather strange family of people that you've had very intimate, intense relationships with…” – 09:20)
• “I hope so. It feels like that. Feels like that. And it's rare where so much of the things that we watch are telling us what to think.” (57:27)
• Subjects change the filmmaker: “They are open doors and show you things you didn't realize before. And in a wonderful way, I think.” (98:34)

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4. Challenges and The Changing Landscape

• Candid on ethical difficulties: his films have been banned (Juvenile Liaison) and have prompted lawsuits (Whitney Houston, Leonard Cohen, Lily Tomlin).
• “Institutions, rather than reform or change things, will generally point to the individual… you as the filmmaker, take a certain responsibility…” (51:23)
• The move toward corporatism and formula in modern documentaries. (“It's become less challenging, probably, for the audience… they kind of know what they're gonna get.” – 19:03)
• Increased restrictions on press freedom and investigative filmmaking since the Iraq War. (“I think it changed in the Iraq war… There was deliberate bombing…” – 75:58)
• Funding challenges, budget changes, and the rise of post-production complexity making financing more difficult for independent, creative documentaries. (97:40, 98:05)

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On Steve Glazer, Eileen Wuornos’s lawyer:
  “He’d say, the best advice for my client who's about to be executed is don’t sit down.” (01:28)

• On being accepted by Wuornos:
  “Eileen loved us right from the beginning… Cause you were outlaws.” (05:04–05:09)

• On vulnerability in film subjects:
  “People define themselves, I think, more with their problems and the things they don’t want to talk about or address and what they do.” (17:02)

• On Suge Knight interview:
  “I remember saying that if you, in the unlikely event that you were taken a hostage, that you had no objection to your kneecaps being shot out. No kidding… I saw my ERSW cameraman sort of turn green.” (70:26–70:32)

• On Courtney Love and the chase for an ending:
  “I went up to a podium… Hollywood sometimes has a problem of distinguishing between fact and fiction…” (82:09) “My agent… said, ‘Did you hear about that idiot who got up?’… I said, Dan, it was me.” (84:13)

• On finding empathy and story:
  “A lot of storytelling is finding that identification and sympathy for people and telling their story in a way that creates empathy.” (56:46)

• On documentary as record and self-change:
  “It's also kind of a record of your ability or lack of ability at that time. You just want to get it as good as you can.” (85:59) “I think the people in, in the films that you value and have relationships with change you quite a lot.” (98:34)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Eileen Wuornos & Steve Glazer: 00:24–08:41
• On Breakthrough Fourth Wall, Documentary Style: 13:09–19:20
• Heidi Fleiss & Eccentric Supporting Characters: 33:12–37:02
• Kurt & Courtney Production Chaos: 39:56–45:14
• Soldier Girls, Abing, and Human Contradictions: 45:53–49:13
• Whitney Houston, Archive Challenges: 52:22–61:34
• Biggie & Tupac, Suge Knight Interview: 63:03–74:13
• Freedom of Press & Limits Post-Iraq War: 75:32–76:55
• Direct Cinema and Dramatizations: 87:23–94:31
• Business & Funding Challenges: 96:11–98:30
• Personal Change Through Filmmaking: 98:30–99:43

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Conclusion

This episode is a sweeping, deeply personal look at Nick Broomfield’s pioneering documentary career. It captures not only the mechanics and mishaps behind his best-known works but also a rare window into the empathy and abiding curiosity that drives his process. Broomfield’s reflections—humorous, sharp, and occasionally self-deprecating—offer valuable lessons about embracing complexity in people and in storytelling.

Those interested in documentary film, ethical storytelling, or simply the fascinating mechanics of real-life narrative will find this episode rich with insight and inspiration.

Transcript

[Podcast Host]

Tetragrammaton.

[Nick Broomfield]

I'd originally been offered to do a series about serial killers, and Eileen was, for a start, the only woman on the list. And I didn't want to do a series, but I started doing some research. And I called up Eileen's lawyer, Steve Glaser, and the first thing he did was ask how much I was going to pay. And I remembered that it was the Son of Sam law, which was that people could not benefit from the crimes that had been committed. You know, So I was immediately thinking, this is very strange. The lawyer is asking me for money, in a sense, for him to benefit from.

[Interviewer]

Was that your first film in the.

[Nick Broomfield]

U.S. no, the Lily Tomlin was, yeah. And I did tattoo tears as well. So I had this phone conversation with Steve Glazer and then thought this was a really interesting way in.

[Interviewer]

In some ways, he's one of the stars of the movie, if I remember correctly.

[Nick Broomfield]

He is. He is. You know, and he's the sort of. It's hard to really condemn him outright because he's a sweet guy, but he's also incompetent and quite. You know, he defended marijuana growers and obviously had the best marijuana in Florida for that reason, but was quite incapable of handling a capital murder case. But Eileen loved Steve, you know. Cause he amused her and he was amusing, you know, I mean, he'd say, the best advice for my client who's about to be executed is don't sit down. You know.

[Interviewer]

So he says this to someone who's going to the electric chair?

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah, he says this to someone who's going to the electric. Don't sit down. You know, Screams with laughter. You know, I think he told the joke to Eileen. She probably found it funny, too, you know, So, I mean, you would never dream these things up.

[Interviewer]

No, it's impossible. So you read about Eileen. You thought she was interesting. And then what happened next?

[Nick Broomfield]

Then we flew over to Florida and just started filming pretty much.

[Interviewer]

Was it your first time in Florida?

[Nick Broomfield]

My first time in Florida, yeah.

[Interviewer]

What was that experience like?

[Nick Broomfield]

I think we started off in Gainesville. I always go running in the morning, which is a great way of getting to know a town, because you invariably get lost and you see places and meet people. I like Gainesville, actually. And it was, you know, we found a sort of very cheap house to rent. And so there wasn't any big pressure to have an agenda. And we just hung out with Steve. And then slowly the film came together. It was very difficult to get to Eileen.

[Interviewer]

She was in prison at the time.

[Nick Broomfield]

She was in prison at Broward Prison in a different part of Florida.

[Interviewer]

In general, how difficult is it to film in prison? Cause you've done that several times.

[Nick Broomfield]

It's tricky. A lot of it comes down to your actual personal relationship with the governor of the prison. And you have to work pretty hard at that to convince them that you're reputable and it's worthwhile. And we did have some problems with the prison in Broward. The problem really was it was a six or seven hour drive, I think, between the two places. And Steve, we had air conditioning going because it was damned hot there. Steve would light up these unbelievably strong joints. And even though we didn't imbibe much ourselves, by the time we got out of the car at Brow, we were finished.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, secondhand smoke.

[Nick Broomfield]

We were just, you know. And Steve, I remember, went in to see Eileen and we decided to do a really stupid thing, which was do a sort of driving shot around the perimeter of the prison for no good reason, really. And of course, we got arrested by the prison. They pulled our truck into the prison compound, stripped it, completely strip searched us. And so by the time we got to Eileen to do the interview, it had gone around the institution that this crew had been invented and strip searched. And we were suddenly like one of them.

[Interviewer]

That's really interesting, though.

[Nick Broomfield]

It was really interesting. So Eileen loved us right from the beginning.

[Interviewer]

Cause you were outlaws.

[Nick Broomfield]

We were outlaws. We were like stars. We were like. She thought we were gonna be performing as a band in the prison that night. And I kept saying, eileen, you know, we're like, really boring. We just. You're kind of idiots who made a mistake, and we're here to interview you. But she retained that sort of childlike, innocent humor about us for. Well, for years and years, you know.

[Interviewer]

How often would you get to speak to her?

[Nick Broomfield]

Well, over the years, I spoke to her quite a lot. And, you know, she would write to me, and she was actually quite a good artist. She'd draw these pictures, and her letters were like 13 or 14 pages.

[Interviewer]

She had a lot of time.

