Original-Cin Q&A: Director Nick Broomfield on Capturing History Through Rock Docs
By Liz Braun
Over 40-plus years and as many films, Nick Broomfield is firmly established in the pantheon of documentary filmmakers.
Initially regarded as a bit of shit-disturber — his first feature, Juvenile Liaison (1976) was banned for 15 years for what it showed about the Lancashire police treatment of young offenders — Broomfield, 75, went on to influence a generation of filmmakers through an experimental approach that came to be called performative or participatory documentary.
A scene from The Stones and Brian Jones.
His films have profiled an amazing assortment of characters — the difficult, the dangerous, and the misunderstood — from neo-Nazi leader Eugene Terreblanche and serial killer Aileen Wuornos to Courtney Love, Heidi Fleiss, Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur, and Whitney Houston.
Time and success have made him a sort of eminence grise of UK documentary, but Broomfield has never stopped being dynamic and original. Or controversial.
His latest movie is The Stones and Brian Jones, a terrific documentary about the beginnings of the Rolling Stones and the “swinging ‘60s” in London. Broomfield’s movie returns Brian Jones to his rightful spot in music history as the founder of the band, even as it examines the self-destructive tendencies that made Jones, a gifted musician, the first member of the “27 club” when he died in 1969.
We spoke to Broomfield via Zoom on the cusp of the new film’s release. Be sure to read our review of The Stones and Brian Jones.
ORIGINAL-CIN: Why this film and why now?
NICK BROOMFIELD: I guess I’ve been making films and looking at things that influenced me in my life. I am certainly telling more personal stories. I made Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love, and one about my father [My Father and Me, 2019] and so this was also something I felt very close to. Meeting Brian Jones was kind of a seminal moment for a 14-year-old in the 1960s. The film also gave me an opportunity to look at the ‘60s and the values of the ‘60s, which is the time that I grew up.
O-C: The ‘60s footage is impressive.
NB: Finding the archive was difficult. Finding an archive that hadn’t been seen before, a bit behind the scenes, and not staged, that was probably the hardest thing about this film. It took a long time.
O-C: Who was helpful, when it came to talk about Brian Jones?
NB: ZouZou was helpful. Linda Lawrence was very helpful. She lives with Donovan now and was obviously very close to Brian. Obviously, Bill Wyman was helpful, and so was Pat Andrews, who was another girlfriend of Brian’s.
Quite a lot of people in Cheltenham, where he grew up, were helpful — some of them actually had video footage — that wonderful footage of him on the boat, with one of his girlfriends, for example. The grammar school he’d been to, they’d done a school video we were able to get hold of that hadn’t really been seen before. All those kinds of things, they took time. Normally I do a film in a year, and this took two-and-a-half years.
O-C: Is there some emotional autobiography in telling Jones’ story?
Director Nick Broomfield
NB: I think the tension, the generation gap, and the parents born before the war and the kids born during or after the war — they had a very different sense of the lives they wanted, how they wanted to live their lives and what they were looking for.
Brian’s parents were professionals. The father designed jet engines and was a scientist and mathematician. Brian did well at grammar school, and they wanted him to go on to a profession, to be a doctor or lawyer, and the last thing they wanted was for him to be in a rock band.
They never really accepted that… I spoke to one of the neighbours, and he remembers Brian arriving back in a great big Rolls Royce and parking it outside the parents’ semi-detached house, but his parents were Welsh Baptists, quite puritan and hard working, and the excesses of Brian were not things they approved of.
O-C: Is there a list of films you still want to make?
NB: I’m one of these people who never knows what movie they’re going to do next. I look around and have an idea come to me that’s often completely different from what I have been doing. I never have much of a to-do list. I have a curiosity list.
O-C: A lot of your movies are about musicians — is it the music or the outsized personality that interests you?
NB: I guess a lot of them are an amazing vehicle to look at a complex situation. A lot of them reveal an intimate portrait of you know, parents and kids, the portrait of Whitney Houston, in that family, and their aspirations for her and her being unable to live up to the image Clive Davis had created for her. It was almost a Shakespearean story. I guess that’s what I look at with these things. And Brian’s relationships with his background and his family was the same kind of thing.
O-C: Each of the films is also an historical document, a capsule of the era.
NB: I hope they are. I find history fascinating. You can hope they will be viewed that way, as a record of a particular time with various iconic people.
