Michael Grigsby

Mike Grigsby

As the culmination of our 'In fact' tribute to one of Britain's foremost practitioners and proponents of the authored non-fiction film, Michael Grigsby here looks back on his adventures in documentary, and shares his passion for its potential.

Interviewed Friday 25 June 2004 by Julian Petley

Interview © BFI 2004

Introductions

Patrick Russell: Just before I introduce Mike Grigsby and Julian Petley to you, I'd like to thank some of the people who've helped put this season together. I'm not going to be able to thank all of them, but I would like to thank the NFT for hosting this season, and in particular Susan Picken and Clare Norton-Smith from NFT Special Events for so brilliantly organising everybody and everything. And also Simon Duffy for helping to track down the subtitled print of Kieslowski's I Was a Soldier [1970] which we screened with Mike's film of the same name earlier in the week. I'd like to thank Guy Hinton and Elizabeth Benjamin from bfi Marketing for so enthusiastically and skilfully promoting this retrospective, and proving that there is a hungry audience out there for non-fiction on the big screen.

I'd like to thank the staff and pupils of Abingdon School for their unique contributions earlier in the season, to my colleagues Christophe Dupin and Sonia Genaitay for introducing some of the programmes, and I'd also like to thank all my colleagues at the bfi National Archive and in the bfi Distribution Library who have worked really hard to make the best possible screening material available for the season, in particular to Sonia Genaitay, who co-ordinated all of the archive's technical work for the retrospective at the archive's conservation centre in Berkhamsted. And last, but certainly not least, I'd like to thank Michael Grigsby himself for sharing his work - and his passion for filmmaking with us over the last few weeks, which he will do again over the next hour and a half, and I couldn't think of a better interlocutor for that than Julian Petley, who, as well as being a wonderful film scholar and writer, has been a long-time champion of Mike Grigsby's work, so I'm sure we've got a fascinating evening ahead of us, and I hope that there'll be time for a question-and-answer from the audience at the end, so would you please welcome Julian Petley and Michael Grigsby [applause].

Julian Petley: Okay, thanks very much for that. Yes, I've known Mike a very long time indeed. I first really got to know Mike when I was a film journalist and saw his wonderful films about India called Before the Monsoon [1979], and one of the joys of being a journalist, amongst all the pitfalls, is that you do actually get to meet people whose work you admire and, having seen these films, I very much wanted to meet the person who'd made them and to talk to that person, and also to share my enthusiasm about these films with other people, so I wrote about Mike for a now long-defunct magazine called Primetime and we've remained friends ever since.

So what I'd like to do this evening really is to talk to Mike as a way of getting him to raise both issues about his career, but also about the documentary in general. We'll go on to about 10 o'clock, which gives us about an hour, and then I'd very much like to throw the session open to the floor, because I'm sure many of you have got questions that you'd like to ask Mike as well, and we'll try and come to a close at about 10:20.

Getting started... taking risks

JP: Anyway, Mike, the first thing I'd like to ask you really is - the obvious one - is about your beginnings, about how you got so impassioned about film and how you got into film and, of course, television as well.

Michael Grigsby: Okay, well slightly at the risk of repeating myself with some of the people who may have been here three weeks ago - in NFT1 actually - my fascination with film began when I was about nine. My Dad kept a screen furled up under the stairs - film screen - and he had a 9.5 movie projector. Then on Saturdays, I used to commandeer it, getting all my mates, charge them 10p each and show them Mickey Mouse films and Laurel and Hardy and Charlie Chaplin. That got me going both as a film... loving films but also as a bit of an entrepreneur. When I went to school, I realised they didn't have such a thing as a film society, so I formed it. That means I had to get all these films in for the kids to look at around me. That was when I was about thirteen, fourteen. And some of the films, which were cheap and free, were the documentaries, as is always the case.

These films actually really excited me, I think in a way that I hadn't anticipated, because they made me look at the world in a very different way. I was looking at the films of Humphrey Jennings, I was looking at the films of Basil Wright, Harry Watt and people like this. This stimulated me so much, even as a fourteen-year-old, that I went to the boss, the headmaster of the school and persuaded him that I should make a film too. That was my first pitch. It succeeded. He actually... he funded me to buy a movie camera, a little one, a 16mm... I don't know, equivalent of a Box Brownie I guess... and a little tape recorder and a few bulbs and some basins, as reflectors and a pram with three wheels. And we started. I surrounded myself with a bunch of dissidentsand mavericks who were disillusioned with school life and we made our films. We made several films.

They showed a clip of one the other day at the NFT1, which was wonderful, with a live orchestra. It was great to see something I'd done when I was so young. Word seemed to get around because I think somebody from the BFI came down and reviewed my last film there, No Tumbled House [1955]. They wrote a very good review of it, a surprisingly good review. And that gave me the impetus to think I really wanted to make film, I wanted to do this as a career or whatever. And I remember saying to my parents "I want to make films". Now that was quite a heavy thing to say to your parents in the middle 50s. It wasn't the thing to go into at that time. But they were very supportive.

I then wrote lots of letters. I got two responses which were positive, one from the BBC, one from Granada, who had just newly formed. I had two job interviews and one of them was with Harry Watt, who had made Night Mail [1936]. He interviewed me at Granada and actually gave me a job in his film unit. I was all of eighteen, nineteen years of age... fantastic. I joined Granada a few months later and Harry Watt actually left at the same time. The film unit collapsed and I was left being offered a job as a television cameraman, something I didn't want to do. But even at that age I realised I had a foot in the door and I should stick with it.