[Nick Broomfield]

She had a lot of time. And I would send a mean little postcard back. But we did stay close, and I did try and actually get her some different legal representation, but it was with this group of very serious and New York women. It was also a woman's group. And Eileen, they weren't funny like Steve, probably really good lawyers. It was my impression that they really knew what they were doing and they really could have helped Eileen, but she just was so different. They were so different.

[Interviewer]

What was she in jail for?

[Nick Broomfield]

She was in jail for seven murders.

[Interviewer]

Seven murders?

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah, she was in jail.

[Interviewer]

And was it clear that she did those murders?

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah, it was clear. But what was unsure was whether or not the first person she murdered was a guy called Richard Mallory, who was a serial sex offender. And that was never disclosed to the jury for some reason. And I think he did torture her. And, you know, I think she. She murdered him. And then I think murdering was easy, but she wasn't like a serial killer. I don't think she. I don't think she enjoyed murdering at all. I think she was just really down on her heel and wasn't a very good prostitute and was running out of funds. I think it was more like rubbing and not leaving a witness behind.

[Interviewer]

I see. What was it like to talk to her? What was it like to look into her eyes?

[Nick Broomfield]

I mean, I have to say, it was the first film I made where I felt really personally involved, you know, and I felt Eileen herself was a real victim. She'd been abused by both her grandfather and her brother. You know, she'd been living like a feral animal in the woods. She'd somehow fallen between all the cracks with the social services, wasn't at school, and, you know, her life was kind of disaster, and she kind of never really stood much of a chance. Yeah, and she was so kind of trusting with us and so pleased whenever we came to visit her, you know, almost like a little kid. That it was, you know, it was distressing. I felt really, really very upset. I was actually called as a witness for her final appeal before execution, which is when I started making the second film.

[Interviewer]

How many years later was that?

[Nick Broomfield]

Got about 10 or 12, I think. So I felt very, very involved in that particular story, her life.

[Interviewer]

Did you keep up communication with her during the 14 years?

[Nick Broomfield]

Oh, yeah, I did. That's when she wrote all the letters. Funnily enough, her best friend called me on my way to come and see you today.

[Interviewer]

Really?

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

What are the odds?

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah. Well, I think Netflix has just done a update of the film.

[Interviewer]

And there was the movie Monster, which was.

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah, exactly.

[Interviewer]

Charlize Theron, which was based on your films, I guess.

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah, exactly. And I gave Charlie's a whole lot of, you know, films and rushes and stuff that I had, which I guess she helped her get her character right. So some of these stories really stay with you. You know, you become very involved, and I guess it's one of the things that I like so much. You become very involved in people's lives and you care about them, and you stay with this sort of rather strange family of people that you've had very intimate, intense relationships with. When you do these films, which you kind of keep all your life. You know, whether it's people who've been in prison or people who were in the army or, you know, people on some of these other films, you know, musicians or.

[Interviewer]

And they're all people that you would have never come across in your normal life.

[Nick Broomfield]

Well, exactly. And that's what I've particularly enjoyed about it, you know, and that you kind of care about each other and you have had a very wide education of people with entirely different backgrounds and experiences and that you come to really respect and adore in the whole process.

[Interviewer]

How did you come to making documentaries?

[Nick Broomfield]

Well, I was not a great student at school. I was interested and inquisitive. And I found from the age of 14 or 15, wandering around with a stills camera somehow gave you the freedom to strike up conversations and friendships that you would never normally have had. And I think making films was a progression from that, really. I loved the work of Jack London. I remember when I was at school, he wrote this book called People of the Abyss, which was really about the East End of London and that world there. He wrote it in a very visual way, and I thought that would have been an amazing document on film. So there were kind of things like that that really got my interest going. I just like that kind of visual form and the ability to enter completely different worlds and cultures and absorb them. And it was like learning properly, not looking at a book, but interacting with people and being aware that things were complicated. You would meet people who. You might really not share the same political outlook at all, but there was something like a spiritual bond that was so strong and so magnetic that it overrode everything else. So those kind of judgments that you would normally make if you looked at somebody's character assessment on paper would be completely different and much more complex when you really got to know them and hang out with them. And film, you know, making documentaries really gives you the time to do that. And so I had wonderful friendships that I wouldn't have had otherwise and was educated by people who were far more worldly than my background, which was pretty removed, in a way.

[Interviewer]

I love the idea of the camera was the thing that allowed you to speak to people. In most cases, the documentarian's invisible, and in your case, you're in the film too. And that was the first time I saw one of your Films that was like the breaking of the fourth wall. And that was just a fascinating thing. I'd never seen anything like that before.

[Nick Broomfield]

I found I've learned more by the sort of semi disasters that I've worked on than anything else. You know, after several months of hanging my head in shame, you know, and wondering how it had gone so wrong, then on the next film you incorporate all those mistakes. And I had done this film about Lily Tomlin, the comedian.

[Interviewer]

I love Lily Tomlin.

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah, I love Lily Tomlin, too. And was so enamored with her work. And Joan Churchill and I went on a kind of long adventure with her, which was her preparing for a big Broadway show. Search of science, intelligent lights in the universe. But right from the beginning, there were a lot of problems. Lily is a great artist and was sort of at the height of her success, but she was incredibly insecure. And so we would go on the road with her to try the show out with different audiences. And sometimes we would only see her on stage. We wouldn't see her for the week. And sometimes we'd see her peeking out from the curtain in the little motel we were staying in. But I think she was so worried about the show. She thought we were probably documenting a disaster.

[Interviewer]

I see.

[Nick Broomfield]

And she was extremely troubled. And it kind of got worse and worse. Really.

[Interviewer]

Did she invite you to film?

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah, she did. We had a mutual friend, which was the doctor, this wonderful old doctor called Elsie Georgie, who was a kind of doctor to the stars at that time and was very close to Joan's family. But I think, you know, we were filming on and off for about a year and a half and it somehow never got better. We had worse and worse stories that we would tell friends of over dinner. But when the film came out, it was the archetypal film of somebody preparing for a show and then taking it to Broadway and it being an enormous success. But we had none of the angst, that. Real angst, the sort of paranoia, the.

[Interviewer]

All the things that make the successful ending that much more interesting.

[Nick Broomfield]

Exactly. And in a way makes you love Lily even more because she was so insecure and so full of self doubt, which would have been, I think, enormously sympathetic and encouraging for other people to have seen that. And, you know, I thought it was an incredible failing on our part that we hadn't found a way of incorporating all that story, which would have made it something a great story, as against a sort of. So we did this and then we did that.

[Interviewer]

Were there any things that you tried that didn't Work to get her more involved or open.

[Nick Broomfield]

I think our mistake was to go in with a very fixed idea that we were gonna make this kind of film.

[Interviewer]

I see.

[Nick Broomfield]

And breaking the fourth wall, you know, breaking the fourth wall is a big thing.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Nick Broomfield]

It requires you to suddenly be part of the story. And it also lets the audience in on all the difficulties and problems you're having, which, of course, are much more revealing than the ostensible thing. And people define themselves, I think, more with their problems and the things they don't want to talk about or address and what they do. And the trouble is, we were playing the old traditional game.

[Interviewer]

It's very interesting. I never thought about this before, but in some way, your films are the documentary of the documentary being made on the subject.

[Nick Broomfield]

Exactly. Because I think you go in to tell a story because you are interested. You're inherently interested. But your adventure of making that story is so much more complex and revealing than what you had ever imagined when you were writing your treatment or whatever you were doing. And documentary is a form that enables you to be very spontaneous. And, you know, unlike feature films, you don't go in with a set script and a schedule. And you have an enormous freedom, which is actually, I think, very seldom used. Because, you know, at the moment, I think documentaries become very corporate. Corporate bodies like having a lot of control. So everything is very controlled and formatted. But I think probably, you know, when the great documentary legends like Wiseman and Pennebaker and Leacock and Drew, you know, when they were starting, it was the Wild west, it was a big open, and people would try out things in a way that I think it's harder to do now, probably.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. The format's become cookie cutter in some ways.

