Nick Broomfield

Nick Broomfield is an award-winning documentary filmmaker. Over a career spanning more than five decades, he has made acclaimed films on subjects ranging from serial killer Aileen Wuornos and the deaths of Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur, to Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, Whitney Houston, and South African politics. He later expanded into what he calls “Direct Cinema,” using non-actors in scripted dramas such as Ghosts and Battle for Haditha to explore social and political fault lines with documentary immediacy. His experimental and investigative work has earned major honors, including a Sundance First Prize, a British Academy Award, and the DuPont-Columbia Award for Outstanding Journalism. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Athletic Nicotine https://www. AthleticNicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Squarespace https://Squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://DrinkLMNT.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Rick Rubin?

  Tetragrammaton.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  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 Glazer. And the first thing he did was ask how much I was going to pay. And I remembered there 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...

• 1:09Rick Rubin?

  Was that your first film in the US?

• 1:12Speaker 01

  No, The Lily Tomlin was, yeah. And I did Tattooed Tears as well. So I had this phone conversation with Steve Glazer and then thought, this was a really interesting way in.

• 1:24Rick Rubin?

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

• 1:28Speaker 01

  He is. He is, you know, and he's a 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.

• 1:52Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  But Eileen loved Steve, you know, because he amused her and 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?

• 2:11Rick Rubin?

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

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, he says this to someone who's going to the electric. Don't sit down, you know, and he 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.

• 2:31Rick Rubin?

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

• 2:38Speaker 01

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

• 2:45Rick Rubin?

  Was it your first time in Florida?

• 2:47Speaker 01

  My first time in Florida, yeah.

• 2:48Rick Rubin?

  What was that experience like?

• 2:50Speaker 01

  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 it was very difficult to get to Eileen.

• 3:23Rick Rubin?

  She was in prison at the time?

• 3:24Speaker 01

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

• 3:29Rick Rubin?

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

• 3:34Speaker 01

  It's tricky. A lot of it comes down to your actual personal relationship with the governor of the prison.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  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 Broward, we were finished.

• 4:21Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, secondhand smoke.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  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, 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, and we were suddenly like one of them. That's really interesting, though. It was really interesting. So Eileen loved us right from the beginning.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  Because you were outlaws. We were outlaws. We were like stars. We were like, she thought we were going to be performing as a band in the prison that night. And I kept saying, Eileen, you know, we're like really boring. We're 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. How often would you get to speak to her? Well, over the years, I, 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. She had a lot of time.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  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 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. Yeah. And they really could have helped Eileen. But she just was so different. They were so different. What was she in jail for? She was in jail for seven murders. Seven murders? Yeah. She was in jail.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  And was it clear that she did those murders? Yeah, it was clear. But what was unsure was whether or not the first person she murdered was a guy called Richard Manory, who was a serial sex offender.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  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 robbing and not leaving a witness behind.

• 7:30Rick Rubin?

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

• 7:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:15Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  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 her final appeal before execution, which is when I started making a second film.

• 8:41Rick Rubin?

  How many years later was that?

• 8:43Speaker 01

  About ten or twelve, I think.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  So I felt very, very involved in that particular story, her life.

• 8:54Rick Rubin?

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

• 8:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:05Rick Rubin?

  Really?

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:07Rick Rubin?

  What are the odds?

• 9:08Speaker 01

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

• 9:13Rick Rubin?

  And there was the movie Monster.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  Which was, yeah, exactly.

• 9:16Rick Rubin?

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

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And I gave Charlize a whole lot of, you know, films and rushes and stuff that I had, which I guess she helped to 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

• 10:03Speaker 01

  people who were in the army or, you know, people on some of these other films, you know, musicians or...

• 10:12Rick Rubin?

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

• 10:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 10:40Rick Rubin?

  How did you come to making documentaries?

• 10:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  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 liked that kind of visual form and the ability to enter completely different worlds and cultures and absorb them.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  And it was like learning properly. Yeah. Not looking at a book, but interacting with people and being aware that things are 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

• 12:39Speaker 01

  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.

