It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive (32 page)

‘Don’t I?’ replied Ken.

And with that he put down his glass of wine, got up out of his chair, and walked off down the aisle and out of the cinema, leaving me there on stage like the proverbial spare dick at a wedding, with all eyes upon me waiting to see what we did now.

There was a horrible silence. I had no idea what to do.
I still wasn’t sure whether this was actually a joke. Was Ken suddenly going to reappear, laughing at his madcap pranks?

I waited.

The audience waited.

We all waited together.

We all waited together some more.

Apparently he
wasn’t
coming back.

‘Er, right …’ I said, with a mixture of fear and embarrassment.’Well, I think that perhaps we’d better just start the movie. Roll the film!’ And with that I scuttled up the aisle, out through the exit, and into the nearest toilet where I hid, awash with shame and self-loathing.

After a few moments, and several splashes of cold water to the face, I ventured out into the foyer where Ken was sitting, smiling happily, apparently without a care in the world.

‘Ken!’ I almost screamed, ‘What the
hell
was all that about?’

‘All
what
about?’ he replied with bemused amusement.

‘All that walking out in the middle of the interview!’ I gasped, as if it somehow needed explaining.’What was all
that
about?’

‘Oh, that? I just thought they’d all heard enough and they wanted to watch the film.’

‘But Ken,’ I pleaded helplessly, ‘we were in the middle of an interview. They’ve
paid
to see you talk about the film. And you just
walked off and left me there on stage
.’

‘Did I?’ mused Ken, clearly failing to grasp the severity of the situation.

‘Yes you did!’

‘Ah,’ he chortled.’Well, never mind.’

‘
Never mind!
How can I
not mind
? We need to go back on after the film and do some more, otherwise it’s going to look
terrible
and people will be … well, they’ll be cross. Or disgruntled. Or worse.’

‘Worse than “disgruntled”?’ said Ken in quietly mocking tones.’Well I thought it was funny.’

‘
Funny?
’

‘Yes. Quite funny.’

‘
Quite funny?
’

‘Yes, quite funny. I thought so. But if you insist, we’ll go on again after the film.’

Which we did. And guess what happened? Ken answered a few more questions, then got bored and walked off stage
again
.

Which presumably was also ‘quite funny’.

Looking back, I can only conclude that Ken was testing me – albeit playfully – and I presume that our subsequent friendship has somehow been built upon this trial by fire. In which case, it was all worth it.

Other hostile encounters have not yielded such positive rewards. Take the Nick Broomfield incident which made the pages of
Private Eye
and sparked a really petty feud that would fester away for the best part of a decade – at least from my side (in the words of St Moz, ‘Beware, I bear more grudges, than lonely High Court judges …’).

Here’s what happened.

Back in 1998, alongside doing reviews on Simon Mayo’s show on Radio One, I also presented the station’s weekly
film programme, and functioned as an all-round low-rent ‘movie-tsar’. In an attempt to stave off any suggestions that I had ‘sold out’ by working for the nation’s number one pop station, I had made a point of being ‘honest’ with film-makers about their work – an honesty which frequently bordered upon rudeness. In the case of Broomfield, who was a very successful documentary maker, I had enjoyed many of his previous films, particularly
The Leader
,
His Driver and the Driver’s Wife
in which he efficiently mocked white supremacist Eugene Terre’Blanche simply by documenting his lengthy attempts to interview the creep. This laid the template for a series of films (
Tracking Down Maggie
;
Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer
;
Fetishes
) in which Broomfield effectively took centre stage, his bumbling
faux naïf
shtick providing a comic narrative backbone which prefigured the work of Michael Moore in the US, helping to popularise documentaries, for which we should all be grateful.

With
Kurt & Courtney
, however, that joke wasn’t funny any more. One theme of the film was an investigation into (clearly spurious) allegations that various persons – including Courtney Love – had somehow colluded in the demise of Kurt Cobain, the Nirvana frontman who famously blew his own head off with a shotgun. The film concluded that such allegations were probably bunk, but en route offered a platform for a menagerie of unreliable assholes to make outrageous and unsubstantiated claims about Love.