Being me, I got very disaffected and disillusioned with the work I was doing. I wanted to make my own films. So I went out one day and I bought a movie camera on hire purchase. And again got a group of disillusioned, disaffected people around me from Granada, and for a year and a half we made a film called Enginemen [1959]. That film, by chance, Lindsay Anderson heard about it. Lindsay Anderson was then running Free Cinema in London, I was in Manchester, I knew nothing about Free Cinema, I knew nothing about anything, except I wanted to make movies and I wanted to make Enginemen with my mates. Anyway, he heard about it, I sent him the rushes. I didn't even know how to spool the things up and he opened this brown paper parcel - I saw him on television once telling this story - that he got this brown paper parcel on his table and he opened it and all this film fell out. And that was from me. He put it together, got it on the projector and he and Karel Reisz viewed the stuff and sent me a telegram, which I think I still have, saying congratulations, how can we help you finish this film? They got me money from the bfi Experimental Film Fund to finish the film and then they exhibited it in the NFT1, in the last Free Cinema programme in '59 or '60, whenever it was.

I remember walking over Hungerford Bridge here to the opening and looking down and seeing all the people milling around and thinking, fantastic, they've come to see my film. Of course they hadn't, they'd come to see Karel Reisz's We Are the Lambeth Boys [1959]. It was wonderful. The film went well, I had incredible reviews, some of the best I've ever had actually and it gave me the impetus to go back to Manchester, revitalise the unit and we made several more films. The second one I made, Tomorrow's Saturday [1962], was also shown here at NFT1. Meanwhile I was banging on the door at Granada, saying, make me a director and they were saying, you're far too young, you're 21, 22, go away. After I did Tomorrow's Saturday, they actually stopped and thought about it. I then went... I was boarded by Granada and I remember doing the thing you shouldn't do at a board. I argued with somebody on the board because they said, okay if you get this trainee directorship... director's job, you'll have to do Coronation Street as a part of your training. I said, I won't do Coronation Street, I want to make documentaries. They said, I'm sorry, you've got to do Coronation Street... I said, no, no, no - arrogant puppy that I was - I didn't get the job. So I thought about resigning from Granada... ho-ho, big deal.

Sometime later I got a phone call from Granada saying, we want to talk to you. And I went back and they said, okay, we're going to give you a chance as a trainee director. And I l earnt something very significant then, that if you take a stand, you take a hell of a chance, but you might win. And I won. And I became a trainee director. If I hadn't taken the stand, I'd have probably... I don't know what I'd have been doing. But I took a stand, I won and that's something that's kept me going for the last 35 years or something, that if you don't take risks, you get nowhere, friends. So, I'm a risk taker and it always pays off.

Why television?

JP: And now you've got your own NFT season, which is the second one actually I seem to think. I think the interesting question that springs to mind from that is: why television? Lots of people want to be film directors, you very clearly wanted to get into television, didn't you? At a time when it wasn't so fashionable I think, to want to be in television, why, why was it television you wanted to get into?

MG: That's a good question... and it's about the kind of society in which we live, really. I felt then and I feel now, that really ordinary punters, us people somewhere along... doing our daily work and whatever, we don't seem to have much of a voice anywhere within our society. We aren't being listened to very much by Parliament down the road here, certainly not be politicians who promise, promise, promise, but when they get there become part of that gentleman's club and forget about us all. And I always felt that television potentially had an incredible outreach or had an incredible potential to reach people within their home. And it had the potential for us as filmmakers to go into other people's lives and to capture those lives and then to reach through into other people's living rooms about people's lives in a very straight and honest and direct way. It's called democracy. And it's a part of our democratic structure. And that's why I believe passionately in television. That's why I went into it and that's why I'm very saddened to see what's happened to it today. Because that part of the democratic structure has been taken away from people. That chance to actually talk through the camera to people in their living rooms, that almost direct link, has almost completely been lost now.

It's even worse now, because the separation between the government and its people is even wider than it was back in the middle '50s or the '70s or whatever. So I think now we're losing all round. It doesn't stop me believing in the potential of television, I just think it's now being misused and abused. Primarily by the people who run the companies because they don't really care about the punters who are their viewers. They don't really care, I don't think they understand them or don't credit them with any real sensitivity, indeed intelligence. Which is why you have so much junk coming out of the corner of your room now. And it's... for me, this is a battle that one has to face and deal with. Not run away from it, not wallow in nostalgia and say it was all greater 15, 20, 30 years ago. It wasn't necessarily greater, it was just different. Because I had to fight every time I wanted to make a movie and get it on the box in the way I wanted... I still had to fight like hell to do it. But at least I had the chance to do it. Not now.

JP: Well I'm sure we're going to come back to talk about the state of TV today, but although you did choose television - and thank goodness you did - at the same time, your work is very, very clearly cinematic. It's been very striking, I think, during this season, how terrific your work actually looks, up there, on the big screen. We've seen during this season some of the films by some of the filmmakers who've influenced you. It's been a very, very well chosen season indeed. It would be useful, I think, if you would just say perhaps a few words about the big influences on you, particularly, I think, Humphrey Jennings. What it is that you've got from those filmmakers who have been the big influence.

MG: One word: excitement. Excitement of capturing the poetry of the everyday and being able to make the everyday become imaginative and exciting for somebody who is watching it. And I think these people like Jennings did that by using all the creative forces in their possession. I mean they were using music, sound, image and editing techniques, which really liberated one's imagination. For me, that's the biggest kind of impact these people had on me when I was fourteen and indeed still today when I see their work. Again, you see, they were risk-takers. And they had producers and executive producers like Grierson and co. who gave them their heads. What an incredible time that must have been. To have had people like W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten and directors like Jennings and Wright and Watt and Cavalcanti. What an amazing time when people believed passionately in the language of film and the excitement of film and the passion of film, and a way of actually using that film to reach and talk about the society in which we live. That's what really stimulated me. And it still stimulates me today.

