Nick Broomfield is as passionate as ever about documentaries, even if making them has drained him. He tells Shane Hegarty about Eugene Terre'Blanche, Aileen Wuornos and Lynndie England
Nick Broomfield is worried we might get a little tired of him. "I hope you didn't find the book horribly boring and self-indulgent," he says of Documenting Icons. "I sort of enjoyed doing it, but then I thought people are going to be falling asleep in their thousands when they read this. It'll be sold for people who can't sleep at night."
It's a surprise to find Broomfield suddenly coming over all shy. When he tells a story he is inevitably a central part of it. He was influential in making the documentary form both a serious moneymaker and popular entertainment, but he may always be remembered as the one who put filmmakers on the screen. Watch Michael Moore lumber across a shot, Morgan Spurlock vomit burgers or Louis Theroux act hurt when Paul Daniels avoids him, and somewhere deep in the shadows is the influence of Broomfield.
He has made sometimes extraordinary documentaries on a range of characters, including Margaret Thatcher, the dead rappers Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur, the rock stars Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, the Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss, the white supremacist Eugene Terre'Blanche and the serial killer Aileen Wuornos, but as he has documented those figures he has become something of an icon himself.
The cover of the book has him grinning awkwardly in trademark pose: boom mic in hand, badly arranged headphones covering his ears. It is the Broomfield seen trailing his subjects or hovering in the foreground, an image he eventually satirised in a series of car ads. It has become so common for filmmakers to wander into shot that it is hard to believe that when he first resorted to the tactic, out of necessity when his 1988 film Driving Me Crazy was falling apart, he was told it would ruin his career.
"I remember when I first started working in this style," he recalls, "people were horrified, and the people who ran Film Forum in New York said, 'As long as you're working in this style we won't show any more of these films,' which was devastating, because they were the main outlet for art-house documentaries. So it's really gratifying that the form has really caught on and it's a style that younger filmmakers, who are more questioning and guerrilla-ish in their attitude, have taken."
He wasn't the first to do it: he picked up the trick from a couple of other films, one of which, Waiting For Fidel, from 1974, involved its director, Michael Rubbo, chasing unsuccessfully after the Cuban dictator. "I think being in the films can get in the way if it gets in the way of the subject matter," adds Broomfield in his semi-drawl, "particularly if you're dealing with a subject that doesn't want to talk to you. If you approach it in a traditional way you haven't got a film."
Nonetheless, he's aware that things may have veered somewhat out of control. "I think I've got bored with it because it has become the dominant form, and so I feel it's time to move on and do something different. Not to say I won't do it, in part, again."
It's Broomfield season. The book arrives at the same time as a BAFTA tribute and the release of a DVD box set of his work. He has been making films for more than 30 years, but hasn't always had to chase after the subjects. His most recent was Aileen: Life And Death Of A Serial Killer. Why did he make it? "Well, because I was subpoenaed." Having in 1992 made a film about Wuornos, a prostitute who killed seven men, he was called to the witness stand when she later appealed her death sentence. The original film showed her lawyer smoking joints on a car journey to see her. In the film we see Broomfield interview her the day before her death, and he shouts "I'm sorry" as she is led away.
"Making films is a very obsessive thing, and you have to get very involved with your subject on all sorts of different levels in order to make anything really that has any kind of depth to it," he says. "I think you probably need to be very obsessed with who they really are." Wuornos, he says, appeared in his dreams for six months after her death. Charlize Theron's Oscar-winning performance as Wuornos in Monster owed everything to those films, and he says her performance was fantastic, but Broomfield had already brought humanity and context to a woman demonised and exploited.
Wuornos was the ultimate Broomfield subject: both wrongdoer and wronged, living on the fringes. He has always tried to look at the centre of society by focusing on the edges, as in films such as Fetishes, which was made in S&M parlour, and Chicken Ranch, which was made in a brothel. "I've always been interested in people who are almost like outlaws, and I suppose prostitutes and those kinds of women are very much that: they're in very isolated and outlawish positions. And some of them are quite strong individuals; some are quite desperate individuals.
"What fascinated me is that it is a very strange and very interesting way to see society, particularly with Fetishes. People have fetishes about money or about the Nazis or about being Jewish or so on. They bring all those kinds of bits and pieces of society that don't work very well, or are unresolved, into these places."
He has also been interested in leaders. "Whether it's Margaret Thatcher, who changed the political spectrum and redefined right and left, or it's someone like Eugene Terre'Blanche, who's making a desperate stand to maintain a position that's untenable. But they were both very historical figures, I think, in the same way that Biggie or Tupac or Kurt Cobain were very large iconic figures, and I suppose Aileen Wuornos was as well. And they all mean something very particular in our culture.
"And often one thinks about those sorts of things when one makes a selection of a subject. You think that if it's something that resonates with me, do these characters have a greater significance? Do they speak for other people or just for a particular viewpoint? And I think that makes those characters very interesting to choose. In a way they have an enduring strength because of that."
When planning a documentary, how does he convince people to give him such access, to put themselves at his, and so the public's, mercy? "Part of the secret is that people actually enjoy having you around instead of being some awful kind of duty they have to do. So one of the things you do is to involve people in the making of the film and to involve them, in a sense, like friends. And I think that's what gets the films made."
He insists he is a coward at heart, despite his close shaves. He was almost raped in a US prison and nearly murdered by carjackers in South Africa. He has been close to several murderers. But for such a coward he has a habit of baiting his subjects, using what he calls elephant traps. Perhaps the most obvious example was when, having finally secured an interview with the intimidating, volcanic Terre'Blanche, Broomfield decided to provoke him by showing up late. Broomfield dawdled over his breakfast as his cameraman became increasingly panicked by the madness of the tactic.
He has spent much of the past decade exploring the murkier corners of US culture, not because of any overriding interest in that country, he insists, but because he was living there and couldn't leave while his son was still at school. Besides, he's moving away from the US for his next films. One is an update on Terre' Blanche, another is about immigrants in Britain that will climax with the death of the Chinese cocklepickers in Morecambe Bay.
He has enjoyed his recent opportunities to reflect on his work, but now he is keen to get moving again. "I think, um, what happened was, after doing the Aileen Wuornos film, which was emotionally draining and, as you know, ended in her execution, I felt really quite exhausted."
Ask him who he would most like to turn the camera on and the response reveals another archetypal Broomfield subject, ripe for interpretation. "I was quite interested in doing something on Lynndie England," he says, referring to the female US soldier in the photographs of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, near Baghdad. "It's possible that I'll still do that, because I think that obviously throws up so many other issues. I think that Lynndie England is probably a rather sad victim of the whole thing, but she embodies maybe most people's enduring images of the Iraq war and all its contradictions, and I think she is a very emblematic figure in that way."
Documenting Icons is published by Faber, £12.99