It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive

by Mark Kermode

  For the record, I’d also like to state that since a major regime change at the end of the nineties the BBFC have been doing a sterling job of allowing adults to decide what they watch whilst still policing legally unacceptable images with discretion, insight and patience. This is good news for UK filmgoers, but has a downside for me because the Board’s thoughtful vigilance means that there are now precious few occasions on which I find it legitimate or justifiable to walk out of a movie. Which is a shame, because there are few things quite as satisfying as being able to storm indignantly out of a really terrible film. At the Cannes Film Festival (of which yet more later) the seats in some screening rooms are of the flip-down variety which make a pleasing banging sound when swiftly vacated. During particularly ‘problematic’ screenings one can thrill to an increasing crescendo of percussive clatters which invariably starts with a random single beat before advancing toward a free-form jazz drum solo of thumping disgust. That sound is one of the few things I actually like about Cannes.

  So, to answer a question I get asked all the time, yes I really do watch all those movies from beginning to end, even the ones I really hate. Even Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Very occasionally, I confess, I have succumbed to sleep, which I suppose is the psychological equivalent of walking out – your body’s still there, but your mind has left the building. A recent example would be the really very boring ‘comedy’ Year One which failed to raise a titter despite the presence of Jack Black and Michael Cera, both of whom I generally find innately humorous. But the film was a stiff – such a bore, in fact, that when Radio One film critic James King lost all patience and decided to take a toilet break (another variation on the ‘walkout’, offering only temporary escape) he had to wake me from my slumbers in the seat next to him to let him out. Film executive Jack Warner used to judge movies by how often he had to go to the bathroom, famously calling Bonnie and Clyde ‘a three-piss picture’. Now that’s what I call constructive criticism.

  Sadly, my rule about never walking out of movies is not always reciprocated by the film-makers. While I will sit through any movie from beginning to end on the basis that if you walk out you’re bound to miss the one thing that would have made the viewing worthwhile, film-makers seem to feel less concerned about getting to the end of me.

  I received my first proper lesson in film-maker walkouts from Ken Russell (who now ranks as one of the very few film directors whom I consider a friend) in Southampton in the mid-nineties. Having written umpteen laudatory pieces about Russell’s outrageously outré work for magazines like Sight & Sound, I was asked to chair an onstage discussion with Ken at the newly gleaming Harbour Lights cinema down by Southampton waterfront. The talk would accompany a screening of Russell’s fiery 1971 masterpiece The Devils which had famously proved unpalatable to censors and studio executives alike and had accordingly suffered extensive cuts. Inspired by Aldous Huxley’s ‘real life’ account of alleged demonic possession in seventeenth-century France, The Devils was a profoundly political work which raged against the unholy marriage of church and state (Russell called it ‘my most – indeed my only – political film’). Oliver Reed delivered his finest performance as unruly priest Urbain Grandier who was burned at the stake after rallying the citizens of Loudun to stand firm against the destruction of their city walls. The film’s most flamboyant sequences depicted theatrically blasphemous orgies staged by the Ursuline nuns who claimed that Grandier had possessed their bodies, spurred on by the twisted passions of Sister Jeanne of the Angels – a shrieking tour de force performance from theatrical stalwart Vanessa Redgrave.

  According to Russell, chief censor John Trevelyan told him early on that he would have to lose his most prized sequence in which the nuns tore down and ravished a huge effigy of the crucified Christ. But Trevelyan’s reservations were nothing compared to the anger of the film’s American backers who considered even the depiction of pubic hair beyond the pale, and demanded that the film be further butchered for American release. Russell recalls the reaction of the stateside studio suits to their first viewing as being one of ‘utter outrage. They called me to their suite in the hotel, and they just let me have it,’ he told me.’One of them, who looked like a gangster, got up and said, “I have chased every broad from here to Chicago and I have never seen the likes of this disgusting shit!” They really hated the movie.’

  When I asked Ken what had happened to the treasured ‘rape of Christ’ sequence which he insisted contained ‘some of my best work’ he told me dejectedly that it was ‘gone, lost, forever probably’. In a moment of rash bravado I told him that I would find that missing sequence and restore it to its rightful place in the film. And eventually I did just that, prodding Warner Brothers into producing a tin of film which contained several censored sequences including the ‘rape’ which was duly reinserted into the movie by ace editor Michael Bradsell. The restored director’s cut of The Devils was premiered at the National Film Theatre in London in 2004 as part of a ‘History of Horror’ season which I co-curated with Linda. It got a standing ovation and was duly earmarked for future DVD release. But then the Americans got wind of what we were up to and, in an uncanny echo of their actions back in the early seventies, effectively banned the intact movie all over again. At the time of writing, Ken’s cut of The Devils is still gathering dust on a shelf in Hollywood, despite having long since been given a clean bill of health by the UK censors. All of which means that the only thing preventing you from watching one of the greatest British movies of the past fifty years is the peevishness of an American studio. So much for the First Amendment.

  Anyway, let me climb down from my soapbox and return to the mid-nineties when my friendship with Ken was still in its very early stages, and the idea of a director’s cut of the The Devils seemed even more remote than the possibility of an Austrian body-building sci-fi movie star someday becoming ‘The Governator’.

  So there I was at the Harbour Lights cinema, on stage with Ken Russell, a packed audience hanging on his every word as he laid the groundwork for the screening which was to follow. He was in ebullient mood, a glass of red wine in one hand, the other making grandiose gestures as he conjured riveting anecdotes from thin air like the master storyteller he is. Inevitably the conversation turned to the restriction of artistic freedom at which point I naïvely invited Ken to hold forth on the evils of censorship. But, ever the contrarian, Ken decided to do just the opposite.

  ‘The thing is,’ he told the attendant throng, ‘that people assume that I must be anti-censorship, but I’m not. Far from it. I really believe in censorship.’

  There was an awkward silence in which the audience and I tried to figure out whether this was a joke, whether Ken was pulling our collective legs.

  He wasn’t.

  ‘Censorship is essential,’ he went on, warming to his theme.’You have to have it.’

  ‘Um, why do you “have to have it”?’ I asked tentatively, my woolly liberal sensibilities somewhat befuddled by this turn of events.

  ‘Well, because otherwise people will just do whatever they want,’ declared Ken, sounding slightly impatient.

  ‘And that would be bad because …?’ I ventured pathetically.

  ‘Because we know what happens when people do exactly what they want,’ he replied firmly.

  At which point I did the very thing that lawyers are always told never to do in court: i. e. to ask a question to which you do not already know the answer.

  ‘And what is it that we “know” happens?’ I blundered.

  ‘Well, for example, we “know” that people have died as a result of Natural Born Killers …’

  Ken was referring to a series of frankly scandalous news stories which had appeared in the preceding months alleging that Oliver Stone’s controversial rehash of Badlands, Bonnie and Clyde et al. had inspired copycat crimes in America and France. These stories would later be roundly debunked, and today Ken insists that he never said such a thing anyway, and even if he did (which he is s
ure he didn’t) he only did so to get a reaction out of me because I was becoming boring.

  In fact, I was becoming rattled – enough to take my eye off the ball and to misread Ken’s mischievous mood spectacularly.

  ‘Oh you don’t believe that,’ I scoffed in an entirely inappropriate and dismissively offhand manner.

  ‘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 al
l.

  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.’