I think one of the reasons that, happily, my work... a lot of it looks really good, either on the small screen or the big screen is because, when we make the films, I'm very fortunate and very blessed that I've always worked with dedicated teams of editors, camera people, sound people, who believe in the way in which I want to work and I believe in them, both creatively and technically. We work as dedicated units. And that love and that care for the medium and for one another and for the people one is making the film about, which is the key thing, that translates into what you see on the screen. And that craft is what you see on the screen. That is something that's been really, almost lost today, because those little units are being broken up, people aren't being trained anymore. You don't get assistant editors in editing rooms now who are not only handing out trims but are also actually watching the way in which an editor works. Watching the arguments or the discussions between a director and the editor. That's been lost. If that's lost... and if that craft is lost, then we are really down to the wire because there's nothing left. So we have to remember that. We have to be aware now of what we still have and somehow retain it and build on it.

'Style is an attitude and attitude is style'

JP: Absolutely. Well, coming on to talk more specifically about your own films... one of the things that I think very clearly distinguishes them is this matter of space. First of all you give your... the people who you're filming, you give them space to talk, don't you. You don't have this awful kind of cut, cut, cut... that kind of 'metronomic' editing. You actually give people the space to talk. But also you're very careful, whether it's people in Northern Ireland or the Vietnam veterans in the States, to place them in their own particular space. So we can actually see them at some length in the environment in which they're in. Would you like to say something about a) how you yourself managed to get that kind of space to work - which obviously takes a long time to film something like that - and also something about your working methods. Was there something about television, you know, without going in for myths of the Golden Age, was there something about television in the 60s, 70s and even into the 80s whereby it was possible to have longer periods of time to make films than it... and bigger budgets than it is now.

MG: I think the question of space is a stylistic one. Basically, I think Anderson said 'style is an attitude and attitude is style.' I think I said to people here the other night, when I made I Was a Soldier, there was no other way I could make that film about three boys coming back from Vietnam. There was no other way I could make that film. And by giving them mental and physical space to be... to be themselves, to just allow a camera to run and stay running when they were saying nothing, which was most of the time because the film was about the pain in their eyes, the film was about the pain in their heads, the things that you cannot talk about. So how do I as a director deal with that? I deal with it by allowing the camera just to run and not cutting. By not having this frenetic tendency, which most of us do, of starting the shot to roll and then cutting into a close-up and then changing the position. Now, if you're being filmed and you see a cameraperson running around you all the time, you're going to become... you're going to become very uneasy. And if you're already in turmoil, you're going to become even more in turmoil. And I think it's incumbent on us as directors, as film people, to always try and put ourselves in the shoes of the people you're making the films with and about. And try to understand what they're feeling, what they're saying, what they're hearing. And try and understand their emotions. And then in that way, perhaps we have a chance of reflecting them accurately, or more accurately.

The thing I learnt very quickly - and that film, I Was a Soldier, was a great marker for me - I learnt very quickly not to be impatient, to take time, to give people the space they need to say what they have to say, even if half the time it's in silence. And if we have to shoot much more film than we need to do that, so be it. There are times in that movie when the boys will say something and then there'll be total silence except for the traffic sound or the sound of the birds and the wind in the trees. And then 30 seconds later they'll say three words. That's them. That was their emotional statement then and, indeed, I think it's still very much their emotional state today. That's how most of us are actually. We're not robots who can just deliver sound bites, which is what the television companies want and reduce us to 30-second slots. We're not like that. And I'm sure I've said this to... in one of my interviews... but when I made the film about Lockerbie, I knew one of the participants had an incredible story to tell. But when we came to do it, he stopped talking and took me aside and said, Oh Mike, I can't do this. And I said, what do you mean, you can't do this and he said, I can't summarise this in two minutes, which is what I see everyone doing on television. And I said, I don't want you to summarise it in two minutes. I've got a 20-minute roll of film on the camera, you can talk for 20 minutes and I won't say a word. Just tell us your story. And he said, are you sure? And I said, I'm sure. And he talked for 20 minutes or 15 minutes or whatever it was. And I hardly said anything. And we just held the camera in one position. And his story was so moving and if any of you had been here the other night you'd have seen how moving that tale was.

We took chances, of course we did. But you have to believe in the people you're making your films about and with. It's their lives you're trying to reflect. And frankly I have got no axe to grind, I've got no points to score. I'll be very honest, a lot of directors do have points to score, because they're being encouraged now to do this with the camera and do that with the camera. Why? They don't know why. They've just been told, give us variety in the cutting room and we'll cut about it. Why? Why can't we have the courage to just be, to be still, to trust in our subjects, to trust in those people who have put their trust in us. It's so very simple. You know filmmaking is so simple. But we screw it up. We screw it up as directors and filmmakers because we make life much more complex than it really is. And so that's why, I think my films translate well on a big screen because they're very simple. They're not simplistic; they're very simple, they're very clear, they're very direct and you either really like it or you really dislike it. Quite frankly, I don't mind, as long as you don't think they're 'interesting'. That's a word, one word I can't tolerate. So people either really love my work, or they really don't like my work. Great. That's how it should be. But let's have a bit of conviction, let's have a bit of passion, let's have a bit of trust. Because, hey, we need that in our everyday lives with one another anyway. And we as filmmakers have that responsibility to try and create a little more trust perhaps than there is.

