Nick Broomfield sees GHOSTS—and so should you

Q&A with the great British filmmaker. His 2006 film GHOSTS comes to San Francisco's Roxie on November 21.

I don’t often write about San Francisco-exclusive screenings or engagements, except, I’ll admit, for somewhat selfish reasons. If there’s something cinematic happening that I would absolutely get on a BART ticket or burn a Fastrack credit for, I have to imagine there’s another East Bay film geek who should know about it. Past examples include the Noir City festival at the Castro and a midnight screening at the Clay of A Boy and His Dog, with the director, L.Q. Jones, in person.

When I heard documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield was in town to promote the single screen release of his 2006 film, Ghosts, I jumped at the chance to get on the phone with him. I’ve been watching Broomfield’s films since the mid-1990s, when I checked out, somewhat randomly, his Oscar-nominated documentary Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam from a public library. Soon after that I saw Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer, Broomfield’s fascinating film about the character Charlize Theron would go on to play in Monster.

Over the years I’ve taken BART into the Roxie Theater, that bastion of independent cinema, to see Broomfield’s Kurt and Courtney, Biggie and Tupac, and Fetishes, a revealing peek into underground fetish clubs. Broomfield’s films are endlessly fascinating. Some audience members have found them irritating, as Broomfield often puts himself into the middle of the action, much like Michael Moore did famously in Roger and Me. I find Broomfield to be a very effective muckracker and a relentless journalist. If Broomfield is interested enough in a subject to make a film, I’m interested enough to watch it.

Ghosts is Broomfield’s first foray into the docudrama genre. (His second, Battle For Haditha, played at the Roxie earlier this year). Ghosts is a fictional film based on a true, tragic story about a group of Chinese immigrant workers, many of whom drowned in a horrific who after being smuggled into Britain died in a horrific. It’s a powerful piece of work and well worth a look—it opens at the Roxie Theater on November 21. Here’s what Nick Broomfield had to say about it, as well as some of his other films.

Diablo: I’m curious why you’ve shifted from documentaries to docudramas, and if the success of films like Paul Greengrass’s United 93 and Bloody Sunday had anything to do with this decision.
Broomfield: No, Bloody Sunday had some well-known actors, so it didn’t influence me as much as say (Michael Winterbottom’s 2002 film) In This World. I was interested in casting actors who had not acted before, but inhabited the world that the film is about.

Diablo: So more like the Italian neo-realist films of the 1940s, like Rome, Open City?
Broomfield: Well, yes, but that, and of course, Battle For Algiers, are amazing films, but they were shot on film. I don’t think I could have made Ghosts that way. I don’t think In This World could be made that way. We shot this on HD, so we could get very long takes, without cuts to improvise a more realistic feel.

Ghosts re-creates a horrific incident, in which more than 20 Chinese immigrants drowned at Morecambe Bay. Did you shoot on the actual locations that this tragedy occurred?
Yes, the final sequence was shot partly in Morecambe Bay, and part of it in Wales. Morecambe Bay is such a terrifying place, we could not film entirely there and keep the actors safe.

What precautions were taken to keep the actors safe? They are standing on the top of a van that’s being quickly submerged in water…I was worried about them!
We had the coast guard and a whole lot of underwater divers in wet suits and crew in big rubber boats with motors. Still, we lost the white truck there, it ended up in too much water.

How did you cast the film? You said you wanted to use non-actors exclusively.
Yes, I wanted to use non-actors, people who had actually experienced what the film what was about. The average casting director wouldn’t be able to tell you who to cast as an immigrant farm worker because they only see professional actors. So, we had to go to places like the Chinese church in London and spoke to people there. That’s where we found Ai Qin Lin, who I cast as the main character in the film. She really did come over from China and really does have a young son back in China. She was ideal for that part.

How did you research this story? I couldn’t tell if Ai Qin is supposed to be an actual person from the Morecambe Bay incident, or more of a composite tale of a migrant worker.
A lot of the scenes in the film are based on undercover work that a journalist named Hsiao-Hung Pai did researching the Morecambe Bay story. But I did a lot of undercover work myself, learning firsthand what the migrant workers lives are like. I picked onions in a field. There were 10 of us to a room, we were getting up at 4:30 in the morning, working 14 hours a day. I pride myself on being physically fit and being a hard worker, but had never experienced anything quite like this. It was quite an experience. So the characters are based on some of the people I met, some of the people Ai Qin met.