• 13:09Rick Rubin?

  I love the idea of the camera was the thing that allowed you to speak to people. In most cases, the documentarians 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.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:29Rick Rubin?

  And that was just a fascinating thing. I'd never seen anything like that before.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  I found I've learnt 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.

• 13:59Rick Rubin?

  I love Lily Tomlin.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  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 Life in the Universe. But right from the beginning, there were a lot of problems.

• 14:24Rick Rubin?

  Like what?

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Lily is a great artist and was sort of at the height of her success.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  But she was incredibly insecure.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  And so we would go on the road with her to try to 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.

• 15:02Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  And she.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Was extremely troubled. And it kind of got worse and worse, really.

• 15:12Rick Rubin?

  Did she invite you to film?

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, she did. We had a mutual friend, which was the doctor. This wonderful old doctor called Elsie Georgie. He 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 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.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  But we had none of the angst, that real angst, the sort of paranoia, the...

• 16:02Rick Rubin?

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

• 16:07Speaker 01

  Exactly. And in a way makes you love Lily even more.

• 16:11Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 16:35Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  As against a sort of, so we did this and then we did that.

• 16:39Rick Rubin?

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

• 16:47Speaker 01

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

• 16:55Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  And breaking the fourth wall.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  You know, breaking the fourth wall is a big thing.

• 17:01Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  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 than what they do. And the trouble is, we were playing the old traditional game.

• 17:30Rick Rubin?

  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.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  Because, you know, at the moment, I think documentaries have 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 Weisman and Penny Baker 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.

• 18:59Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. The formats become cookie cutter in some ways.

• 19:03Speaker 01

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

• 19:07Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  Because they kind of know what they're gonna get. And I think people would have so loved Lily.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Had we shown the horrors that she was going through.

• 19:21Rick Rubin?

  Her vulnerable self.

• 19:22Speaker 01

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

• 19:32Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:42Rick Rubin?

  Which was your only intention, yes?

• 19:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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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• 22:01Rick Rubin?

  What's the first of your movies where you appear in the movie?

• 22:07Speaker 01

  I think probably in terms of accessible, there's a film I made called The Leader, The Driver, and The Driver's Wife.

• 22:14Rick Rubin?

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

• 22:16Speaker 01

  Well, it was in South Africa.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  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 Venterstok. And he had a bunch of, you know, 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.

• 23:01Rick Rubin?

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

• 23:05Speaker 01

  He effectively ran the town. He was murdered hideously a few years later.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  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 Tblanch 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 Ventestor.

• 23:42Rick Rubin?

  How did you find out about the story? Was it something well-known in Britain at the time or no?

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Not really, no. I had read an article about Tblanch. And we'd actually gone to South Africa to make an entirely different film.

• 23:59Rick Rubin?

  What was the one you were planning to make?

• 24:01Speaker 01

  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 going to 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

• 24:46Speaker 01

  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 Tblanch and.

• 25:03Rick Rubin?

  What do you remember from the article?

• 25:05Speaker 01

  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 Sturm.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  It sounds crazy. Yeah, it's kind of crazy, crazy. Was this a place where everybody rode horses? Quite a lot of people rode horses, but he,

• 25:52Speaker 01

  you know, he was a Boer from a Boer family, you know, and they, well, they regarded themselves as the founders of South Africa. They had these ox carts and so the horse was part of that mystique. And, you know, we just drove to Venderstorp to see what it was like. And one of the meetings was happening, you know, where he was there and there were all the people doing the Hitler salute. Wow. And he gave this, well, we didn't understand much of it because 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.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  We didn't really have permission and partway through it, one of the audience got up and actually knocked the cameraman out. Your cameraman? Yeah, my cameraman, you know, who ended up on the floor. And I think it was that action that made the driver, who was Tblanch's personal driver, drove him around to all these things, who was 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.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  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 Tblanch really didn't like me very much at all. How could he not like you?