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah. It's become less challenging, probably, for the audience.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Nick Broomfield]

Because they kind of know what they're gonna get. And I think people would have so loved Lily had we shown the horrors that she was going through.

[Interviewer]

Her vulnerable self.

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah, her vulnerability, exactly. You know, instead of which we ended up with a $11 million lawsuit from Lily at the end of it.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Nick Broomfield]

Which. Which was a waste of all our time. I mean, the film eventually came out, but instead of it being a celebration of this great thing.

[Interviewer]

Which was your only intention. Yes.

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. The intention was to show the struggle of creation. And part of the struggle of creation is you. You know, you pull your hair out and you can't sleep, and you. You know, you're distrustful of people around you. And you. You know, you think people are trying to get you and they're actually trying to help you. And I think if you have that, all that in the mix, you get a pretty amazing portrait of the artist who is going through hell to finesse what they're doing.

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[Interviewer]

Nicotine is an addictive chemical. What's the first of your movies where you appear in the movie, I think.

[Nick Broomfield]

Probably in terms of accessible, was a film I made called the Leader, the Driver and the Driver's Wife.

[Interviewer]

I've not seen that one. Tell me about that one.

[Nick Broomfield]

Well, it was in South Africa and the leader of the extreme right there who was kind of had kind of swastikas and so on, was called Eugene Terreblanche. And he lived in this small town called Wenderstorp. And he had a bunch of staunch supporters, all of whom were part of an army, very militant, aggressive. And they believed, you know, they went back to the Bible and they felt people obviously with white skin were inherently superior to, you know, the rest of the people in the town.

[Interviewer]

Was this a democratic place or was he like a warlord?

[Nick Broomfield]

He effectively ran the town. He was murdered hideously a few years later. And we went there to kind of make a film about Mandela was about to come out of prison. There was going to be a big change in South Africa. The question was, was there going to be revolution? Was there going to be massive bloodshed? Was the white army going to join people like Tablanche and come out and fight? Or was Mandela going to be able to have truth and reconciliation, which was what he wanted? So we went to Venta store.

[Interviewer]

How did you find out about the story. Was it something well known in Britain at the time or.

[Nick Broomfield]

No, not really, no. I had read an article about Tablanche and we'd actually gone to South Africa to make an entirely different film.

[Interviewer]

What was the one you were planning to make?

[Nick Broomfield]

It was about these Christian encounter groups where the amazing thing in South Africa at that time is a lot of black kids had never touched white skin and they really thought they were gonna evaporate or the color bar was that severe in South Africa then. But there wasn't really a profound enough encounter. It didn't really go much beyond that because the Christian groups themselves were very conservative and not really interested in taking the exploration too far. You know, it was still a very rigid society with, you know, people lived in different parts of the town. And it was still very segregated. And the thinking was segregated still. And we spent a week or so with them and then thought, this is not really going anywhere. And then I remembered reading this article about Tablanche. And.

[Interviewer]

What do you remember from the article?

[Nick Broomfield]

What I remembered was it was a kind of amused piece about this guy who had beaten various people up in the town. Somebody who worked at the service station who came out with. He was kind of like a puppet Hitler. He was an orator. He wrote poetry. He rode a big horse called Sturham.

[Interviewer]

It sounds crazy.

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah, it's kind of crazy. Crazy.

[Interviewer]

Was this a place where everybody rode horses?

[Nick Broomfield]

Quite a lot of people rode horses. But he, you know, he was a bull from a bull family, you know, and they. Well, they regarded themselves as the founders of South Africa. They had these oxcarts, and so the horse was part of that mystique. And, you know, we just drove to Vendorstorp to see what it was like. And one of the meetings was happening, you know, where he was there, and there were all people doing the Hitler salute.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Nick Broomfield]

And he gave this. Well, we didn't understand much of it. Cause it was all in Afrikaans. But it was this sort of incredible speech. And everybody went crazy like that. And, you know, we started filming it. We didn't really have permission. And partway through it, one of the audience got up and actually knocked the cameraman out.

[Interviewer]

Your cameraman?

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah, my cameraman, you know, who ended up on the floor. And I think it was that action that made the driver, who was Tablanche's personal driver, drove him around to all these things, who actually turned out to be a sweetheart of a man called jp he took pity on us and said, I'm so sorry. It's just like, please, you know, come to my house and at least have some supper or something. That was kind of our way in. We became very close to JP and got to know a lot of these supporters. So, you know, I was a character in it, too, because Tablanche really didn't like me very much at all.

[Interviewer]

How could he not like you?

[Nick Broomfield]

He thought we were. Well, he thought we were, you know, really a bunch of amateur students who didn't, because proper journalists would come out for the afternoon, do an interview and leave. And we were there endlessly and staying in someone's abandoned farmhouse, because even then it was dangerous to be in a farmhouse in the countryside. And he didn't take us seriously at all and would have these incredible explosions in front of us. And it was kind of like a black comedy about the white. Right, really. And I think we all learned an amazing amount doing the film. And it was very. A very different style for English television at that point.

[Interviewer]

You made it for BBC?

[Nick Broomfield]

I made it for Channel 4. And I think, you know, being in the film was something that was slightly frowned upon at that time, but I think it galvanized an audience and it was funny and it was unexpected. And a lot of the contradictions were there that we hadn't had in the Lily Tomlin film. And there was a friendship, an unlikely friendship, but we had a friendship with JP who, in a sense, was just born at a particular historical time, but was inherently a very kind person. So I think all that kind of came out in the film.

[Interviewer]

How was the film received?

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah, it was received, you know, incredibly well. It was more of a sort of English thing, because I don't think, you know, America's not that interested in South Africa. But it was very interesting, you know, it was very emotional, too. I remember meeting the South African general who was in charge of all the forces at that time, and he had been so amazed by Mandela and so won over by Mandela that he had decided to actually support Mandela and give people like Tablanche up, which was regarded as him being a traitor to the Boer people and so on. But it was incredibly moving, seeing how somebody who had been so entrenched had changed his position and just saw something new. Saw something very new. Yeah. And I think we were able to incorporate a lot of the problems of making the film into the film. I mean, that was all there. All the difficulties in dealing with Tablanche, for example, you know, if we were five minutes late for an interview, he'd go ballistic, you know, and frankly, him going ballistic was more interesting than what he had to say.

[Interviewer]

So what were your takeaways after that experience?

[Nick Broomfield]

I think I would do all the research that everybody would do, but also go into every film with a pretty open mind, without any fixed opinions or things I wanted to prove or I didn't have an agenda. I think that was the first thing I felt that should kind of go. All those films were a real exploration of who these people were.

[Interviewer]

I think that's what drew me to your films so much, is that they didn't feel like they were trying to convince me of anything, but just exposing me to things that I would never otherwise get to see.

[Nick Broomfield]

I felt if one could try and mirror the experience of making the film to an audience who would probably never encounter these people in that situation, that would be a wonderful thing to do. You know, for a long time, documentary filmmakers never really declared who they were. So an audience looking at their films never really could assess. There was obviously somebody behind the camera making the film, but they had no real sense of the relationship that existed between the filmmaker and the subject. And so I feel if the audience have that information, you know, maybe they don't like you, the filmmaker, but. But they can approximate what it would be like to have a relationship with the subject in the film.

[Interviewer]

The first film of yours that I saw was the Heidi Fleiss movie, right? And I remember I saw it in a small art house theater in downtown Manhattan. And I remember thinking, not only is this great, but I've never seen anything like it. And it was one of the most interesting documentaries I'd ever seen at that time. So tell me about what research you did before meeting her, then about meeting her for the first time and what that experience was like.