And I think, if I may also say, that I'm very influenced by feature films and fiction. I spend a lot of time in the cinema watching feature films and I love the work of the Iranian cinema, which takes small subjects but talks about big issues. They take the micro and they talk about the macro. And they do it so simply with almost no money at all and it's about humanity. And they communicate their tales across the world. Very simple, very direct, in ways that reach your heart and your head. That's what we should be doing in documentary. We should be making films that don't just reach your head - fact, fact, fact, but reach your heart and move you. And if you do that, you've a chance of making people think, feel and question. So it's also a political point because I think this point about questioning has almost been lost in our society. We don't question enough. We're being given headlines all the time by the press or by television. In our daily lives we're always racing from place to place, we never have time for one another, we never have space to sit down and think, feel, question, why am I saying this, why are they saying that, why is this happening? That's what the filmmaker should be doing. That's what Iranian cinema is about. For example It makes you realise about the role of women in Iran, but in a human, humorous, caring way. So I get a lot of inspiration from watching fiction and some great documentary. Not a hell of a lot of it around at the minute, but there is some.

JP: Thanks. Well, amen to that. This business of trust, I think, is really important. One of the reasons why the people who you make films about or with trust you is because you actually are able to spend a long time with them, aren't you - or you certainly were - before you ever began rolling the camera. And in point of fact, when you did begin rolling the camera, there wasn't much wasted footage, because what you shot was the essential really. Do you think in today's television environment, it's possible to have those kinds of filmmaking conditions? I mean I say again, without going in for myths of the Golden Age, nonetheless, Granada and Central were able to give you a reasonably good deal - which of course you had to struggle for - to enable you to go to Northern Ireland or onto a trawler or whatever and live with these people for quite a long time before you shot an inch of film. Is that still possible, do you think, in today's TV environment?

MG: I think it's incredibly difficult. I think that's... coming back to what I was saying earlier, that the people running the television companies or the film companies now, really don't... generally don't have - there are exceptions of course within every company - but generally don't have the kind of vision and the care about the society in which television and their company is based. And if you don't have that kind of care, then I think it - by the people who are running the company and that kind of responsibility from people who are running a company, towards the society in which you live - then it's extremely difficult for the filmmaker or the programme-maker within it, to actually convince them to give you the time and the space. I've been blessed over this time to have always had risk-takers as my bosses and people who seemed to care about the society in which we lived and therefore gave me the chance to go out and spend five months doing research, or they really cared because the franchise was coming up for renewal and they needed a film from Grigsby or somebody else, which was actually going to get them good reviews or whatever. They don't even care about that any longer now. So one had to... one always has to work the system. You have to understand the system and there's no point pretending we're in a dream world, because we're not. A filmmaker is both a dreamer and a realist and you have to be a bit of both. But I think in one sense it is much more difficult now to get that kind of space, to have that research time, which is what I always insisted on and continue to insist on. But now I'm working partly outside the broadcast media and laying down my conditions, as opposed to being told I have to produce my research within a week and blah, blah, blah, which is what most people are having to do today. So, things have changed a lot. But that doesn't mean one has to be pessimistic, because there are always ways around that mountain.

Sound and music

JP: Your films, as we've discussed, are very, very visually distinctive. A film by you is pretty obviously by you within a few minutes. But also your films are very, very aurally distinctive. The sound design on your films is extremely careful. Background sound counts for quite as much sometimes as what the character may be saying in the foreground. It's also, I think, to do with the way in which you place your characters so carefully. But also you use music in a very fascinating way. Often to counterpoint or contradict the image, often with a great sense of irony as we've just seen in Living on the Edge [1987]. It also crops up in, I mean even more I think in Time of Our Lives [1994]. So I thought what we might do just for five minutes, before I get you to talk about this, is have a look at a wonderful sequence from Listen to Britain [1942]. I know this has been shown already, in this excellent season, but here, I think Jennings's use of music is absolutely extraordinary and it reminds me so much of what you would do later. But I think you take Jennings's work with sound and image a stage further than Jennings. So shall we just have a look at this sequence, it's about seven minutes long, I'm sure many of you will be familiar with it, but it's wonderful stuff so if we could just run the extract, thanks...

[extract: Listen to Britain]

JP: Okay, well that was a chance to hear two of the greatest aural dissolves I should think in the history of cinema, from Flanagan and Allen to Myra Hess and then Mozart into the machinery. But, obviously what Jennings is doing here is using music along with imagery to suggest togetherness, isn't he. Whereas your use of music in your films is much more ironic, I think, isn't it. Particularly, I'm thinking of Living on the Edge and Time of Our Lives. I think it's one of the things that makes those films so extraordinarily resonant and moving and powerful. Would you like to say something about how you set about using music in those films?

MG: Well, I think there's... first thing to say is that, for me, to listen is to see and if you close your eyes and you just listen to the world around you, you will start to look at it, perhaps in a slightly different way. When I made my film in Lockerbie, the first day I arrived there I went out onto the street at five in the morning or six in the morning and I just listened to that town around me. And it was at town of rural sounds, of sheep, of cows and the odd car. In my mind, I was therefore building up a kind of a soundscape of this community. And just by listening, it helped me really understand that place, and a feeling of that place. So that when that aircraft exploded above it and fell onto that little town, I could imagine the devastation and the horror was perhaps even greater than exploding over a city because this calm... solitude... rural sounds had been completely annihilated in one fell swoop.