• 27:39Speaker 01

  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, and leave. Yeah. 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, you know, he didn't take us seriously at all and would have these incredible explosions in front of us. And, you know.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  It was kind of like a black comedy about the white right, really. And I think we all learnt an amazing amount doing the film. And it was a very different style for English television at that point. You made it for BBC? I made it for Channel Four. 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.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  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. How was the film received? Yeah, it was received, you know, incredibly well.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  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 Tbilan and Up, which was regarded as, you know, him being a traitor to the Boer people and so on.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  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 Tablange, 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.

• 30:52Rick Rubin?

  So what were your takeaways after that experience?

• 30:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 31:30Rick Rubin?

  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.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  I felt if one could try and mirror the experience of making the film to an audience who had probably never encountered 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.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  And so I feel if the audience have that information, you know, maybe they don't like you, the filmmaker, but they can approximate what it would be like to have a relationship with the subject in the film.

• 32:42Rick Rubin?

  The first film of yours that I saw was the Heidi Fleiss movie.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:48Rick Rubin?

  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.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  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 wear.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  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,

• 34:16Speaker 01

  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 Yvon Nage, who curiously had been a film student with my film professor.

• 34:39Rick Rubin?

  Really?

• 34:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:40Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 34:41Speaker 01

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

• 34:55Rick Rubin?

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

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:05Rick Rubin?

  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.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  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 Nage 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,

• 36:01Speaker 01

  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 an 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.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  He would put a hosepipe through her letterbox into her house, you know, sort of flooding the whole bottom of the house. And then, I think they were responsible for each other going to prison. It's such a bizarre story. Yeah, I was like, of course, I had no idea. How could you? How could anybody? When he 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, 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

• 37:28Speaker 01

  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, 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, because 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.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  You know, and she's highly intelligent, Heidi, now living with these birds in Perump in the desert.

• 38:23Speaker 03

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• 39:51Rick Rubin?

  What was the first of the music films you did?

• 39:55Speaker 01

  Probably Kurt and Courtney, yeah.

• 39:57Rick Rubin?

  How did Kurt and Courtney come about?

• 40:01Speaker 01

  I think that came from you.

• 40:03Rick Rubin?

  I don't think it came from me.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  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

• 40:19Rick Rubin?

  Oh, yeah.

• 40:20Speaker 01

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

• 40:35Rick Rubin?

  High Times?

• 40:36Speaker 01

  Maybe it was High Times. And there was a really interesting article in there about Kurt and Courtney, which I read and thought, this is indeed an interesting story. And then I went up to Portland and Seattle

• 40:57Speaker 01

  and started making that film,

• 41:00Speaker 01

  which was very much a, not at all a traditional music film.

• 41:08Rick Rubin?

  Did you go in knowing anything at all?

• 41:10Speaker 01

  I went in really knowing nothing.

• 41:13Rick Rubin?

  Do you remember who you talked to first?

• 41:15Speaker 01

  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?

• 41:31Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  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. And then in Seattle, too.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  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 it, it was a pretty depressed subculture, I think. It was very wet when we were there, but it was kind of dark in a way.

• 42:52Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 42:53Speaker 01

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

• 43:00Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 43:02Speaker 01

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

• 43:14Rick Rubin?

  Why was that?

• 43:16Speaker 01

  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, the cameraman that I worked with, who also shot a lot of Ken Loach's films and actually he's done a couple of films with Charlize now.

• 43:39Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  He's a really amazing cameraman. I remember when I said, 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.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  I always remember his words, they were, I think without Rita, I'm not psychologically equipped to deal with you on this shoot.

• 44:07Rick Rubin?

  That's great.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, isn't it?

• 44:09Rick Rubin?

  Real vote of confidence.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, because Rita was the sanity in these often insane films.

• 44:17Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  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 loved my films and, you know, I said, okay, come along, you know. And then he had a friend who, I remember one morning going into that room

• 44:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 45:14Rick Rubin?