Unsurprisingly, Love had declined to co-operate with Broomfield, a refusal which (it seemed to me) the film-maker had taken as a licence to throw metaphorical
mud at her. Watching
Kurt & Courtney
, I got the strong impression that this ‘rockumentary’ was less about the question of who killed Kurt Cobain (I think it was Kurt, in the garden house, with the shotgun – I win!) than about how cross Broomfield was with Courtney Love for not cooperating with his film.

Since Broomfield had become known for pursuing recalcitrant interviewees with headphones and boom mike in hand (a persona he later mocked in a series of TV adverts) I figured he must be pretty tough-skinned, and therefore resolved at the outset to tell him just how much I didn’t like
Kurt & Courtney
. I thought he would appreciate such refreshing straight talk, and over the years I’ve found this policy to be fairly productive. For example, when interviewing pop-video maestro turned feature-film-maker Garth Jennings for
The Culture Show
I felt morally obliged to tell him that he had made ‘a complete Horlicks’ of
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
, to which he responded politely, ‘I see. Am I allowed to tell you to fuck off?’

‘Of course,’ I replied.

‘Right then, fuck off.’

After which we proceeded with the interview on exceptionally genial terms.

I also told Leonardo DiCaprio that I forgave him for
Titanic
which he seemed to take well, if you interpret his silence as comedic rather than stroppy.

Broomfield, however, simply took the hump, becoming more and more irate about being taken to task by some grubby oik from a pop radio station who should presumably
have been giving him an easy ride and lots of free publicity. After about seven minutes of mildly confrontational badinage, he rolled his eyes and declared that my entire problem with his movie was that I simply didn’t have a sense of humour.

At which point I said, in what I believed to be extremely measured tones, ‘I just don’t see what’s funny about accusing a woman of being complicit in the death of the father of her child.’

And that was it.

The next moment Broomfield, who had just made a movie about a star who wouldn’t speak to him, got up out of his chair and stormed out of the room, followed in Keystone Cops comedy fashion by a bumbling radio reporter with a microphone to whom he was now refusing to speak.

‘I can’t
believe
you’re walking out!’ I yelped as he stomped through the corridors of his PR’s offices and out into the street.’I can’t believe you’re
walking out of an interview
…’

But he was. And in a moment he was gone. As was my career, probably.

In the embarrassed silence that followed Broomfield’s departure I was struck by a clawing sense of terror that the whole thing was my fault and I had
failed
to do my job – which was to interview a famous film-maker and get him to say interesting things about his work. Looking at the counter on the tape machine I realised that I had recorded less than eight minutes of material, one or two of which would have been taken up by the unbroadcastable sounds of doors banging and feet scuttling.

This was not good. This was not good
at all
.

I started to pack my bags.

Broomfield’s PR appeared at the door.

‘What
happened
?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said shaking my head.’I told him I didn’t think the film was funny and he stormed out.’

‘Oh bloody hell,’ she sighed in exasperation – whether at me or him I wasn’t sure. More likely me.

I trudged back up Portland Street, past Broadcasting House, and into the warren-like surroundings of Yalding House from whose stuffy basements Radio One kept the nation’s pop pulse pounding. With a growing sense of doom and despondency I handed the tape over to my producer.’You listen to it,’ I said.’You tell me whether I cocked up. If you think I did, I’ll quit. Sorry.’

And with that I went off to hide in the toilet – something which had helped the last time a film-maker walked out on me.

After about ten minutes (plenty of time for my producer to listen to the
whole
tape) I slunk sheepishly back into the studio wondering whether it was too late in life to take up teacher training or explore some similarly worthy character-building career outside of radio broadcasting.

I looked like death. My producer just looked nonplussed.

‘Bit of an overreaction,’ she said, non-committally.

‘By who? Me?’

‘No,
him
, the director.’

‘So you don’t think it was my fault.’

‘What, that he overreacted?’

‘That he
stormed out of the interview
. You don’t think it was
my
fault?’