So, when I'm making a film, I spend a lot of time listening as well as looking. Listening not only to what people are saying to me but listening to the texture of life around me. And that subconsciously translates into the actual making of the movie. And sound recordists, I think, really love working with me because I give them a lot of space and time. That we don't just do sync recording as things are happening but they also have the space and the time - and I build it into my schedules - to go out and to record quite independently the texture, the subtext of life that is happening around us and around them at that time. Then I incorporate that into the soundtrack of the final film.

Often when we're dubbing - and I usually have a two-day dub - we will have many tracks up there, which we condense into one. Because, even if you're not aware of those sounds, they're there. Even in I Was a Soldier, you know, when the film is full of silence, there's actually always sound there. There was the sound of the dawn chorus, the sound of the birds, the sound of the cows, the sound of normality. And quite implicitly, what I was trying to do was to make their abnormality, the horror of what they'd been through... without actually talking about it... the horror of what you could see in their eyes was much stronger when juxtaposed against the normality of everyday life, which you heard very quietly in the background. So although the film appears to be silent, there was always that soundtrack running there. So it implicitly works away and seeps into your consciousness. It's not hitting you, it's just there. So I spent a lot of time constructing the sound as well as the images.

And in terms of music, I'm very careful about music. You saw a lot of music in Living on the Edge just now. It was there for a reason. It was there because I was trying to build an impressionistic study of a contemporary Britain, Thatcher's Britain, but I was trying to span time and space. I was trying to take us back, I was trying to reflect the culture before, and in the present. Music, and particularly rock music of the time, seemed a very good way of talking and of expressing emotions and feelings without actually having to say very much. I mean, just a wonderful image I remember, when the train was racing through a tunnel and there's a build-up of sound on the track - which was from a Beatles LP -then as we come out of tunnel it cuts and it's complete silence and there are these three boys... groups of boys in Glasgow, just standing in silence, looking at the camera. That juxtaposition of the music, which was a part of the culture of the time and exciting... energy... rhythm... and then cutting to these boys, just looking at you in dead silence. For me, that did in two minutes or a minute and a half... it told me so much about the separation of those boys' lives from the rest of us in the swinging metropolis or wherever we were. It told me so much about their lives and we could convey that very simply, very economically and very poignantly.

When I made A Life Apart [1973], my film about the deep sea trawling... fishing community, there was no music in it at all. The film was, the music if you like, was the sound of wind and the sea and the working conditions under which the men were. So I use music very carefully. I think it's also worth mentioning Time of Our Lives... for me, there was a effective sequence where - for those of you who haven't seen it, it's about an East-end family and having Grandpa's 85th birthday party... and there's a telling sequence in this where one of his daughters, who lives in the same apartment block, comes out of her flat door and locks it and then walks for three minutes through endless corridors, and down in a dirty, dark, stinking lift, onto the next floor and walks again along the corridor, through this very run-down building to see her father, who's in a lower flat. I was trying to work out: how do I convey to an audience the kind of history which has happened between her time - the daughter - and her father's time? And the promises that have been made to her father when he came out of the army at the end of the Second World War and the Beveridge Report, promising a brave new Britain.

I decided I could do this through using a very condensed but complex soundtrack, which was like an evocation of sound over the past 50 years or 40 years or whatever it was. And we did that... we put this soundtrack... we spent a week, two weeks in the editing room just building this track of moments from the previous 30, 40 years . We juxtaposed this all against the woman as she made her way through this rather unpleasant building. So by the time she came to open the door of her father's flat, you then heard the Beveridge Report, 1945, crackling over the airwaves, talking about the brave new Britain, where equality, promises for the future - which had obviously not been fulfilled because you could see that in the imagery of the shot and you could see that in the desolation, the isolation around you - but there was the soundtrack telling you one thing and the images were telling you something else. Putting those two things together over a period of three minutes, actually conveyed, if you like, a composite history of Britain in a very economic way. And it worked. And that's why I love using sound juxtaposed against the images, so it's not always actual sound, it's a sound which tells you as much as the image is telling you at the time. Something, sadly, we don't see much of being done today.

JP: Indeed. So, the music, your choice of music, comes to you, by the sound of it, very much at the editing stage. So when you've got the material together, you're putting it together, that's when you think of the resonant music to use, as well as other things, like the Beverage... That is the big difference from Jennings, isn't it? Because you use sound and image against each other, whereas Jennings, I think, on the whole...

MG: But I learnt my lessons about the use of sound from films like you've just seen. I mean, I saw that as a fifteen-year-old kid and got excited by that. And I suddenly realised, sound and image put together in that way are exciting. And indeed they are. We've just forgotten how to do it, guys, you know. But it's so simple. Just use your imagination.

'If there's a will...'

JP: We've talked quite a bit, both this evening - and you and I over the years - about the state of the TV industry and wishing it was other that what it was. But to try to bring this towards a conclusion on a slightly more cheerful note than complaining about present-day television, what do you think are the possibilities now for working outside the mainstream TV industry, particularly I'm thinking of... in terms of alternative forms of distribution and exhibition.

MG: You know, I think it's always been tough. I think if you're an artist in any discipline it's tough. Hey, I went to the Titian exhibition last year at the National Gallery. The guy had nightmares trying to get his paintings to work. But you know, 400 years later, the humanity, the passion, the energy is still there. If you're an artist, in any discipline, it's tough. Let's not kid ourselves. I know this is a word that people don't like using in Britain very much about filmmakers... as artists. We have some sort of problem about this, which you don't find in continental Europe. I don't really understand it. It's always been difficult and it's still difficult today. It's just that the conditions are different. So what does one do, one has to find a way, as I said earlier, around those mountains, around those problems. In one way, things are much easier now because of accessibility to digital equipment and one can open up doors which were not really possible before.