[Nick Broomfield]

Yes, Heidi was having problems about being filmed, so it took a long time to actually film Heidi. We went and saw her. She had a store in Pasadena where she was selling Heidi Warehouse. And I seem to spend a lot of time rolling up T shirts and trying to be helpful around the store. You find yourself doing all these jobs, you know, getting lunch for everybody and coffee to sort of. I think as a filmmaker, you often try and be useful. And so I think Heidi was kind of amused with that. And I think it took a long time actually to get Heidi to agree to take part in the film. There was this whole group of people that Heidi was associated with. There was Madame Alex, who was the madame before Heidi, who Heidi had sort of stolen all her clients. And Madame Alex was very resentful of Heidi. And then there was this Sort of Svengali figure called Yvonne Nagy, who, curiously, had been a film student with my film professor.

[Interviewer]

Really?

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Amazing.

[Nick Broomfield]

And I remember telling my film professor that Yvonne Nagy was involved as a sort of pimp in this film I was making. And he said, oh, I always knew he'd do well.

[Interviewer]

It seems like in your films, the cast of characters are often wilder than the subject.

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

I don't know how that works out, but it does seem to be the case. Like, you can make a film about a serial killer and her lawyer is more interesting than she is.

[Nick Broomfield]

And I guess, you know, making these films is very much casting, following the characters that you're really interested in, following. Characters who. Yvonne Nagy was, I think, a very gifted filmmaker at one point in time and had slowly become seduced into this world believing that he was still the same person. I think maybe that happens a lot in Hollywood, is that you come into town with a whole set of beliefs and values of what you are and what you want to be, and incrementally you can change into almost imperceptibly so that 20 years later, you're actually an entirely different creature, although you think you're the same person. And I think that that had sort of happened to Yvonne. You know, he was kind of interesting, but tragic figure. And he and Heidi had this incredibly destructive love affair where they did the most dreadful things to each other. And they were still sleeping with each other. She would put naked pictures of him, paste it on all the cars around the court in Los Angeles. When they were all at court together, he would put a hose pipe through her letterbox into her house, sort of flooding the whole bottom of the house. And then I think they were responsible for each other going to prison.

[Interviewer]

It's such a bizarre story.

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah. I was like, course, I had no idea.

[Interviewer]

How could you?

[Nick Broomfield]

How could anyone when you went in? Yeah, and that was the whole thing. And, you know, I was a character in it. And they used to, you know, he called me a rube. He got really. He got more and more annoyed with me, which was kind of interesting. And Heidi would blush, you know, when I said, but, Heidi, I've got a log from your front gate indicating that Yvonne is still coming to visit you. It's his car. His car registration. And she'd say, no, Nick, you got it all wrong. You got it all wrong. Going bright red. And, you know, it was such an adventure making that film. It went on and on and on for. I mean, I couldn't really pay my crew anymore. You know. Cause it was like 14 weeks but I didn't have an ending, you know. But it was a wonderful adventure making it, you know. But you have to hang on tight and hope you're not going to lose your mind in doing it, you know. And you know, Heidi's still a good friend. Amazing, you know, and she's highly intelligent. Heidi now living with these birds in Pahrump in the desert.

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[Interviewer]

What was the first of the music films you did?

[Nick Broomfield]

Preferably Curt and Courtney?

[Interviewer]

Yeah, how did Kurt and Courtney come about?

[Nick Broomfield]

I think that came from you.

[Interviewer]

I don't think it came from me.

[Nick Broomfield]

Well, I think you said there's a very interesting. Because I made the Heidi Fleiss film and then we had a lot of really interesting talks about many things, you know, Gene Scott included and.

[Interviewer]

Oh yeah.

[Nick Broomfield]

And I think you said there's a really interesting article in. There was some magazine that it wasn't uncut, but it was to do with a. Marijuana.

[Interviewer]

High times.

[Nick Broomfield]

Maybe it was High times. And there was a really interesting article in there about Curtin and Courtney, which I read and thought this is indeed an interesting story. And then I went up to Portland and Seattle and started making that film, which was very much a not at all a traditional music film.

[Interviewer]

Did you go in knowing anything at all?

[Nick Broomfield]

I went in really knowing nothing.

[Interviewer]

Do you remember who you talked to first?

[Nick Broomfield]

I think we first went to Portland because we were having real problems getting access to anybody particularly close to Kurt. And Kurt had been with a record label. Was it Sub Pop?

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Nick Broomfield]

Who I think thought we were the enemy. So we went to Portland and Talked to all these bands that had been contemporaries of Kurt's, like Napalm beach and various other ones, too. I don't think any of them ended up in the film, but one of them was Breeding Rats. And they were all living in these crazy places. And I guess it was at a time when there was a lot of. There was a sort of culture that was really on heroin. So we learned quite a lot about that in Seattle, too. And it was in the rainy season, and we stayed in this. Well, the cheapest hotel we could find in downtown Seattle. And slowly, you know, got to know some of Kurt's family and his girlfriends. And, I mean, looking back on, was a pretty depressed subculture, I think it was very wet when we were there, but it was kind of dark in a way.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Nick Broomfield]

It was not a particularly enjoyable film to make. There were bands like Screaming Trees.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Nick Broomfield]

And you could. You know, we got a real feeling of where the music had come from. But it was kind of a disastrous shoot. I didn't have my normal crew with me.

[Interviewer]

Why was that?

[Nick Broomfield]

Rita, who I'd worked with for years, was living in England, and her husband had died, and she had two small children. And Barry Ackroyd, cameraman that I work with, who also shot a lot of Ken Loach's films. And actually, he's done a couple of films with Charlize now. He's a really amazing cameraman. I remember when I said to him, would he come and shoot the film? His first question was, is Rita coming along, too? And I said, no, Rita can't do it. I always remember his words. They were. I think without Rita, I'm not psychologically equipped to deal with you on the shoot.

[Interviewer]

That's great.

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah, isn't it?

[Interviewer]

Real vote of confidence.

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah. Because Rita was the sanity in these often insane films. And Barry was the one who was knocked out at the leader, who felt, you know, instead of the camera feeling like this art form, it was like a battering ram in my films sometimes. And so I had a completely different crew. You know, I remember one of the guys was somebody I'd met at Whole Foods who just, you know, said he'd love my films. And, yeah, I said, okay, come along. You know. And then he had a friend who I remember one morning going into their room, and they were in bed with one of the subjects who was badly on drugs. And I was like, this is, like, not good. And so I kind of started all over again on that film.

[Interviewer]

Are there typically breakthrough moments in the process of making these films? Where something happens.

[Nick Broomfield]

Yes. I think sometimes you feel you've kind of got a complete picture of that person, you understand them. And obviously if they're a central character, it's gonna give you sort of some kind of arc of understanding which is, I guess, what you're looking for, you know, a development of a character. I remember, you know, when we did.

[Interviewer]

Soldier Girls, what's that one?

[Nick Broomfield]

That was a film that Joan Churchill and I did in Georgia. And it was basically about following women through basic training. And there was this really tough drill sergeant called Sergeant Abing, who, woman or man? He was a man.

[Interviewer]

I see.

[Nick Broomfield]

But the rest, the platoon was women. And it was in Fort Gordon and Ebing was just kind of unforgiving, relentless, sort of really didn't particularly like us either, you know, and would march everybody up and down and. And then we discovered that he. He wrote poetry and he'd never wanted to be in the Marines but had been kind of forced into the Marines and had been through Vietnam and was really worried about these women who. He said they're all going to be in communications and they're going to be prime targets in any conflict. The first thing you go for is communications. And he said, these are all little gang bangers from some teeny little town somewhere. And they're so unfit and they're so incapable. You know, I feel I've got to get them into some kind of situation where they at least can take care of themselves. So you saw this kind of ruthlessness that he had was. There was a lot of caring.

[Interviewer]

It was like a tough love kind of thing.