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

• 45:22Speaker 01

  Yes, I think.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  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 going to give you the sort of

• 45:42Speaker 01

  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 Soldier Girls. What's that one? That was a film that Joan Cheshn and I did in Georgia. And it was basically about following women through basic training.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  And there was this really tough drill sergeant called Sergeant Abing, who... Woman or man? He was a man. I see. But the rest, the platoon, was women. And it was in Fort Gordon. And Abing 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 then we discovered that he wrote poetry.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  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, you know, really worried about these women who, he said, you know, 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, you know, these are all little gang bangers and, you know, 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.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  So you saw this kind of ruthlessness that he had was, there was a lot of caring. It was like a tough love kind of thing, what you're describing. It was really like a tough love. And then, you know, one would see him with all these various characters. And then I remember 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. I think he'd just been through so much.

• 47:58Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  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.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  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 Abing had put his Purple Heart

• 48:59Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  in the suitcase, you know. So you could have these, you know, incredibly profound relationships with people, you know, you touch each, yeah.

• 49:12Rick Rubin?

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

• 49:14Speaker 01

  No.

• 49:15Rick Rubin?

  Has your work ever been banned or censored?

• 49:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, quite a lot.

• 49:23Rick Rubin?

  Give me an example.

• 49:25Speaker 01

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

• 49:31Rick Rubin?

  What's that?

• 49:32Speaker 01

  It was a scheme that the police had in Blackburn, Lancashire.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  You probably know Blackburn from the

• 49:41Rick Rubin?

  Beatles song.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  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 were disciplined problems. And we, we shot this film for a few weeks. It was just very standard cinema verite.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  But some pretty extreme things happened in it. You know, 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.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  And the police managed to get the film banned.

• 51:03Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 51:22Rick Rubin?

  Terrible.

• 51:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 51:38Rick Rubin?

  Just blame people.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  And blame people.

• 51:39Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:41Rick Rubin?

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

• 51:44Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 51:45Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  And obviously, you as the filmmaker, take a certain responsibility for, especially those people who've been obliging and you've 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, in England. And then lots of lawsuits.

• 52:13Rick Rubin?

  What are the kind of lawsuits?

• 52:16Speaker 01

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

• 52:21Rick Rubin?

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

• 52:28Speaker 01

  No, we started from the beginning.

• 52:29Rick Rubin?

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

• 52:32Speaker 01

  Well, I had 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 or something. 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-

• 52:58Rick Rubin?

  How long was this after her passing?

• 53:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 53:21Rick Rubin?

  That's a good story.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  Not even her music. Yeah, yeah.

• 53:25Rick Rubin?

  And then what's the first thing you do after that?

• 53:28Speaker 01

  Well, sort of tried to at least listen to the music

• 53:35Speaker 01

  and get someone to tell me something about the story.

• 53:40Rick Rubin?

  Who were the characters in that story?

• 53:42Speaker 01

  Well, it was, I guess Bobby Brown, her parents, Sissy, her mother, the conflict with the father, her brothers who had turned her on to crack, Bobby Brown, who had been blamed for turning her on to crack, but had in fact not. And then Clive Davis.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  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,

• 54:27Speaker 01

  was then kind of disparaged and looked down on and had this terrible legacy of Whitney Houston when she was an entirely different person. Wow. Who had grown up in Newark, which at that time was pretty tough, and was also supporting this enormous family of dependents who all kept her on the road and kept her playing, even though she really didn't want to and her voice was damaged and 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.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  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 a hold of this guy called Rudy Dolletzol, who had indeed shot with Whitney for a year. The footage had never come out. Wow. We bought this other film. What was that footage like? It was pretty beautiful. It was beautifully shot. It was great footage, but it lacked the story. Often you can have great footage,

• 55:56Speaker 01

  but if you have a story, there's no context. Yeah, it was incredibly helpful. And I remember, you know, we called it Whitney, Can I Be Me?

• 56:10Speaker 01

  And I think.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  She had a strong sense of who she was. She used to be called Nippi when she was growing up. And all her close friends called her Nippi, which was completely different from Whitney, the Clive Davis creation.

• 56:28Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  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-

• 56:43Rick Rubin?

  Music she liked.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  Black music.

• 56:45Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 57:27Rick Rubin?