When I started making films, I had to buy a camera, I had to spend money on film. It was very expensive. And it broke me. I mean it really broke me. Today, we can actually pool together, get a video camera and still make films. The possibilities for distribution are actually pretty endless if one starts to think about it. We've got things like the internet, we've got, now, potentially, cinema distribution, we've got television distribution. We've got DVDs, if you can get your stuff onto DVDs, that's a wonderful way of getting your film seen around, in a way that I could never have done when I sent my parcel of film to Lindsay Anderson and it all fell out. You know, I couldn't show that anywhere. Now we have the access, we have the possibilities and it's relatively cheap. So I'm actually - as some of you who know me know - I'm an absolute optimist and everything is possible.

What we have to do is just grab what's out there and make it work for us. Don't let it be the other way around. Don't let us become formatted into having to deliver this and deliver that. That is what has happened, I think, and what I do find a little discouraging, I see a lot of people coming out of media schools and wherever, thinking they're the greatest thing since ice cream - and they may well be - but then they are desperate for a job and they go into the production companies or the television companies and very rapidly they lose their identity. They lose who they are, they lose their passion, their vision, because they become a part of a machine. One has to really resist that and fight that. One has to hold on to that sense of identity. I think that we can only do that if we work together collectively. And I think one of the great things for me about this season has been that I can see there's a real hunger for filmmaking, there's a real hunger for this sort of filmmaking. There's a real hunger to communicate, there's a real hunger to get to know one another through film and to get to know one another in person. And so, although things are grim, things ain't that grim. And I've been looking here over the last, nearly four weeks now, at strong enthusiastic audiences. That's fantastic.

I know people have been coming to these shows from all over Britain. That makes me excited. And that inspires me. If there's a will, my friends, there's definitely a way. And all the tools are there at our disposal. It's up to us to find out how to use them, whether officially or unofficially, it doesn't matter. Just make the bloody film and do it. And if you've got a passion and a conviction and you want to do something, you'll do it. You'll beg, you'll borrow, you'll steal, you'll do it. Don't whinge, don't whine, don't tell me how damn difficult it is, I don't want to hear it, I'm not interested. Do it. Do it. I've done it. I'll continue to do it. We have a real tendency in this country to whinge a lot, to moan a lot, to say, oh my God it's so bad, oh my God I can't do this, oh my God I can't do that. The system's shit, we all agree. The system is shit around the world, we all agree. Find a way through it. Think of the Iranians, the way they found their way through it. Think of the way the Chinese have found a way through their cinema, to express themselves. Things are wonderful, things are possible, things are positive. We can do it. We are doing it.

The future

JP: Now that's a very, very good point. You and I were present at an event which you helped organise, weren't we, at West Midland Screen in Birmingham, round about the turn of the year, wasn't it?

MG: January.

JP: And there were about a hundred people there and most of them were pretty young. And the keenness amongst these young filmmakers or would-be filmmakers and their determination to use every means available to them, was actually really very inspiring, I thought. And again, the fact that this season has actually got an enormous amount of press coverage, most of which I've got here, is actually incredibly encouraging. Because for years and years it seemed like I was the only person writing about your movies, whereas now...

MG: You are a visionary, my friend. [laughter]

JP: Well, I could see the light...but it is actually wonderful that people have finally woken up and seen what a great body of work this is... and long may it continue. Which brings me in a way to the last question, which is: tell us about your future plans.

MG: Ha... Well I have many future plans and many current plans and suffice to say I'm working on... all the things I'm working on at the minute are in the non-broadcast area. It's quite weird because I've really come full circle from working outside broadcast in a... when I was doing my Free Cinema work and my amateur movies. I mean, in a way I've come full circle back to that position now, because I don't really want to deal with the broadcast companies, particularly in the initial stages of a production, because that is the dangerous part, that is when you lose yourself and your soul if you're not careful. Because most of the broadcast companies... you walk into an office and they say, tell me what your film's about, and they want to know the whole story... before you've even gone out there and researched it and thought about it... I can't do that.

I tell you what, when I made Living on the Edge, I walked into the office of the commissioning editor at Central and - okay, I had a track record, he knew my work - I said five, six words to him... seven words, I said, I want to make a film, I want to make an impressionistic film about contemporary Britain. He said, okay, let's do it. [laughter] That, I promise you, that was it. He was concerned at the amount of money we spent on it because we spent a year on... and we spent , I think several months shooting it, and it was five or six months of research. But that was a trust, that was a risk. Today, now you have to actually write it all down and explain the subject and explain how the film is before you've even done your research or done your shooting. And of course filmmaking is about - coming back to what we were saying earlier - is about evolution. It's about things growing, changing. People change, the weather changes, nothing stays the same.

Today everyone, the commissioning editors are so frightened that they want a bit of paper telling you exactly what the film's about on day one. Because when day 81 comes along and you have the finished film, if it's different and they get their head chopped off by their boss for having a different film, they want their bit of paper to say, hey, this is what he/she gave me. And covering their backs. So, risk-taking has sort of gone out the window . And that's why I simply refuse to subscribe to that, particularly in the research stage. I'm now... I'm working outside the broadcast media, I'm trying to get money through the Lottery Commission for a project in Northern Ireland. I'm working on a potential project in Palestine. . And I have many other plans as well, which we haven't time to go into. But it's all really very exciting... and it's great. [laughter]

JP: Well look, the very, very best of luck with those plans. I hope we're here in ten years time having another retrospective with a whole lot more movies.