[Nick Broomfield]

It was really like a tough love. And. And then, you know, one would see him with all these various characters. And then I remember at the end of the end of the story, he kind of broke down and said, you know, I just can't. I don't feel I can love anymore.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Nick Broomfield]

I think he'd just been through so much. He'd seen so much carnage and everything, you know, and that was incredibly moving. Then when the film came out, I guess the Pentagon, who originally gave us permission, kind of victimized him and sort of sent him off to Belize or some remote spot to do jungle training for two or three years so that he, you know, the press couldn't get hold of him and he couldn't as a kind of punishment, which we didn't know about because we tried to get hold of Abing, it was his name, quite a lot, you know. And then Joan was in Idaho several years later and managed to find him and he was completely forgiving. You know, he was still the same guy. And then when Joan got back to Los Angeles, she opened her suitcase and Ebing had put his Purple Heart.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Nick Broomfield]

In the suitcase, you know, so you could have these, you know, incredibly profound relationships with people, you know, you touch. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

And you wouldn't. You'd never know it from the outside.

[Nick Broomfield]

No.

[Interviewer]

Has your work ever been banned or censored?

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah, there's quite a lot.

[Interviewer]

Give me an example.

[Nick Broomfield]

Well, again, Joan and I made this film called Juvenile Liaison.

[Interviewer]

What's that?

[Nick Broomfield]

It was a scheme that the police had in Blackburn, Lancashire. You probably know Blackburn from the Beatlesong. Yeah. Very depressed area and a lot of families extremely poor, Mother or father missing. And the police had this scheme where the police would try and help with, you know, kids who weren't getting on properly at school or were stealing or were abusing their parents or discipline problems. And we shot this film for a few weeks. It was just very standard cinema variete, but some pretty extreme things happened in it. And the police meant well, but they hadn't had any special training. And they would take clearly autistic kids who had maybe stolen a cowboy suit or into the cells, these barbaric police cells, and turn the light out and leave them in there for a few hours to sort of try and horrify them back to behaving properly. Anyway, the film came out and it was immediately pounced on by some members of Parliament and shown at the House of Commons as an example of this terrible scheme. And the police managed to get the film banned.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Nick Broomfield]

And the people in the film all got victimized again. You know, the. Obviously they had originally put us with who they thought were the greatest Juvenile Liaison officers, but when the film came out, they kind of fired them and made their lives difficult.

[Interviewer]

Terrible.

[Nick Broomfield]

So, yeah, so that you kind of learned that, you know, when you're doing those kind of institutional films, institutions, rather than reform or change things, will generally point to the individual.

[Interviewer]

Just blame people and blame people.

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

And shift the blame onto the people and off of themselves.

[Nick Broomfield]

Exactly.

[Interviewer]

I see.

[Nick Broomfield]

And obviously you as the filmmaker, take a certain responsibility for especially those people who been obliging and you spent months and months with. So I felt terrible about this particular police sergeant, but that film was banned and, you know, has never really been shown in England. And then lots of lawsuits.

[Interviewer]

What are the kind of lawsuits?

[Nick Broomfield]

Well, you know, the Whitney estate, actually, even Leonard Cohen's estate.

[Interviewer]

Really? Tell me about the Whitney project. Did you start that from the beginning or was there already something Happening?

[Nick Broomfield]

No, we started from the beginning.

[Interviewer]

Oh, I don't know the story of this movie. I've never seen it.

[Nick Broomfield]

Well, I'd gone into Showtime. I was pitching them some story you can tell when people are completely disinterested. You know, they're sort of yawning and looking at their watches. And I realized it was going disastrously wrong. So I suddenly said, Whitney. You know, I'd been for a hike that morning with a friend, and he, for some reason, had said, what happened to Whitney? You know, this was.

[Interviewer]

How long was this after her passing?

[Nick Broomfield]

Not that long. He had brought it up on this hike. And I thought, yeah, what did happen? Neither of us knew. So I just sort of said, whitney, apropos of nothing. Suddenly I had all the interest. You know what I mean? And 10 minutes later, I had a commission. I knew nothing. Nothing. Not even her music. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

You know, and then. What's the first thing you do after that?

[Nick Broomfield]

Well, sort of tried to at least listen to the music and get someone to tell me something about the story.

[Interviewer]

Who were the characters in that story?

[Nick Broomfield]

Well, it was, I guess, Bobby Brown, her parents, Cissy, her mother, the conflict with the father, her brothers, who had turned her onto crack. Bobby Brown, who had been blamed for turning on to crack, but had, in fact, not. And then Clive Davis, who had created this mythical figure of Whitney Houston, who was sort of like black royalty, who was this entirely different person who, when she didn't live up to his creation, was then kind of disparaged and looked down on and had this terrible legacy of Whitney Houston when she was an entirely different person who had grown up in a. You know, in Newark, which at that time was pretty tough, and was also supporting this enormous family of dependents who were all. Kept her on the road and kept her playing even though she really didn't want to. And her voice was damaged and, you know, she couldn't hit the notes anymore. That was kind of where it went. You know, there was very little footage that we could get. One of her bodyguards told me about somebody who had shot a film that had never come out. He was Austrian and was now working on cruise ships or something. We spent about months and months trying to find him and eventually got hold of this guy called Rudy Dollitzol, who had indeed shot with Whitney for a year. The footage had never come out.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Nick Broomfield]

We bought this other film.

[Interviewer]

What was that footage like?

[Nick Broomfield]

It was pretty beautiful. It was beautifully shot. It was great footage, but it lacked the story. You know, often you can have great footage, but if you A story. There's no context. Yeah. It was incredibly helpful. And I remember, you know, we called it Whitney, Can I Be Me? And I think she had a strong sense of who she was. She used to be called Nippy when she was growing up, and all her close friends called her Nippy, which was completely different from Whitney, the Clive Davis creation.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Nick Broomfield]

And apparently on her rehearsal studios, she'd written this sign, can I Be Me? Because she wanted to do completely different kind of music. She wanted to do much more sort of soul, you know, much more music. She liked black music.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Nick Broomfield]

And she was being forced into doing this other kind of music. Yeah. And also, she didn't own any rights over her music. So it was all of that that ended up. And, you know, although I never met Whitney, I felt an incredible sympathy and support for her having started knowing absolutely nothing, you know, And I think a lot of storytelling is finding that identification and sympathy for people and telling their story in a way that creates empathy.

[Interviewer]

I feel like you're always respectful of whoever it is that's in your movie. You just show them.

[Nick Broomfield]

I hope so.

[Interviewer]

It feels like that. Feels like that. And it. And it's rare where so much of the things that we watch are telling us what to think.

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah. Also, I think everybody is full of. You know, the human condition is one of failings and things that could be better.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Nick Broomfield]

And everyone is full of blemishes, which I don't know. I mean, I don't think it's interesting to tell stories that don't have contradictions or don't have different views of that person.

[Interviewer]

It's not what life is like.

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Life is filled with contradictions, and things don't fit perfectly, and things don't always make sense. More often than not, they don't make sense.

[Nick Broomfield]

And I guess newspaper articles, maybe someone gets a week or two, but documentaries, you sometimes get the better part of a year. So you can go into things in real depth. And I think it's the gray areas that are often much more interesting than anything else. Like Wood de Blanche's driver, who would come out with the most incredible racist statements that would kind of make your hair stand up. And at the same time, was an incredibly kind, endearing person who I think had known nothing else when he'd been growing up.

[Interviewer]

You know, Was the Whitney movie the first one that used a lot of archival footage? It was actually, from a technical standpoint. How was that different?

[Nick Broomfield]

It was much more of an editing exercise, because when I was shooting everything, I was constructing the story as I was going along the narrative. So, you know, you'd shoot one scene and then think, I need, I need this. Or I'm interested in finding out this aspect. So it was kind of like working with building blocks. You'd do one kind of interview or have one kind of scene and then you knew you needed this scene with that person or you narrowed down your vision. And so by the end of the shooting you'd really know precisely what you were doing. Whereas at the beginning you start with open slate or, you know, when you've got a ton of archive, you kind of have to build a story around the archive and find the archive that illustrates the story. I found it very difficult to begin with. I think it's a whole different way of working. It's much more finicky. But in some ways I quite liked having the piece of the editing room.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Nick Broomfield]

And being able to have a. A sort of disciplined day.

[Interviewer]

It was probably much longer edit than usual.

