Page 6 - 20_Bafta Academy_Catherine Zeta-Jones_ok

first person
reality bites
Formats are a commercial reality, but filmmaker Nick O’Dwyer argues the time is right to try and conjure up more documentary tales of the unexpected.
Grim. Bleak. Chilling. Disturbing. If someone wrote this about your work, you’d probably be off to the doctor’s for a bumper box of Prozac. For years, I took it as a compliment and revelled in the great tradition of Documentary Miserabilism. I was The Grim Man.
I made films about people shooting each other, about crackheads murdering smack- heads in various horrible ways, about people betrayed in love and life, about merciless criminals tormenting hapless pensioners, about electric chair deaths.
I made them with modish black and white flashback scenes, with choppy super 8, with ominous, echoey sound- tracks. Telly critics wrote, various- ly, how they wept tears of rage, how their blood boiled, how extraordinarily depressed they felt at all this mayhem and human disconnection.
When the poor bloke from The Guardian described the latest gloomfest as “a thoroughly demoralising, relentlessly appalling study of cruelty and lying at its most ruthless” I chuckled and kept the newspaper cutting.
Then I got sick of it.
I don’t really know why. Maybe it was simply an overload of hor- ror: there’s only so much you can take. For me, it was a year spent with chaotic crackheads on one side of the Pennines and bogus caller criminals at the other end of the M62 that turned the tide.
After that, I started looking for stories that had some quality of redemption about them, ones that had love and hope and sweetness.
Maybe it was about lazy pro- gramme making: it’s very easy to make sad TV. If you put someone on talking about how their mum died and put appropriate music behind it, people will describe it as powerful and moving. It’s a lot harder to make something with some wit, hope and comedy about it.
4
Maybe it was about growing up – a particular balance of brain chemistry in Brits in their late twenties and thirties. After that, our hairlines recede, we get contented and turn into old farts cooing about how telly’s gone to the dogs. Or we get angry and bitter and get taken away under restraint.
I don’t think I was unusual. Now, I see a lot of film proposals from documentary makers in their early thirties – the time when they’re likely to be getting their first solo commissions – and all too many of them focus on death, destruction, cruelty, betrayal. I feel depressed reading them.
Maybe it’s the broadcasters. For years, British factual telly had an appetite for horror and per- versity. You could send pro- gramme proposals celebrating the human experience of love until you were blue in the face to Channel 4 or the BBC. No dice.
Send one about necrophilia and it would be Open Sesame for the cool glass doors of Horseferry Road. Ditto people shagging horses. Ditto lesbian S&M murderesses.
Maybe it’s the kinds of people who want to make documen- taries in Britain. The ‘do’ makers coming through now grew up with that sort of stuff – among it, my own miserabilist efforts. Maybe it moulded them or per- haps it self-selected the kinds of people who’d want to make documentaries: gloomy bastards.
Poor buggers. They must be baffled now. The current vogue is for formatted ‘manipulated doc- umentary’ giving us the endless tide of Faking Its and Wife Swaps, Job Swaps, House Swaps and, no doubt, Kid Swaps and Heart and Lung swaps. The poor old miser- abilists are – perhaps appropri- ately – left out in the dark.
The tidal wave of formatted programmes derives from hard commercial realities – a coinci-
dence of interest between the broadcasters and their suppliers. Production companies prefer
programming with a recognis- able format that they own and can either sell or exploit over- seas: that’s how they make money. Obviously, they want bulk commissions.
The motive on the demand side is equally clear cut. Factual commissioning editors are, essen- tially, risk averse and scared of a bollocking from the nasty bas- tard along the corridor. They want to know the films will be on time, on budget. They don’t want surprises.