MG: Well, I hope so. I tell you what, in this retrospective or tribute, I mean, it's been really enjoyable, but actually there's only been... I think they've only screened something like eight or nine of my films, which is all they had time to do, bless them. And they've done a great job. But I've got about another 20 films out there, some of which I think deserve to be seen here !

JP: Yes, I definitely sense another season...

MG: Maybe not ten years, maybe two years?

JP: Two years, yeah, okay, right, fine. Okay, well look, we've got quarter of an hour, 20 minutes, I'm sure people out there would like to ask Mike some questions. So let me throw... let us throw it open to you now. Okay, yes, at the middle there.

Using space

Audience member: ...You give people space in the film, but you also give space space in the film, do you think you could comment on your use of landscape?

MG: That's a good question. I said this, I think, in an interview to The Times or something recently. But basically, you know, when I go to see, as I said earlier, a feature film - of which I watch many - you don't expect to see the story up front, do you? No you don't. You expect the characters to evolve, if you like, out of the landscape, out of the mist. Because you've understood the context in which the characters are, you get to know the characters better. The same thing should apply to documentary, as far as I am concerned. That's why, to answer your question, I give a lot of time, a lot of space, to landscape, to context. Because, I think, if you don't understand landscape, context, in which people live, work, breathe, then how can one really understand them? That's why I object, very much... there's so much on television now where people are interviewed against white walls. White walls tell me nothing about a character. But if you actually... people are in their own milieu and you try to capture that... the feeling of that living room and give space around the frame when you're shooting, then you're looking out of the corner of your eye as you are watching or listening to them... you're looking at that little room, that world around them... that's their world. That world makes them. And it reflects them, their personalities, emotionally and on several levels which aren't spoken.

I'll just give you one example, if I may. I made a film called The Search [1991], and there was a scene in that in which we wanted to film a granddaughter talking to her grandmother about her father's life. And the grandma was looking at photographs in the family album. We had lunch with them and the house in which she lived - and we were having lunch in one corner of the room - the grandma lived. She had been there for years and years and years and it was brown. The texture of that room was brown. The texture of the house was brown, with these faded photographs and faded prints. And I didn't... I wanted just to do one shot, one scene and get out because I didn't want to interrupt them too much and I wanted to do it as simply as possible.

And Dan Holmberg, the Swedish cameraman, knew the style, knew what I was looking for and as we had lunch, he said to me I think I know what to do. We'll shoot it from here, where we're having our lunch. And then he got up, at the end of lunch, and he walked around and he quietly opened the shutters around the walls and the light started to come in... filter in. And it illuminated the rest of the room, which went on way behind these two people. And so you began to see the faded pictures and you began to see the texture of brown. So we came to shoot it and we came to show it, you had the scene of the two people sitting at the table, talking over their photographic album. But behind them you could see this grandmother's life. And you knew she'd been there for a long time. We didn't have to say that; it was implicit. So that is why we spent a lot of time thinking about the relationship of... that is something that is being done in feature films all the time. Look at the opening of Fargo [Joel Coen, 1996], as they struggle through the mist and the snow. And out of that come the characters... you suddenly... you understand Nebraska, you understand that situation. Look at Badlands, Terrence Malick's Badlands [1973] - fantastic use of landscape, of sound, of feeling, of understanding character. It's so simple, my friends, it's so simple, it's just understanding how he uses that wonderful language that we call film language.

JP: If I could actually just give one other example to you, it's Mike's film... or one of Mike's films... set in Northern Ireland called Too Long a Sacrifice [1984], which actually is set in rural Northern Ireland and gives you a completely different impression of Northern Ireland from most films in Northern Ireland, which are urban. And the use of landscape there, I think, is absolutely extraordinary. There was a point, the gentleman back there who wanted to ask a question, held his hands up...

Inaudible question

MG: Well, that's exactly... actually... I mean we don't spend a year but we do spend five or six months in a community.

Inaudible continuation of question...

MG: I think what I learnt from Jennings was, as I said earlier, that exciting use of image and sound and the possibilities of using it organically. Politically, if you like, in terms of space and in terms of giving people space, I demand long research time. I demand that... if we made A Life Apart or Lockerbie, Living on the Edge, we had five, six months of research time before we shot a frame. And because... and I demand that because if I don't have that, then how can I understand these people's lives, how can I truly reflect it? And so it's incumbent on me to always have long research time. When we go to Palestine, as I hope we will, I'm going on an initial trip to just sit and observe, listen, away from all the media throwing things at me. I want to just form our own judgements, our own feelings and then start to build up the resonances, the ideas, let the thing evolve. It's all about evolution. The other thing, I think, is very... I think it's worth saying that when I was a child I was very ill and I spent about seven months in hospital in bed, which is a long time for an eleven-year-old. It actually produced in me a real sense of stillness in myself. So, although I'm a bit of a windmill, I'm also... inside here there is a still, small voice. And that space, that stillness, that silence, if you like, has actually formed the way I approach life and the way I approach movie-making. I'm influenced, too, by a lot of the films I see from the Far East and again from Iran. That valley of space, of stillness, of silence, of letting things be. Trusting things to be... of trusting, of letting people be themselves, without us manipulating them into another shape or form. That is my biggest battle today... fighting people who don't have that same kind of conviction or belief.

'My films are made collectively'

MP: There's a question in the middle there...

Audience member: I wanted to ask a question about the fact that you didn't go to university and yet you're dealing with very complex social, cerebral subject matter. I'm curious as to how you structure your research...