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah, it was. It's very tricky. A. In the Whitney thing, we didn't have to source that much archive because it was all there. But in other films I've done waiting for the archive. Finding the archive is such a time consuming business. And then molding it into the story and finding the relationship between the different bits of archive is also kind of tricky. It's just a different discipline, I think. And the Stones film that I did was almost all archive interesting, but kind of frustrating to work.

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[Interviewer]

Qu Tell me about Biggie and Tupac.

[Nick Broomfield]

Biggie and Tupac.

[Interviewer]

What made you want to make that film?

[Nick Broomfield]

Well, I'd always wanted to do a film about the lapd and there was this police Officer Russell Poole, who was alleging that Biggie had been killed by these LAPD police officers who had an allegiance with Suge Knight and Death Row Records. And I met with him a few times.

[Interviewer]

Where did you hear that story?

[Nick Broomfield]

I think I probably saw an interview with Russell Poole on television.

[Interviewer]

I see.

[Nick Broomfield]

And then I went and met with him a few times and then also met with Biggie's mom, Valetta at the beginning, who was very anxious to get to the bottom of who had killed her son.

[Interviewer]

At that point in time, no one knew anything?

[Nick Broomfield]

No. So that was really the way in on that one.

[Interviewer]

And what happened Next?

[Nick Broomfield]

Well, Channel 4 put the money up for it. You know, I've been moderately lucky in that I haven't had to wait enormous amounts of time generally to get funding, which I think can be so frustrating and depressing for a lot of people.

[Interviewer]

It's also allowed you to make a lot of films.

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah, it's allowed me to make a lot of films. So we got the money pretty quickly. And then it was this sort of real conundrum of there were all these different theories and different people and, you know, there's a lot of shenanigans going on. And also there were two people. So it was very difficult to do justice to them both because obviously they had this real connection. Tupac had helped Biggie a lot at the beginning and there was this kind of sort of weird rivalry or misunderstanding developed between them, which was so tragic that these two people who started off with a lot of love and were incredibly similar, I mean, obviously size wise they weren't very similar, but they were both unbelievably talented students. They were both sort of a grade students. Tupac went to the Baltimore School of the Arts, which is a pretty amazing place. And Biggie was at this private school and writing this incredible poetry. And so they gave each other a great deal. And then they were overtaken by these other forces which obviously emanated in some way from their own situations. I think, you know, Tupac was always kind of looking for a father and a greater meaning in life and enjoyed the bravado of Suge Knight and all these. This posse of kind of gang members and stuff. And of course Biggie was singing about it, but I. You know, it was a kind of love story that ended in complete tragedy. Both of their talents were manipulated for other reasons.

[Interviewer]

You originally wanted to make a film about the lapd, right? Did the LAPD piece of the story become a big part of the story?

[Nick Broomfield]

Well, yes. Well, then there were these three Police officers, David Mack, Rafael Perez and this guy called Elijah Muhammad or something. Those three police officers were. All two of them had worked at death row as off duty police officers and were also members of a gang, the same that Suge was a member of. David Mack was subsequently convicted of a bank robbery and sent down. And Rafael Perez was all involved in the Rampart scandal. So they were kind of up to their neck and stuff. And I remember interviewing this very funny woman who was both their girlfriends at one time. I don't know exactly what they got up to, but she was pretty hilarious. So there were a lot of, again, complicated characters. I mean, I guess, you know, the two main characters in it was the portraits of Tupac and Biggie. And we did find a lot of material that had never been seen before.

[Interviewer]

And how do you go about doing that, finding archival that hasn't been seen before?

[Nick Broomfield]

A lot of the TRUPAC stuff was from his friends, his family. Same with Biggie. You know, there were friends of his who had shot material. But it's a real time consuming needle in the haystack time. It's a lot of people who claim to have stuff that they haven't got and then they want to charge you the earth for it. You know, this is their one moment of fame and opportunity. So it is difficult.

[Interviewer]

Did you get to interview Suge?

[Nick Broomfield]

Yes.

[Interviewer]

How was that?

[Nick Broomfield]

It was amusing in a way. He was in Mule Creek State Prison.

[Interviewer]

And you got permission to film him in prison?

[Nick Broomfield]

Well, it's complicated. Again, it was finessing a relationship with the governor.

[Interviewer]

I see.

[Nick Broomfield]

And in Mule Creek State Prison you can get permission to film the institution in general, but not to film a specific prisoner. So you go up there. My normal crew didn't want to come because you have to sign and put your address in the prison logbook. And they were all like, you kidding? Because we got all these threatening messages from death row before saying we don't want you to do an interview and piss off. And then when they heard we were going, it was like, what hotel are you staying in, what plane are you coming? You know, all this horrible stuff. So anyway, we got there and you had to sign a waiver. I remember saying that if you in, in the unlikely event that you were taken a hostage, that you had no objection to your kneecaps being shot out. No kidding.

[Interviewer]

You have to sign that for real?

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah, you have to sign that for real. I saw my ERSW cameraman sort of turn green.

[Interviewer]

You signed it happily.

[Nick Broomfield]

Well, I just thought, this is ridiculous. This is like A farce. Anyway. So then the superintendent of the prison says, I'll have to take you around. What do you want to do? We sort of did a couple of cursory other interviews. And then I said, you know, we want to talk to Suge Knight. And he said, oh, fine, you know. So he took us to Suge's cell.

[Interviewer]

But at the time that you went, you didn't know what was going to happen? You didn't know for sure you would get to talk to anybody?

[Nick Broomfield]

No, no, we just went up there. We had permission to film in Mule Creek, but we didn't know.

[Interviewer]

Did they know what the topic of what you were filming was about or No?

[Nick Broomfield]

I think they might have done. I mean, the superintendent was super obliging.

[Interviewer]

Great.

[Nick Broomfield]

And, you know, he took us. Suge was on the phone at the time. I said, oh, shall I go and I'll go and ask him, you know. And Subaru says, no, I think I might have more luck. You know, I think Sug was trying to get on parole or something.

[Interviewer]

I see.

[Nick Broomfield]

So he went up and, you know, death row had said, he's not going to talk to you, so you might as well just forget it, you know. So he comes along and he has to go back to his cell to get a big cigar, and then we do an interview with him outside.

[Interviewer]

Is he smoking the cigar?

[Nick Broomfield]

Smoking the cigar.

[Interviewer]

Amazing in prison?

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah, amazing in the prison. And he obviously could make as many phone calls as he wanted, kind of thing. He seemed to have a lot of rights one way or another. I think he probably has a lot less now, now that he's got a big conviction.

[Interviewer]

Is he in prison now? Yeah, I wasn't aware he.

[Nick Broomfield]

I think he was sentenced for murder. You know, he. He knocked that guy down with his car and stuff, I don't know, deliberately.

[Interviewer]

So you interview him smoking a cigar outside, and was it illuminating?

[Nick Broomfield]

Well, I think the circumstances of the interview were illuminating. You know, he said, I don't want to talk about the murder of Biggie right up front. But he said, I want to give a message to the kids. And then he came out with this pretty. Given that you've seen the rest of the film and you knew what he was up to, it was this kind of almost Christian message to the kids. And then I asked him a few other things about Snoop Dogg, who he was threatening to kill at the time. And, you know, he talked about Snoop being a snitch and that snitches got killed and all that kind of stuff, you know. But I Wouldn't say it was one of the finest interviews, but it was very telling, the circumstance of it to. And it was frightening to be there, actually. You know, he's quite an intimidating presence. You know, he's very big, and then he's got this very soft. A very soft, gentle voice, which I found completely freaky, you know, because everything about him is menace, and the voice made him even more menacing.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Nick Broomfield]

So the film, you know, was sort of. Well, I think it was a good portrait of the Biggie and Supac thing, but inconclusive in that the LAPD have never. It's still unresolved, you know, it's unresolved in the movie.

[Interviewer]

Is it still unresolved to this day?

[Nick Broomfield]

It is.