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

• 57:33Speaker 01

  I hope so.

• 57:34Rick Rubin?

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

• 57:41Speaker 01

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

• 57:53Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  And everyone is full of blemishes, which I don't know. I mean, I don't think it's interesting to-

• 58:04Speaker 01

  Tell stories that don't have contradictions or don't have different views of that person.

• 58:12Rick Rubin?

  It's not what life is like.

• 58:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:14Rick Rubin?

  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.

• 58:22Speaker 01

  Hmm. And I guess newspaper articles, maybe someone gets a week or two.

• 58:29Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  Documentaries, you sometimes get the better part of a year.

• 58:33Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 58:34Speaker 01

  So you can go into things in real depth. And I think it's the gray areas that are often much more interesting than than anything else. Like with de Blanche's driver, who would come out with the most incredible racist statements that would kind of make your hair stand up and then, at the same time, was an incredibly kind, endearing person who, I think, had known nothing else when he'd been growing up, you know.

• 59:09Rick Rubin?

  Was the Whitney movie the first one that used a lot of archival footage?

• 59:14Speaker 01

  It was, actually.

• 59:15Rick Rubin?

  From a technical standpoint, how was that different?

• 59:19Speaker 01

  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'll 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.

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  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 peace of the editing room.

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And being able to have a sort of disciplined day. It was probably much longer edit than usual. 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.

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  Interesting, but, you know, kind of frustrating to work with.

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• 1:02:58Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about Biggie and Tupac.

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  Biggie and Tupac?

• 1:03:03Rick Rubin?

  What made you want to make that film?

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  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

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  by these LAPD police officers who had an allegiance with Suge Knight and Death Row Records. And I met with him a few times.

• 1:03:41Rick Rubin?

  Where did you hear that story?

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

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

• 1:03:49Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  And then I went and met with him a few times. And then also met with Biggie's mom, Valletta, at the beginning,

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  who was very anxious to get to the bottom of who had killed her son.

• 1:04:09Rick Rubin?

  At that point in time, no one knew anything?

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

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

• 1:04:17Rick Rubin?

  And what happened next?

• 1:04:20Speaker 01

  What Channel 4 put the money up for is, 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.

• 1:04:40Rick Rubin?

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

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  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,

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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,

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  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 in complete tragedy.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  Both of their talents were manipulated for other reasons.

• 1:06:54Rick Rubin?

  You originally wanted to make a film about the LAPD.

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:06:58Rick Rubin?

  Did the LAPD piece of the story become a big part of the story?

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  Well, yes. Well, then there were these three police officers. David Mack, Rafael Perez, and this guy called Elijah Mohammed 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 Shug 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.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  So they were kind of up to their neck in 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 and...

• 1:08:21Rick Rubin?

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

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  A lot of the Tupac stuff was from his friends, his family. Same with Biggie.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  You know, there were friends of his who had shot material. But it's a real time-consuming needle in the haystack time. Yeah, it's a lot of people who claim to have stuff that they haven't gotten. 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.

• 1:09:06Rick Rubin?

  Did you get to interview Shug?

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:09:09Rick Rubin?

  How was that?

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

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

• 1:09:18Rick Rubin?

  And you got permission to film him in prison?

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

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

• 1:09:25Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  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 like, you're 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 in? All this horrible stuff. So anyway, we got there and you had to sign a waiver, I remember,

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  saying that if you, in the unlikely event that you were taken a hostage,

• 1:10:18Speaker 01

  that you had no objection to your kneecaps being shot out. No kidding.

• 1:10:23Rick Rubin?

  You have to sign that for real?

• 1:10:24Speaker 01

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

• 1:10:30Rick Rubin?

  You signed it happily?

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  Well, I just thought 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 Shug Knight. And he said, oh, fine, you know. So he took us to Shug's cell.

• 1:10:55Rick Rubin?

  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.

• 1:11:02Speaker 01

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

• 1:11:09Rick Rubin?

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

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

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

• 1:11:19Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  And, you know, he took us, Shug was on the phone at the time.

