Nick Broomfield Q&A

The documentarian discusses his powerful new feature film, 'Ghosts'.

Jan 11 2007

Famed for documentaries like 'Kurt and Courtney' and 'The Leader, His Driver and The Driver's Wife', Nick Broomfield has now made a drama, 'Ghosts', which revisits the deaths of 23 Chinese cocklers in Morecambe Bay in 2004. To make the film, 58-year-old Broomfield cast real Chinese illegal immigrants and worked undercover himself. He's currently about to shoot a new drama set in Iraq.

As a documentary-maker, were you tempted to include talking-heads in 'Ghosts' – like Michael Winterbottom did recently in 'Road to Guantánamo'?

Not really, no. I didn't feel it needed it. I think on the current film I'm doing, which is about the massacre at Hadifa in Iraq [where US marines killed 24 Iraqi civilians in November 2005], I had thought initially of having talking-heads of the actual guys. But then I had such problems finding anyone, marines in particular, who was happy to talk. No one wanted to talk about it, at least not on camera.

In 'Ghosts', I shot a lot of material undercover on a surveillance camera, and up until the last cut there were elements of that in the final film. Myself and Ai Qin [the film's lead actress, formerly an illegal immigrant who was granted legal status two years ago] went undercover, picking spring onions and working in a factory. But it was too much like a different film and I was persuaded to take that out of the finished film.

You pretended to be an illegal worker?

I was pretending to be a South African, an Afrikaaner out of work, which is about the only sort of white English-speaking person who does that work. Ai Qin and I were a fairly unlikely couple, but we came in through the illegal route and paid money to gangmasters to get us the work and so on.

And you filmed while working?

Yes, I had a camera in a pair of glasses that were on my head. The problem with shooting and working at the same time was that I was working too slow. Most of it was piecework that we were doing and I was constantly getting fired for not keeping up.

It sounds like your research methods were similar to making documentaries.

Very, very similar, yes. In fact, one probably does more research for this. But it was invaluable having Ai Qin, who was a real illegal immigrant, with a kid back in China. Obviously, I could learn a lot from her. On my next film, I'm casting real ex-marines to be the marines. They've been through the training; they know exactly what happens.

Where will you shoot the next one?

In Jordan. It's the closest safe place to Iraq. Again, it's using a similar process: casting Iraqis to be the Iraqis.

Have you been to Iraq?

I haven't. I haven't been to Hadifa. It's just too dangerous. I think it would be asking for trouble at this particular time. Normally, of course, I would have done.

Did you meet any of the Chinese cocklers who survived?

We met one survivor. He was an illegal immigrant and very frightened of what immigration was going to do to him. He was terrified of the publicity. He gave us a good sense of what had taken place and also the fact that the gangmaster was just a little guy who had the misfortune of being at the wrong place at the wrong time and ended up doing 14 years for it. He was blamed for the whole thing.

You show a fight that the Chinese had with some British cockle-pickers soon before they died. Did you meet any British cocklers?

We met a lot of cocklers. There' someone up there called Mr Cockle who's a buyer of cockles, who's down on the beach everyday and weighs the cockles when the cocklers bring them to him. He pays them on the spot in cash. He has thousands of pounds in a safe in the back of his truck with a couple of guys with clubs in case anyone tries to steal it. It's very Wild West.

The British cocklers we used in the film are real. When we were filming that scene a bunch of cocklers came and threatened us. I was told afterwards that they were in fact the people who were responsible for beating up the Chinese who drowned.

And you shot some brief scenes in China, too, without a permit?

We originally applied for permission, but we ran out of time. It wasn't that we were doing something very defiant though. Also, I didn't want to compromise Ai Qin and her family. I wanted to use them and the village she came from in the film. We expected a lot of trouble, but there wasn't any really. The scene we shot at the airport happened right in front of two policemen, so we used a small digital camera so as to look like tourists.
It all sounds terribly easy now. But at the time we were shitting ourselves, imagining that we were going to get arrested and the rest of it.

'Ghosts' opens tomorrow.

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