Nick Broomfield: ‘It’s a choice, whether you get on with your parents’

Nick Broomfield's My Father and Me works – the clue is in the title – as intertwined dual biographies. Audiences already know the younger Broomfield as the creator of such singular documentaries as The Leader, His Driver and the Driver's Wife; Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer, and Whitney: Can I Be Me. In one field of image making, his late father, Maurice Broomfield, was at least as distinguished. Raised in a working-class corner of Derbyshire, he became, in the postwar years, the nation's premier industrial photographer. The sharply focused shots of workers toiling beside cascading sparks or raging furnaces remain striking today.

Father and son did not always get on. Maurice was uncertain about the imprecise nature of Nick’s professional strategies. Nick worried that Maurice’s images romanticised the industrial life.

“I don’t think I fully appreciated his work when I was growing up,” Broomfield tells me from a sunny room in southern California. “Partly because he would take me to the factories with him when I was doing very badly at school to show me where I was going to end up! And then he would take hours and hours to set up each photograph.”

My Father and Me marks the culmination of a reconciliation process that gained pace with the birth of Nick’s first son. He was encouraged to make the visual memoir when the Victoria and Albert Museum proposed an exhibition – still due later this year – of Maurice’s images.

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“They are also bringing a book out called Industrial Sublime about his work,” he says. “The exhibition was originally going to be ‘Broomfield on Broomfield’. I thought doing a film would be a great companion piece. I was always rather frightened of doing a film like this before. You don’t want to do something so indulgent it doesn’t mean anything to anybody else.”

Nobody could say that of My Father and Me. The picture takes us through two extraordinary lives at a zippy pace. Nick is raised in an interesting, intellectually lively family – his mother’s Jewish family fled the Nazis in Czechoslovakia – but, as noted above, he never took to school. He is clearly an intelligent fellow. His onscreen appearances confirm intellectual agility and a restless mind. What happened at school?

“I could never see the relevance of it,” he says. “Maybe I was encouraged in that by my father. He was very anti-school. He was encouraged by what was going on outside, what was happening in other parts of the world. I was pretty much the same as that. I was a daydreamer. It was only when I was faced with exams, and realised they would affect my freedom to do what I wanted, that I buckled down.”

Theroux inspiration?

He studied at the universities of Cardiff and Essex before attending the National Film and Television School. The vocation approached from an unusual direction.

“I went to Essex, and it was a very troubled university – with the Angry Brigade and all those sort of people,” he says. “They were all in my year. I had this idea of doing a film on slum clearances in Liverpool, and they said I could have that as part of my degree. They were very open to that kind of thing. I did this film called Who Cares? and that was the first time I thought I had created something. I felt I grew by making it.”

My Father and Me takes us through the fascinating early steps. His 1975 film Juvenile Liaison, concerning the police's handling of delinquency in Blackburn, was, following still controversial disputes, taken out of circulation for some years. Soldier Girls from 1981 went among female recruits in the US army (you can hear excerpts in the U2 song Seconds). But it was not until 1983, and the release of Chicken Ranch, investigating a legalised brothel in Nevada, that the classic Broomfield persona emerged. Is "persona" the word? Headphones round his neck, sound boom in hand, he looks to be adopting a bumbling ingenuousness to disarm interviewees. Some have suggested Louis Theroux, pushing the technique to extremes, got his schtick from Broomfield.

“I am largely being myself,” he says. “It was about breaking the wall. It’s not about invisible film-makers.”

Watching Eugène Terre’Blanche, Afrikaner white supremacist, yelling at Nick in in The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife from 1991, one can’t help but conclude he is a film-maker of some courage. Terre’Blanche is not messing around.

“Well, I don’t feel particularly brave,” he says. “It was actually Barry Ackroyd, the cameraperson on that film, who seemed to get attacked all the time. I remember him saying: ‘It doesn’t feel like I am carrying a camera. It feels like I am carrying a battering ram.’ I’ve always revelled in the chaos. My thinking becomes clearer and clearer as the situation becomes more chaotic.”

Tense relationship

As My Father and Me confirms, his relationship with Maurice continued to be tense. There is no suggestion they were estranged, but they just didn’t seem to get on. Somewhere in there, Nick belatedly learned that his mother was Jewish. Did that change how he felt about himself?

“Well, I had always been the butt of people saying: ‘You have a plummy accent. You are so privileged and upper class.’ I just laughed. My father was working class and so on. People make these assumptions not based on anything. In a way, it was quite liberating to realise I was other than what I thought. Great! Why not? But I do regret not knowing more about that side of the family.”

He mentions his accent. At one point in My Father and Me, we hear how his dad – like working-class actors such as Patrick Stewart or Roger Moore – consciously ironed out his proletarian vowels to get ahead. I wonder if it is still easier to succeed in England if you "talk posh". The class system never entirely withers.

“It’s probably an advantage now to not sound like me,” Broomfield says with a laugh. “It’s amazing how that’s all changed. You don’t get those plummy voices on the radio. I think there is more acceptance of who people actually are. I guess the whole colonial thing has gone that was so confining.”

So much of the conflict between Maurice and Nick is – within the film, anyway – defined in terms of their differing approaches to work. The older man was fanatically ordered. Nick felt that documentary film-making required a degree of anarchy (or at least freedom). “He would actually do a sketch of the picture before he did it,” he says of Maurice. “Then he would redress the factory to get it the way he wanted it.” His son began by sitting back and pointing his camera at disadvantaged children in Lancashire.

Softening attitudes

As time passed, Nick’s mother died and the documentarian went on to become an ornament of the British film industry. Maurice eventually found a second wife and, as men often do at the close of autumn, softened in many of his attitudes. Father and son seemed to find common space some years before Maurice’s death. Was it really the grandchildren that made the difference?

“Well, I think a lot of it was just accepting who we both were,” he says. “We had differences. A lot of it is about the parent accepting that the son is a grown-up now. There are bound to be things that you don’t like about each other, but you must accept those things and celebrate the things you do like. My films were not my father’s favourite kind of things. He would rather have watched nature films – the Attenborough films, things like that. Nonetheless I think he was proud of some of my work. And at the same time, I discovered his work. But mainly we just got through that period of being adversaries.”

Still nut-brown about the eyes and shiny in the cheek, Broomfield has, implausibly, reached his early 70s. Always a tad lugubrious, he has scarcely altered his demeanour since we saw him brandishing his microphone at sex workers in Chicken Ranch. But the new film is a calmer, less angular work than the fraught encounters that made his name. It tells the story of a relationship and evangelises for an extraordinary photographer. Unusually for a Broomfield joint, My Father and Me has a rather wholesome message.

“I have friends who, sadly, never really managed to make peace with their dads or mothers,” he sighs. “And it’s dominated the rest of their lives and made them really quite unhappy. I think it’s a real choice – whether you’re going to get on or not.”

He raises a handsome eyebrow.

“I think it is as simple as that.”

My Father and Me screens on BBC2 on March 20th