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  I said, oh, shall I go and I'll go and ask him, you know. And Super says, no, no, no, no, I think I might have more luck. You know, I think Shub was trying to get on parole or something.

• 1:11:38Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 1:11:39Speaker 01

  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 he, we do an interview with him outside.

• 1:12:01Rick Rubin?

  Is he smoking the cigar?

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  Smoking the cigar.

• 1:12:03Rick Rubin?

  Amazing, in prison?

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:05Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  In the prison. And he obviously could make as many phone calls as he, 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.

• 1:12:22Rick Rubin?

  Is he in prison now?

• 1:12:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:24Rick Rubin?

  I wasn't aware.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  He, I think he was sentenced for murder. You know, he, he knocked that guy down with his car and stuff.

• 1:12:33Rick Rubin?

  I don't know the story. So you interview him smoking a cigar outside and was it illuminating?

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  Well, I think the circumstances of the interview were illuminating. You know, he, he said, I want to talk about the murder of Biggie or right up front. But he said, I want to give a message to the kids. And then he came up 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.

• 1:13:25Speaker 01

  And, you know, he, he talked about Snoop being a snitch and that snitches got killed and all that kind of stuff, you know, but he was, I wouldn't say it was one of the finest interviews, but it was very telling, the circumstance of it. And it was frightening to be there, actually, you know. He's a 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.

• 1:14:09Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:14:10Speaker 01

  So the film, you know, was sort of, well, I think it was a good portrait of the Big E and Supak thing, but inconclusive in that the LAPD have never, it's still unresolved, you know.

• 1:14:28Rick Rubin?

  It's unresolved in the movie, is it still unresolved to this day?

• 1:14:31Speaker 01

  It is.

• 1:14:32Rick Rubin?

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

• 1:14:39Speaker 01

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

• 1:14:49Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  In that particular situation.

• 1:14:52Rick Rubin?

  Are all documentaries that about a particular moment in time? It's not, it's not a biography, it's something else.

• 1:15:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:15:29Rick Rubin?

  Why do you think?

• 1:15:30Speaker 01

  I think things are much tighter. I think there was a sort of magical notion of the freedom of the press, which was super respected, particularly in this country, you know, when I first came here.

• 1:15:48Speaker 01

  And I don't think that exists anymore.

• 1:15:52Rick Rubin?

  When you think it changed.

• 1:15:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:16:16Rick Rubin?

  Al Jazeera.

• 1:16:17Speaker 01

  Al Jazeera.

• 1:16:18Rick Rubin?

  Was bombed?

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh yeah.

• 1:16:20Rick Rubin?

  I don't know this.

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

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

• 1:16:34Rick Rubin?

  I think Julian Assange as well.

• 1:16:37Speaker 01

  Exactly, that and the other guy.

• 1:16:40Rick Rubin?

  Snowden.

• 1:16:41Speaker 01

  Snowden.

• 1:16:42Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:43Speaker 01

  You know, and now there's. The whole fake news thing has made everyone crazy.

• 1:16:52Rick Rubin?

  What was tracking down Maggie?

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  That was. By the time Margaret Thatcher was forced to resign.

• 1:17:02Rick Rubin?

  I don't know anything about Margaret Thatcher. In America, we're not taught to look past the boundaries of.

• 1:17:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:17:09Rick Rubin?

  This country.

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  Well, she was best friends with Ronald Reagan. And the same way that Ronald Reagan was deified by the Republican Party,

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  Margaret Thatcher was by the Conservative Party. It was a sort of all out reevaluation of the sort of paternalistic policies of following the Second World War, of building a home for heroes and

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  the state's obligation to the workers and so on. She reevaluated all that, completely changed it.

• 1:17:48Rick Rubin?

  Did it impact everyday people's lives?

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:52Rick Rubin?

  In what ways?

• 1:17:52Speaker 01

  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 clothes shop illegal and.

• 1:18:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:18:22Rick Rubin?

  Was she popular or unpopular in Britain?

• 1:18:24Speaker 01

  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 and, you know.