MG: It's just that I'm incredibly bright. [laughter] One doesn't need to go to university. I work with very bright teams, basically. And, I think it's actually, I think it really is worth saying that, you know. This season has been a tribute to my work, it's actually really not about me, it's about the people I work with. A lot of people I work with, particularly in the research process, are not filmmakers. They've come from different disciplines. We have lots of discussions and put things together collectively. My films are made collectively. I'm lost without my research team who... I cast for each film differently. I'm lost without the cameraperson and the soundperson and the editor. I'm lost. I need their talents, their skills, their beliefs, their way of looking at society. And we discuss and are... most of our work, particularly in the research time, endless discussions about how we bring these different elements together. As in, Living on the Edge, what are we trying to say, why are we trying to say it? I think, also, it's worth saying, while I'm shooting I work totally instinctively, totally intuitively and I rationalise it later. And at night, the film crew will sit around and say, why the hell did you do that? Or, we don't agree with that. But I trust my instincts. But I can't make my films without the people I work with.

JP: And, if we're talking about the look of your films, I would have thought that, someone like one of your cameramen, Ivan Strasburg, is very important.

MG: I've been so blessed with working with fantastic DoPs, fantastic people, Ivan Strasburg, Adam Suschitzky, Chris Menges who shot all my Before the Monsoon trilogy... Dan Holmberg, fantastic guys, fantastic sound recordists, editors, dubbing mixers. This tribute is as much for them as it is for me. But above all, you know, this tribute is actually for the people about whom we made these films, and without whom there would be... none of us would be sitting here tonight, and without whom the television companies wouldn't have had that slot filled. We tend to forget about the people we've made our films about. Without them, we are nothing. This tribute is about them as much as anybody else.

Can I also just say that I think that the people who are in one's film inevitably, through discussion over a period of five or six months, help shape and form it. And I take my films back into the community and show it to them, sometimes before the companies see it, and discuss it with them. So the film is being shaped from the ground, if you like. One doesn't need a degree for that. One just has to trust and respect people's feelings and talk about it. That's why I believe so much in collective endeavours.

Audience member: So what happens, Michael, when you take the films back to the subjects, and the subjects go I really don't like that, that's wrong, that's not me...

MG: Good question. It has happened. I make it very clear, when I take my films back, that the editorial control must remain with me, but if there are points of accuracy, that we've screwed up, then I will discuss it. If there are points of... where people have been hurt by something which I wasn't aware of and they feel uneasy about it, then we'll discuss it. And I said, I think I said, on Wednesday when we were here looking at The Silent War [1990], a film I made in Belfast, when I took that rough cut back and showed it to people, some of the people in the film said we don't doubt the integrity of what you have done, but we are unhappy at the way you've juxtaposed a few things and that could actually be a problem for us within this community. And I changed it. I actually came back here to England and I went and saw Channel 4 and Central and said, I've got to re-shoot a couple of those scenes because otherwise I might make trouble for them . And I wasn't prepared to do that.

They gave me the backing and I went back and we re-shot... didn't change the integrity of the movie at all, but it just made it possible that those people could live their lives normally. We have that responsibility as filmmakers, not to ignore the people who have given themselves to us, but to go back and if they... if we're a long way away, like I've worked in India or in Baffin Island with the Inuit, then I work as hard as I can to ensure that somebody from the community comes to Britain and sits with us in the cutting room and watches what we are doing.

When we made the film The People's Land [1976], about the Inuit and about the way they were fighting the oppression, if you like, of the Canadian government, of whites on their culture, we did, they took me and asked on trust. So I said, okay, you elect somebody within the community who can come back to England with us and make sure we've got this right, this film, which was subtitled. And they did and they elected a village elder and he came back and sat with us in Wardour Street for six weeks, working through a translator and watching what we were doing, and telling us that this film was accurate. This man, you know, he'd never been to a white man's land before. This was the first time he had been out of his area but he was completely unfazed by the whole experience. He walked down Oxford Street and said they're like cliffs. He was completely unfazed by the whole thing, he was completely unfazed by sitting in an editing room as we tried to put film together, completely unfazed. People are bright, sensitive, intelligent, perceptive, they know what they want and they know when they are being screwed. Don't underestimate other people.

JP: We've got time, I think, for one last question, right at the back, somebody had their hand up, yes, you.

Inaudible question

So, I think the answer to your question is simply, that if you really want to make a film and you care very much about the people you're working with, the people you're making a film with, then you've got to be strong, you've got to say, I won't do it unless I have the space and the time to do it. Because you're right, people sometimes do feel they're going to have a moment of fame. But I think, actually, the flaw lies in the commissioning editors' minds. Because people on the ground are not fools and they can see how they are going to be ripped off. So, you have to have the courage of your convictions and you have to say, I won't do it. I'll only do it if I have that space, whether it's one month, three months or whatever, you have to be strong. Otherwise you just buy into the system. And you just do, really, what they want you to do. And in a few years time, you'll find that you're expendable and they'll get somebody else in to do the same job, cheaper... and younger and cheaper and so the cycle goes on. You have to put down markers. I've always put down markers in my life... about I'll do this, I won't do that. Two words in the English language, very simple: yes, no. Very simple. Stick by it. Yes, no.

JP: Well, I think that's a very good point to end. Well I think it's been a fantastically inspiring season, this. And very well chosen films, both of Mike's and other people's as well. And I think it's been a very inspiring end to the season as well. I think you will send us away with some hope in our hearts and some optimism and some decent values in a rather grubby and grimy television world today. So, Mike, thank you very much indeed. [applause]

MG: Thanks guys. Come again next year.

JP: Yeah, next retro.

Last Updated: Wednesday, 10-Oct-2007 13:57:23 BST