[Interviewer]

If something got resolved, would you go back and add an ending to the movie or. No?

[Nick Broomfield]

I don't think so. I think it's just a portrait of those people at that time.

[Interviewer]

I see.

[Nick Broomfield]

In that particular situation are all documentaries.

[Interviewer]

That about a particular moment in time? It's not a biography, it's something else.

[Nick Broomfield]

Well, I mean, I guess there's lots of different kinds of documentary. I think none of them are definitive, but they're an interpretation of a particular situation at that time. I think. I think they're kind of historical documents, a lot of which I don't think you'll be able to probably make anymore now.

[Interviewer]

Why do you think.

[Nick Broomfield]

I think things are much tighter. I think there was a sort of magical notion of freedom of the press, which was super respected, particularly in this country, you know, when I first came here, and I don't think that exists anymore.

[Interviewer]

When do you think it changed?

[Nick Broomfield]

I think it changed in the Iraq war. You know, there was nothing like the freedom that the press had in Vietnam, where they could go everywhere. And then there was the deliberate bombing of what was that particular news outlet. It had Arabic funding.

[Interviewer]

Al Jazeera.

[Nick Broomfield]

Al Jazeera was bombed? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Interviewer]

I don't know the story.

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah. There was deliberate on the part, I think, of the US deliberately taking Al Jazeera in various places. I think that was sort of the beginning of.

[Interviewer]

Julian Assange as well.

[Nick Broomfield]

Exactly that. And the other guy.

[Interviewer]

Snowden.

[Nick Broomfield]

Snowden, yeah. And now there's. The whole fake news thing has made everyone crazy.

[Interviewer]

What was tracking down Maggie, that was.

[Nick Broomfield]

By the time Margaret Thatcher was forced to resign.

[Interviewer]

I don't know anything about Margaret Thatcher in America. We're not taught to look past the boundaries of this country.

[Nick Broomfield]

Well, she was best friends with Ronald Reagan, and the same way that Ronald Reagan was deified by the Republican Party. Margaret Thatcher was by the Conservative Party. It was a sort of all out re evaluation of the sort of paternalistic policies of following the Second World War, of building a home for heroes and the state's obligation to the workers and so on. She reevaluated all that, completely changed it.

[Interviewer]

Did it impact everyday people's lives?

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

In what ways?

[Nick Broomfield]

Well, she destroyed the unions, who were a really powerful force. They were protecting workers rights, they were very involved in industry. There were nothing. By the time she had finished, she passed legislation making the closed shop illegal and she was kind of forced to resign by her own party. And then she went on a book tour with this book she had written.

[Interviewer]

Was she popular or unpopular in Britain?

[Nick Broomfield]

She was, I would say, pretty unpopular by that time. And she was so unpopular in the Foreign Office that I was able to get her schedule all the way across America. So I knew where she was getting her hair permed and what hotel she was staying in.

[Interviewer]

And, you know, it seems like a security risk.

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah, exactly. Well, we obviously weren't going to do anything to her.

[Interviewer]

No, but still, it's like it tells you something's wrong if you can.

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah, exactly.

[Interviewer]

If you can get that information.

[Nick Broomfield]

And so we sort of evaluated her, who she was and what she'd done while in power as she was going across America and also looking at all these arms deals her son had done by virtue of his association with her with Iraq as well as the Arabic states. Incredible sort of corruption that was also part of it. And we were just sort of following her across America and talking to all these secret agents from Mossad and other places who had done deals, you know, they sold night vision spectacles to Iraq and various chemical weapons and all that kind of stuff. But it was kind of an alarming film because we realized after a while we were being followed, which was an unpleasant feeling.

[Interviewer]

Was this for Channel four as well?

[Nick Broomfield]

This is for Channel four, yeah.

[Interviewer]

How was that film received?

[Nick Broomfield]

I don't think it was the greatest film. I think it was a good idea. But again, it wasn't sort of definitive. It was a reevaluation of her. I didn't love the film and I remember it was incredibly difficult to edit, to get a story to really work.

[Interviewer]

Was it just the nature of what it was or was there anything you could have done in retrospect to improve it?

[Nick Broomfield]

I think it begged for a proper conversation with her, which we never got.

[Interviewer]

And it was not possible to get.

[Nick Broomfield]

No, we tried really hard. She had a few journalists that she Would talk to. And that was it. But I think, in a way, that payoff wasn't there.

[Interviewer]

I see.

[Nick Broomfield]

In a way that. I think if we hadn't got suge Knight, you wouldn't have had the payoff on that film. Sometimes the hardest thing is to get the end. To get a sense of proper closure. And when you don't get that, like we didn't get it in the Margaret Thatcher film, There's always that kind of nagging feeling that you could and should have gone on a bit longer with Curtin. Courtney. There were all these allegations about Courtney, and it was a nightmare getting up at d. ACLU dinner saying, should you really be awarding Courtney this prize when she's.

[Interviewer]

You did that?

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah, I went there to do that. Milos Forman was there, Aaron, with the Larry Flint film. And it was a big event. It was a big Hollywood event. Courtney was guest of honor.

[Interviewer]

You had not talked to Courtney yet?

[Nick Broomfield]

No, I hadn't talked to her. And we first see Courtney coming out of the loo. She's clearly just done a line. And then there were all these speakers coming up to a podium, talking to this room. Right. And I sort of worked out when I could nip up in between speakers. And I just went up there. And I kind of knew what I was going to say. I think I said, I don't want to be a party poop. But Hollywood sometimes has a problem of distinguishing between fact and fiction. And it was giving the torch of freedom to somebody who had threatened journalists in the past, Esteemed journalists. And threatened to bludgeon someone with Quentin Tarantino's Oscar. And so was it really wise for them to be giving the torture freedom award to Courtney Love? At which point this guy jumps up from the audience. I was praying for someone to remove me, but right about this time. Cause I'd run out of things to say. I mean, the best thing they could have done is just leave me up there like a blithering idiot, you know? Anyway, he came up and.

[Interviewer]

Were you arrested?

[Nick Broomfield]

He kind of literally manhandled me off the stage.

[Interviewer]

I see just a person in the audience.

[Nick Broomfield]

No, he was the host.

[Interviewer]

I see.

[Nick Broomfield]

Of this.

[Interviewer]

Not a security guard?

[Nick Broomfield]

No, no, no. He was a guy in a suit. Well, the security guard wouldn't have known that I was not supposed to be up. I see everyone thought I was part of the show. I was in a suit, white shirt, and, you know, I had all the gear on. Right. And I thought I was a dreadful coward. I mean, I really didn't want to do It. It was, you know, a complete nightmare. I was sort of drenched with sweat.

[Interviewer]

It sounds horrible.

[Nick Broomfield]

Horrible. And I remember I had this very gorgeous girlfriend at the time, Belgian, who was really gutsy. And she said to me at one point, because I was kind of, oh, God, I can't do this. If you don't do it, I will. And I was, like, so shamed. I finally got up and did it right. So I was just beside myself with horror and shame. And I remember my agent, I was speaking to him the next day, and he said, did you hear about that idiot who got up? Didn't know it was me at all. Did you hear about that idiot who got up and did, you know. And I said, dan, it was me. And he went, no, no, I was that idiot. Yeah, I was that idiot. That was me. Anyway, that's amazing. But I did have the ending. I then had the ending.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Nick Broomfield]

So you can tell how, you know. And I'd run out of money to pay the crew or anything. So it was like. It was painful going up there, but it was even more painful not having an ending.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Nick Broomfield]

You know, and I wish, kind of, you know, with the Thatcher film, that I think, Rita, Rita, this is a bit of an excuse, but I think Rita and Barry had just about had enough on that film to. I've been dragging them all around America, and they just wanted to go back to their families and have a bit of, you know.

[Interviewer]

Do you ever get tired of it when you're doing it, or are you, like, excited by the chase of it all?

[Nick Broomfield]

I guess I feel you get one shot. Really?