• 1:18:45Rick Rubin?

  That seems like a security risk.

• 1:18:47Speaker 01

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

• 1:18:50Rick Rubin?

  No, but still, it's like a.

• 1:18:51Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:18:52Rick Rubin?

  It tells you something's wrong if you can.

• 1:18:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:18:55Rick Rubin?

  If you can get that information.

• 1:18:57Speaker 01

  And so we sort of evaluated her, who she was and what she had 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.

• 1:19:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:20:01Rick Rubin?

  Was this for Channel Four as well?

• 1:20:03Speaker 01

  This was for Channel Four, yeah.

• 1:20:04Rick Rubin?

  How was that film received?

• 1:20:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:20:25Rick Rubin?

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

• 1:20:33Speaker 01

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

• 1:20:43Rick Rubin?

  And it was not possible to get?

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:20:56Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  In a way that, I think if we hadn't got Shug 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, you know, 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 Kurt and Courtney, there were all these allegations about Courtney. And it was a nightmare getting up at the ACLU dinner,

• 1:21:41Speaker 01

  saying, should you really be awarding Courtney this prize when she's...

• 1:21:48Rick Rubin?

  You did that?

• 1:21:49Speaker 01

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

• 1:22:03Rick Rubin?

  You had not talked to Courtney yet?

• 1:22:06Speaker 01

  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 gonna say. I think I said, I don't want to be a party poop. But, you know, Hollywood sometimes has a problem of distinguishing between fact and fiction.

• 1:22:50Speaker 01

  And it was giving the torture freedom.

• 1:22:54Speaker 01

  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, because 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. Kind of, you know, anyway, he came up and. Were you arrested?

• 1:23:36Speaker 01

  He kind of literally manhandled me off the stage. I see. Just a person in the audience? No, he was the host. I see. Of this. Not a security guard? 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 there. 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, but 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. It sounds horrible. Horrible. And I remember I had this very gorgeous girlfriend at the time, Belgian,

• 1:24:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:24:28Speaker 01

  And I was like, so shamed. I finally got up and did it, right? You know, 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 and?

• 1:24:49Speaker 01

  Didn't know it was me at all. Didn't hear about that idiot who got off and did it, you know. And I said, Dan, it was me. And he went, no, no.

• 1:25:01Rick Rubin?

  I was that idiot.

• 1:25:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was that idiot. That was me. Yeah. Anyway, yeah.

• 1:25:07Rick Rubin?

  That's amazing.

• 1:25:08Speaker 01

  But I did have the ending. I then had the ending.

• 1:25:12Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:25:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:25:25Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:26Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:25:26Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:25:47Rick Rubin?

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

• 1:25:53Speaker 01

  I guess I feel you get one shot, really.

• 1:25:56Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:57Speaker 01

  You're not going to 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.

• 1:26:38Rick Rubin?

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

• 1:26:41Speaker 01

  I think so. I think some of my films, the later films, have been 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 obviously.

• 1:27:07Rick Rubin?

  I hope so.

• 1:27:08Speaker 01

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

• 1:27:20Rick Rubin?

  What is direct cinema?

• 1:27:23Speaker 01

  I made this big feature when I was just starting it. 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

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:28:30Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:28:31Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:28:49Rick Rubin?

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

• 1:28:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:54Rick Rubin?

  That's interesting.

• 1:28:55Speaker 01

  Because they were basically

• 1:28:56Rick Rubin?

  Non-actors.

• 1:28:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:29:10Speaker 01

  Often with the grandparents, their kids, some of which they'd never see again because.

• 1:29:16Rick Rubin?

  Was it like a version of slavery?

• 1:29:18Speaker 01

  Slave labor, really.

• 1:29:19Rick Rubin?

  Really?

• 1:29:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:20Rick Rubin?

  When was this?

• 1:29:22Speaker 01

  I did that in, I think about 2005.

• 1:29:26Rick Rubin?

  And this was happening in Britain in 2005?

• 1:29:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:30Rick Rubin?

  Still happening?

• 1:29:31Speaker 01

  I would imagine.