You made films about such a wide range of topics: Aileen Wuornos, Heidi Fleiss, Tupac Shakur, the battle of Haditha. When do you decide, ‘OK, that’s this is the next topic for a Nick Broomfield film’?
I’ve had the sort of rare luck to initiate my own projects, to do things I really want to do. For me, it’s about finding out more about the world we live in. I guess you just get a hunch of something that you’re interested in, it’s an odd curiosity. It creates an insatiable curiosity: I really want to know about that. You just start digging and digging, and you end up making the film.

Before I started making this film. I assumed that slavery had finished. We think of slavery as people with chains around them, in a field picking cotton or something. But there’s something called modern day slavery, and they don’t have chains on, but they owe an amazing amount of money. It costs something like $30,000 for each person to get smuggled to England or the United States. They have no civil rights. There are millions of these people worldwide.

So, I quickly I realized I did not know anything about the topic. I naively thought of England and America as civilized countries that would not have modern slavery. We pride ourselves on having labor lives, and safety conditions, but in the last 20 years all that has completely changed. In the US there are something like 15 million illegal workers, many of whom are living in conditions of complete slavery.

The immigration issues in this film certainly are not unique to Britain. For example, there’s a reference to a sex/massage parlor that Ai Qin could work at to pay off this huge debt she owes for being smuggled into the country. There are similar massage parlors right here in Walnut Creek, a quiet, safe Bay Area suburb. And I drive by a Home Depot everyday, where workers wait out on the sidewalk for someone to come along and offer some kind of labor.

Of course. You know, all those people you hear who complain about illegal workers, I’d recommend that they go do that work for a few days, picking vegetables. It will completely change their perspective. I guarantee it.

Onto another film, actually two of them: the Aileen Wuornos documentaries. I’m curious, since you knew Aileen, and were one of the last people to speak with her before she was executed, what it was like to see her dramatized in the film Monster—by an incredibly glamorous movie star, Charlize Theron, who went on to win the Oscar for her performance.

It was helped by the fact that Charlize is a friend of mine. I felt a little bit involved in that whole story, the production of Monster. Charlize’s performance was really quite fantastic. I was dreading looking at it, but I remember feeling really impressed by her. You have to remind yourself that you’re not actually watching the real thing, you’re watching a portrayal of it. That made it was slightly easier to watch, than watching Aileen herself.

But the real Aileen Wuornos … I found the second film with her incredibly affecting. I felt incredibly conflicted and upset by what I had experienced, and I needed a break after it.

Your films have had a profound impact on me: I still quote Fetishes from time to time, that guy who blurts out, “An ashtray can’t talk!” And I used to live just down the street from that J&J Beeper store in Los Angeles from the Heidi Fleiss film. Which of your films do you get the most questions about?
You know, they all have quite healthy lives. I’m currently remastering all the films and converting them to HD and Blue Ray, so I’m bringing out box set of them in a few years. There’s a real

A film like Ghosts, while powerful and absorbing, is a tough sell as “Friday night at the movies” in its entertainment factor, as opposed to the new James Bond film or the teenage vampire movie that comes out this week. Even though you have a great track record, is it hard to get funding and distribution for projects like this?
It’s really hard. A lot of the traditional filmgoers, for places like the Roxie, would be university students and film buffs. I think cinema has sort of a dwindling audience, in general. People are turning to places like iTunes or Netflix, rather than going to the cinema.

I do like Netflix, but there’s something about the shared experience of seeing something like your Aileen Wuornos films or Adam Curtis’s The Power of Nightmares at the Roxie—hearing people laugh, or gasp, in surprise at those films. How important are independent theaters like the Roxie in today’s day and age?
Well, first, it’s a great pity that seems to be changing so much, that people are choosing Netflix over going to the cinema. The Roxie still shows a lot of things in a quality format that you simply don’t get on your phone or on a computer. That’s a fantastic benefit. And I think the shared experience, that people can talk about the film after they have experienced it. The exciting thing about a shared experience is that live audience reaction. That’s an important thing.
 

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