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Nick Broomfield]

You're not gonna be doing this film again. And I had the experience of making a couple of films for television when I first came out of film school and really feeling they could have been really great, but they fell way short of that because they were so compromised by time and other things. And I felt that was kind of a disservice to the people in the film as well as us, the filmmakers. So, you know, it's also kind of a record of your ability or lack of ability at that time. You know, you just want to get it as good as you can.

[Interviewer]

Is it as much fun for you now as it's ever been?

[Nick Broomfield]

I think so. I think some of my films, the later films, would be more archival, and they're more of a riddle, you know, it's the riddle of finding the story that will ring with an audience who can identify with it. You know, I think one does change over the years. You know, I Think I was.

[Interviewer]

I hope so. I hope so.

[Nick Broomfield]

I hope so. I'm much more angry, I think. And probably, you know, the world was a lot more political, directly political, than it is now.

[Interviewer]

What is direct cinema?

[Nick Broomfield]

I made this big feature when I was just starting. It was a bad film. I had a wonderful cast. It's one of those unfortunate things where I can only blame myself for not making a great film. But I found working with a gigantic crew and not working with people who were acting themselves, I just couldn't do it properly. And so direct cinema was. For example, I made a film about the Chinese cockle pickers. They were these kind of undocumented workers from China who ended up picking cockles in this place called Morecambe Bay. Cockles are these kind of shellfish you can eat and it's very dangerous because the tide comes in incredibly fast. And they were forced into doing that because they couldn't get employment anywhere else, really. And anyway, 25 of them drowned. Wow. There's one particular night and I did a film about them and I got the same kind of Chinese from the same part of China who were in England, who were living in these houses with gang masters to basically act themselves. And then I did the same thing.

[Interviewer]

You recreated the historical event with other people playing the people.

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

That's interesting because they were basically non actors.

[Nick Broomfield]

Non actors who had come from the same background who were living in these five to a room in these houses, who had left their families behind in China, often with the grandparents, their kids, some of which they'd never see again because.

[Interviewer]

Was it like a version of slavery, Slave labor?

[Nick Broomfield]

Really?

[Interviewer]

Really?

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

When was this?

[Nick Broomfield]

I did that in, I think about 2005.

[Interviewer]

And this was happening in Britain in 2005?

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah, still happening, I would imagine.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Nick Broomfield]

I would imagine. And you get incredibly powerful performances because they're kind of not performances because they haven't got their kids. So if they're acting the part of somebody who hasn't seen. You know, often you cast somebody who doesn't have their kid.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Nick Broomfield]

And a gang master who. The same kind of gang master.

[Interviewer]

What's a gang master?

[Nick Broomfield]

Somebody who rounds up the people, puts them all in the house, charges them rent every week to stay in the house and gets paid and then doles out the wages and sort of also probably drives them to work and runs the house. And then I did the same thing with American Marines in Iraq, and he was shot in Jordan and it was around a particular incident called Haditha. And there were these incredible naval reports that indicated exactly what had happened, which is basically these Marines had killed, I don't know, 20 or 30 completely innocent Iraqis.

[Interviewer]

Why?

[Nick Broomfield]

Because they had an IUD had gone off killing one of them in a Humvee, and they were looking for the terrorists who'd done the bomb. And they were called Kilo Company. And previous to that, in Haditha, they'd been at this other town where they had. Basically, the American army had said, everybody's got to leave this town by such and such a time, and if they don't, we'll kill everybody in the town, which they had done. So Keto Company had had the experience of literally killing everything. Anything that moved, pets, people, children, old people. Anybody who stayed behind in that town was killed. Then they went to Haditha and one of the sergeants or whatever said, clear those houses. And there were kids and old people and they were all killed. And they claimed that there'd been shots fired from the houses. But it was a complex story, really, because most of These Marines were 17 or 18.

[Interviewer]

They were kids themselves.

[Nick Broomfield]

They were kids and they had been trained in a particular way to react kind of zombie like, you know. So we got the Marines to basically act out how they had been, and we built barracks for them, and then we recreated this little hamlet of houses.

[Interviewer]

How did they feel about recreating something like this?

[Nick Broomfield]

Absolutely okay.

[Interviewer]

Really?

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah, because a lot of them had. Yeah, they. They had really no respect for the Iraqis anyway. And this is what they did. I mean, it was all too familiar to them. They had been trained to shoot and ask questions.

[Interviewer]

Later, they killed the enemy and spared.

[Nick Broomfield]

So the film very carefully showed their training and their mindset that had been programmed.

[Interviewer]

It really is showing the problems with the system.

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

The villains were not the killers in this case.

[Nick Broomfield]

No, they were absolutely not.

[Interviewer]

It was the system that created this situation.

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah. And then the villagers were caught in between the terrorists who were laying the IEDs and the American Army. They were obviously being threatened by both sides and were just trying to raise families and they didn't have a political allegiance. And so they, of course, were aware of where these IEDs were being planted because they would see it happening. And then, of course, they. The Marines would be furious that they didn't tell them and that one of their number had been blown in half.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Nick Broomfield]

So we did that. I was very pleased with the outcome on the Incredible. It was very emotional. Very. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Where did that show?

[Nick Broomfield]

Well, it was on Netflix, as you can imagine. Didn't go down enormously well in America.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Nick Broomfield]

In cinemas and stuff. We had a screening at the Arrow and I remember the manager. It was the fist fight at the end of the.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Nick Broomfield]

Some of the marines were there and people would. So, you know, patriotically not believing this could happen.

[Interviewer]

Are there any stories that you've been wanting to tell that haven't been able to do yet?

[Nick Broomfield]

There are a couple of things I started I didn't finish. But I think I've been lucky in that I've been able to do most of what I wanted to. I mean, I think it was possible to make more political films, more social films when I was starting than now. I think now you're kind of looking at true crime and maybe music if it's big enough. But, you know, the documentary market is pretty disappointing. I would say it's not pioneering and looking for new ways of storytelling or interesting new kind of subject matter.

[Interviewer]

Do you think of yourself as an investigator?

[Nick Broomfield]

Yeah, I always saw myself as a kind of cluso. More than, you know, bumbling, bumbling around. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about the business side of filmmaking. How does that work?

[Nick Broomfield]

Well, the model I used for a long time was the British TV stations. Much more risk taking than here. So I would get the initial funding from BBC or Sky or Channel 4 to get the film going and then generally shoot the film and edit the film and then sell it to in the us. But I think that model has kind of gone because most of the streamers want to own and commission the product that they're doing and they're not buying in in the same way that they were. So if you're not very careful, you can end up with a very costly film which you are going to end up having to finance if you don't get someone on board. I think the difficult thing is you can obviously waste an awful lot of time trying to gather the funds to start the film. But it's very risky now to start the film without having complete funding up.

[Interviewer]

Front and from British television. They would not fund the whole film.

[Nick Broomfield]

It's too expensive.

[Interviewer]

I see.

[Nick Broomfield]

I mean, particularly if there's Archive of Music. I think you're probably lucky in the UK with the documentary getting, I don't know, 4 or 500,000 pounds, which is probably $800,000, whereas you probably need double or treble. That probably.

[Interviewer]

Hasn't technology brought down the cost of making things or.

[Nick Broomfield]

No, no, because you spend more time in post.

[Interviewer]

I see.

[Nick Broomfield]

Post is much more expensive now than it was before and it's. It's just more complicated and then everybody wants everything delivered in so many different formats that the delivering in the formats costs a fortune.

[Interviewer]

The films you make change you.

[Nick Broomfield]

I felt very changed by the experience of making Eileen and, you know, the relationship with Eileen, the relationship with Sergeant Abing, this wonderful Liverpud housewife called Ethel, who sort of educated me politically. I think the people in, in the films that you value and have relationships with change you quite a lot. They are open doors and show you things you didn't realize before. And in a wonderful way, I think.

[Interviewer]

Tetragrammaton is a podcast. Tetragrammaton is a website. Tetragrammatin is a whole world of knowledge.

[Podcast Host]

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