• 1:29:32Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:29:33Speaker 01

  I would imagine. And you get incredibly powerful performances because they're kind of not performances because

• 1:29:44Speaker 01

  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 doesn't have their kid.

• 1:29:54Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:55Speaker 01

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

• 1:30:01Rick Rubin?

  What's a gang master?

• 1:30:03Speaker 01

  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 you know, runs the house.

• 1:30:24Speaker 01

  And then I did the same thing in 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.

• 1:30:54Rick Rubin?

  Why?

• 1:30:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:31:22Speaker 01

  Where they had basically, the American army had said, "Everybody's got to leave this town by such and such a time. If they don't, we'll kill everybody in the town," which they're done. So Kilo 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, you know, there were kids and old people and they were all killed.

• 1:32:04Speaker 01

  And they claimed that there'd been shots fired from the houses. But it was a complex story, really, because, you know, most of these Marines were seventeen or eighteen. You know, they were...

• 1:32:19Rick Rubin?

  Kids themselves.

• 1:32:20Speaker 01

  They were kids. And they had been trained in a particular way to react, kind of zombie-like.

• 1:32:29Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:29Speaker 01

  You know, so we got the Marines to basically act out how they'd been. And we built barracks for them. And then we recreated this little hamlet of houses.

• 1:32:45Rick Rubin?

  How did they feel about recreating something like this?

• 1:32:50Speaker 01

  Absolutely okay.

• 1:32:51Rick Rubin?

  Really?

• 1:32:52Speaker 01

  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 later.

• 1:33:14Rick Rubin?

  They killed the enemy and spared one.

• 1:33:17Speaker 01

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

• 1:33:25Rick Rubin?

  It really is showing the problems with the system.

• 1:33:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:31Rick Rubin?

  The villains were not the killers in this case.

• 1:33:33Speaker 01

  No, they were absolutely not.

• 1:33:35Rick Rubin?

  It was the system that created the situation.

• 1:33:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then, you know, the villagers were caught in between the terrorists who were laying the IEDs and the American army. You know, 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, they would see it happening. And then, of course, the Marines would be furious that they didn't tell them and that one of their number had been blown in half.

• 1:34:18Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:19Speaker 01

  So we did that. I was very pleased with the outcome on the incredible. It was very emotional, very, you know.

• 1:34:28Rick Rubin?

  Where did that show?

• 1:34:30Speaker 01

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

• 1:34:37Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:38Speaker 01

  In cinemas and stuff. We had a screening at The Arrow. And I remember the manager, it was a fistfight at the end of the.

• 1:34:46Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:34:47Speaker 01

  Some of the Marines were there and the people were so, you know, patriotically not believing this could happen.

• 1:34:59Rick Rubin?

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

• 1:35:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:35:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:35:56Rick Rubin?

  Do you think of yourself as an investigator?

• 1:36:00Speaker 01

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

• 1:36:06Rick Rubin?

  Bumbling.

• 1:36:07Speaker 01

  Bumbling around, yeah.

• 1:36:09Rick Rubin?

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

• 1:36:15Speaker 01

  Well, the model I used for a long time was the British TV stations are 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.

• 1:37:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:37:12Speaker 01

  Which you're gonna 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 upfront.

• 1:37:32Rick Rubin?

  And from British television, they would not fund the whole film.

• 1:37:36Speaker 01

  It's too expensive.

• 1:37:37Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 1:37:38Speaker 01

  I mean, particularly if there's archive of music. I think you're probably lucky in the UK with a documentary getting, I don't know, four, five hundred thousand pounds, which is probably eight hundred thousand dollars. Whereas, you know, you probably need double or triple that, probably.

• 1:37:59Rick Rubin?

  Hasn't technology brought down the cost of making things, or no?

• 1:38:04Speaker 01

  No, because you spend more time in post.

• 1:38:07Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 1:38:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:38:27Rick Rubin?

  The films you make change you.

• 1:38:31Speaker 01

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

• 1:39:41Speaker 05

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• 1:39:55Speaker 06

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