We’ve been promising you an interview with Nick Broomfield about his latest movie Ghosts and here it is. Click here to read D+CFilm’s review of the film, or scroll to the bottom of this interview to watch the trailer. Ghosts is at the Plymouth Arts Centre until Thursday - see our arthouse roundup for details.

What was the starting-point for Ghosts?

“I wanted to do something about modern slavery. I wanted to do it in this country, and so I looked around at lots of different subjects, and then I came across the articles that Hsiao-Hung Pai wrote in The Guardian about living undercover among the Chinese migrant community.

“I was interested in the food business in this country and how the supermarkets rely so heavily on illegal and also migrant labour. It seemed to me that we’re celebrating the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in England, and yet modern slavery is worse than ever.

“People aren’t in chains anymore, yet they’re paying off enormous debts, they don’t have freedom of movement. They don’t have civil rights, they live in terrible conditions. They don’t have any work guarantees in terms of labour conditions. I thought that it was incredible that we had gone backwards.” 

Was this your first collaboration with the writer Jez Lewis?

“Jez was working in Brighton, while I was working in Sussex. We were looking at lots of different projects, and we started writing together, so it was just something that fortuitously happened.

“Jez is very good at research and would find out exactly what was factually accurate and what wasn’t. I would try and write the scenes, Jez would write them up, and then we’d go over it and see what would and wouldn’t hold up. It worked well.

“Initially our drafts were a lot more complicated. In the early cuts of the film, there was a lot of information about how many Chinese migrants were coming in to England. The test audiences we showed this to thought we were pulling them out of the drama.”

How did you decide on the form of the film? You didn’t for example tell it as a first-person investigation like some of your previous films?

“Immigration has been treated a lot in a statistical way. In essence it’s a very emotional story. It’s about people leaving their families and a culture they know, and a social life which is probably a lot better than the one they will have in Morecambe or Thetford, where they never go out and they send all their money back home.

“It’s an enormous change of life, and I felt the way to tell this is not through interviews, but to try and experience it through the eyes of somebody who goes on the long journey from their country and comes here.”

How did you find the people who make up your film? It must be a gamble placing your film on the shoulders of non-professional actors.

“I had a feeling that [lead actress] Ai Qin Lin would be able to stand up to the test. She’s been through a lot, and she was an illegal immigrant here for eight years. We did quite a bit of undercover work together.

“She was pretty tough. Quite a lot of the Chinese get spooked and think that snakeheads [gangmasters] will be after them. They get paranoid and don’t trust people who aren’t Chinese very much.

“Ai Qin wasn’t like that. There were a couple of people I had hired, but I got rid of them at the last minute, because I thought there would be lots of problems with them.”

How did you manage to shoot footage in China?

“In the end we went as tourists and shot our own material, because it was proving to be so tricky.

“Initially we went over with a teeny little high-def camera. That scene in the film where Ai Qin meets her son again at the airport was in fact Ai Qin’s return to China, and the first time she’d seen her son for five years.

“Ai Qin stopped right in front of the police, in the worst possible place, but they didn’t notice anything.”

Why did you decide to structure the film in the way you did by beginning at the end point?

“That was how it was written in the script. The story needed to be set up with some jeopardy at the beginning, otherwise it would be very sequential. You wouldn’t have the sense of crisis in the story.

“I wanted to ask the question from the opening images, who are all these people who are stuck on this vehicle in the sea, and where are they from.

“I remember when I heard about the real-life tragedy of the 23 cockle-pickers, I wondered where they had come from and how had they got there. So that was a natural starting point for an English audience.”

Why did you pick this title?

“This title was what the Chinese call us and it also refers to our view of immigrants. Even if it’s not immediately apparent to the audience, it has a resonance I think.

“I’m actually doing a film at the moment about the massacre in Hidditha, and I’m trying to use it as a microcosm of the situation in Iraq, and it’s very hard to think of exactly the right title for it.”

What interests you in blurring the boundaries between documentary and fiction?

“I think we have entered a phase in cinema that because of the changes in equipment and technology you don’t need to have those gigantic crews and set-ups.

“My tradition is to make things as real as possible, to use real people and to minimize interference and to shoot in long takes to give the illusion of real time.

“If you look at traditional feature films, they are edited in a certain way, they use the shot/reverse shot technique, which I think is an unsophisticated way of telling the story, and people are now used to seeing the style of ‘reality’ television or the style of the news.

“Shooting styles are changing, and the influence of the theatre and the ‘big’ performance is diminishing. There’s an artificiality about most feature films, which is why people turn to documentaries which are often more exciting.

“If nothing else, George Bush has encouraged a whole new generation of filmmakers, whose political consciousness has come to the fore.”

Posted by Thin White Duke

This entry was posted on Monday, April 2nd, 2007 at 9:28 am and is filed under National, News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.