by FilmInk Staff

His father, Maurice is now a celebrated artist. A specialist in ‘industrial photography’, Broomfield Senior had a painterly eye, not surprising given he was as gifted with oil and canvas, as he was with lens and film. His images – of factory floor, the mechanism of industry and men and women at work – became emblems of Great British resilience after the ravages of the Second World War.

Nick Broomfield, now in his early 70s, fills his touching new film with these images and muses aloud about the father he remembers and the man and Artist he discovered while making the movie. He contrasts his own love of spontaneity in film with his father’s careful craft – what looks ‘captured’ in Maurice’s photos are actually plotted, designed, lit and stage-managed, sometimes taking days. All in order to deliver very specific emotional effects. Under his eye, factories are Grand Theatres and workers look like they are performing wizardry…

Prominent in the film too, is Nick’s mother, Sonja, a Czech refugee whose social courage influenced her filmmaker son. Broomfield, who was born in the UK and started his career there, has found himself challenging the norms of the justice system.

Anyone who has ever seen a Broomfield film – he made his first one fifty years ago and completed more than thirty since – will find familiar his technique; wall-to-wall narration, delivered in a wry, cheeky style, and no attempt to hide behind the artifice of film… Nick Broomfield has always believed that the personal is political and My Father and Me is a portal into how he arrived at what is for him an unshakable faith.

FilmInk spoke to Broomfield via phone from his home in Los Angeles, where he is currently completing a film about the Sixties and the British Invasion bands like The Rolling Stones and The Kinks.

This is a very personal film for you.

“Yes. My father died in 2010. He was 94. My son took a lot of the home video I use in it. I started work on it in 2019 as something I would do between making other films. I complete about a film a year… and I did three complete re-edits, and to tell you the truth I was not sure I wanted to do it, it was something I had always resisted, a film about my father. I always thought it might be too close to home.”

We understand the film is linked to the exhibition which opened in London at the Victoria and Albert Museum on 5 November, 2021… ‘Maurice Broomfield: Industrial Sublime’.

“Yes. The V & A approached me because of that exhibition – but it kept getting postponed because of Covid. It took five years to open. The V & A is probably the pre-eminent museum in London.”

What did you see in the material that put you off?

“I wasn’t sure what kind of things I would rake up… I guess, discussing your family you are so close to it, it’s hard to get the distance to know what level to the tell the story on. Of course, you remember horrible things, you remember good things…[but] what’s this going to mean to somebody else?”

How did the film evolve?

“I never go into a film with a particularly fixed idea.

“Martin Barnes of the V&A has written a book about my father and spent hours and hours interviewing him. I had not heard these till I started work on the film. I learnt a lot from these recordings. I didn’t know about the poverty my father grew up with. I didn’t know that he lived in this place which was a tough milling town. When we were growing up, he had described his childhood in a very romantic way.”

His photos are glorious. What else did you have to work with?

“My father was a kind of hoarder and so, in a sense, am I. He kept everything. So, we had a massive amount of visuals. But as I worked my way through the material, the idea of what I was going to make kept changing. The film became a process of discovery. It’s an exploration of all these things I didn’t really know. I did not know [for instance] about the Jewishness on my mother’s side of the family.

“As I was making it, I realised I never really grieved for my family; my mother died when I was young. I never really had time [to grasp that]. I was just starting my career [then] and I had my first son. I didn’t have to time think about what she had given us.”

Barney Broomfield, the late Maurice Broomfield and Nick Broomfield. Photo by Suzy Broomfield (Maurice’s second wife)

Where did your father stand on your own career?

“At one point, I was going to be a barrister. He didn’t care about that. But my mother did. She was a socialist and hated my lawyer friends, thought they were stuck up… but my father was pretty free and easy about most things except photography.

“He hated the idea of holiday snaps. It was like fast food or something. So, I was drilled on how to approach photography. He was a complete perfectionist and highly intolerant of anybody who didn’t do it his way. I was not permitted access to his dark room!”

Your father did have a view on your style, as a filmmaker, as the film portrays. This is where you insert yourself into the film as a character.

“He had a very traditional approach to documentaries. When I started putting myself in films, he was not amused. He was a gentle man. Not at all confrontational. When I started interacting on camera with the film’s subjects, that was not something he enjoyed watching, but my mother loved it.”

It made you notorious and the films – Driving Me Crazy (1986), The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife (1991), Kurt and Courtney (1998) and Biggie and Tupac (2002) – and many others, are quite controversial amongst documentary purists. Why did you break with convention?

“You often make a big change, like the one you are talking about, after you make a really bad film. I made a really bad film about Lily Tomlin (1986). We had all these great after dinner stories, mainly about appalling behaviour and these awful things that happened during the filming. None of them were in the final cut. I realised we could have made an amazing film, had we inserted ourselves and shown how ridiculous the whole process was.

“When I was offered my next film – this was Driving Me Crazy – I said I was only going to stay and make it if I could film everything. It was about a Broadway show that had started to go bad. Often, when you take a big risk, those films work out the best. I refined the style when I did The Driver… which was about the extreme right in South Africa as Mandela took power.”

Of course, journalists and filmmakers have often put themselves on screen especially on TV like the 60 Minutes ‘roving reporter as hero’ thing…but your persona is…

“Oh, I was inept. Bumbling. Always getting into arguments. It was fun to make them.”

It can’t have been fun getting beaten up by the thugs of Right-Wing leader Eugène Ney Terre’Blanche in The Driver…?

“Well, no, that wasn’t fun, but it was funny. Normally, my films are about the subjects wanting to strangle the filmmaker.”

You went to the National Film School in the UK, where you were exposed to the British doco tradition of ‘balance’, ‘fairness’, ‘objectivity’… did you set out to smash that with your films?

“I think I thought it was a bit boring. And all that stuff about ‘balanced argument’? That was really boring. [Laughs].

“Filming is so much about your friendship with, or lack thereof with the person you are filming.

“In my approach, the audience is let in on what is really going on. They are part of the adventure. You get a more accurate portrait by allowing the audience to see more of the process in how the film was made.”

My Father and Me screens as part of the British Film Festival in most states from November 3 – December 1, 2021

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