‘Well, you were spiky and petulant and you weren’t very nice about his movie.’

‘But I didn’t
like
his movie. I was only telling him the truth. I can’t
lie
about it.’

‘Why not?’

‘
Why not?
Because I
can’t
. And he’s going to find out what I think of the movie when I review it anyway. I can’t just sit there and let him think I liked it and then slag it off on the radio.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because that would be
awful
.’

‘More awful than having him storm out of the interview?’

‘
What?
Yes of
course
“more awful” than that! More awful than
anything
.’

‘Well, there you go then – what are you worrying about?’

‘Pardon?’

‘You’ve just told me that letting him think you liked the movie would be “more awful” than him storming out of the interview. And having listened to the tape I’m pretty sure he now
knows
you didn’t like it. So what’s the problem?’

‘The problem is that I made him
storm out
.’

‘Which was quite funny.’

This hadn’t occurred to me.

‘Was it?’

‘Yes. Quite funny.’

‘Hmmm. Let me hear it.’

And so we sat there and listened to the tape together.
There was the sound of me setting up the microphone and testing the levels; there was Broomfield being suave and nonchalant when he came into the room, there was me telling him I didn’t like his film; there was him getting irritated and telling me I had no sense of humour, there was me being sanctimonious and self-righteous (there’s no denying that’s how it sounded); and finally there was him throwing all his toys out of the cot and refusing to play any more.

It was, indeed, ‘quite funny’.

‘My advice,’ said my producer, ‘is to just play the whole thing. Put in a few clips, add some music – it’ll be fine. And funny.’

And so we did.

And it was.

Funny enough, in fact, that John Peel (who once referred to me as his ‘favourite film critic’ – a thrill tempered only by his admission that he couldn’t actually think of any others) wrote a column about it in the
Radio Times
, which was then the biggest-selling weekly magazine in the country. Peel, who had met and
liked
Courtney Love, wrote entertainingly about Broomfield being ‘the biter, bit’, and made much of his inability to deal with having the tables turned on him, a line also taken by
Private Eye
, albeit in rather more sarcastic tones. Overall, the general opinion seemed to be that Broomfield had indeed overreacted which was good because it meant that I probably wouldn’t get fired. At least not yet.

Several years later, Broomfield was on 5 Live talking about his career which had gone from strength to strength in the
wake of our brief on-air altercation. I wasn’t in the studio that day, but Simon Mayo inevitably brought up the subject of the
Kurt & Courtney
walkout and asked the director if he had anything to say about it. Broomfield replied that the reason he had walked out was nothing to do with my line of questioning but was entirely due to the fact that I smelled really bad. Apparently he had found it intolerable being in the same room with my stinky breath and simply had to dash out to get some fresh air.

In his defence, I have to concede that there may be some truth in this. I have never considered a Mary Archer-like fragrance to be an essential part of film criticism, and have probably spent too little time worrying about personal hygiene, partly on the advice of Wreckless Eric who once memorably complained in song about people who ‘partially stifle [their] natural odour with underarm spray’ (ahh, they don’t write songs like that any more). So perhaps when people tell me that my opinions stink (as they frequently do) they are speaking literally rather than metaphorically. Perhaps I really am the world’s most offensive critic in every sense, the film hack equivalent of John Waters’ scratch ‘n’ sniff masterpiece
Polyester
. Coming soon to a cinema near you ‘
The Mark Kermode Story
… In glorious Odorama!’

(Hang on, I think that’s Jason Isaac’s agent on the phone telling me his client is pulling out …)

More importantly, Broomfield’s comment reassured me that our long-standing run-in was indeed nothing more than a childish spat, something which pleased me since I have been a fan of much of his work since. I particularly liked his
docudrama
Ghosts
, a very moving piece (‘inspired by real events’) about the tragic deaths of Chinese cockle pickers at Morecambe Bay. In fact, I met Broomfield last year for the first time since 1998 in a toilet at a swanky London venue where I was co-presenting the
Index on Censorship
Awards. We shook hands, smiled politely, and made friendly small talk, the bad blood between us apparently forgotten.