I’ve always been of the opinion that Courtney Love has been given a hard time of it by the media. There’s an uncomfortable gender inequality watching her being pilloried for the sex and drugs and rock n’ roll lifestyle when we’re all prepared to clasp our sides upon hearing that Uncle Keef fell out of a palm tree.
There’s also something terribly Jacobean about our attitude to rock widows. Heaven forbid they ever find happiness or a sex-life again.
Nick Broomfield, author of the scathing portrait of the Hole singer found in the documentary Kurt & Courtney, is, unsurprisingly, not inclined to agree with me.
“I think you’re being extraordinarily generous about her,” he says, sounding nothing if not taken aback. “You are so kind to her. If you knew the things I couldn’t use for the documentary. Just look what happened to her since. I do feel very sorry for Courtney so I don’t want to reveal any more dreadful things about her. But there are thousands of stories about her. Type her name into Google and there are a hundred worse stories than what I said in my movie.”
We don’t believe everything thrown up by that search engine, surely?
“That’s fair,” he replies. “But I always felt Courtney’s relationship with Kurt has a great deal in common with Biggie and Tupac. That film offers the same kind of story. Courtney and Biggie both want to control everything. It’s not about love – Courtney had a very ambivalent relationship with her husband – it’s because of money I believe. Greed motivated Biggie to continue to have a business relationship with Suge Knight, the man who killed Tupac. I feel that Courtney was less than interested in Kurt towards the end of his life. I don’t have it in for her. She’s had to fight all her life because of a miserable upbringing. I actually hope the second part of her life is better for her, But she has not done herself any favours and these things catch up with you.”
Uniquely for a documentarian, Nick Broomfield, now 58, is almost as famous as his subjects. Even Sesame Street boasts a puppet inspired by him. Though Nick attended a nice Quaker school and studied law at Cardiff, he rebelliously progressed to National Film School. His first films, including Who Cares? (1971), Juvenile Liaison (1975) and Behind The Rent Strike (1979) were socially minded and studiously cinema verite in style. Since 1988 when he decided to appear in Driving Me Crazy and explore the nature of the documentary process – the failed interviews, the red herrings, the arguments – he and his boom mic have been a permanent feature in his filmmaking.
“I do see a lot of imitators,” he laughs. “And it’s very flattering because I’m a bit of a bumblefoot. My films are about breaking through that wall, placing the documentary maker as a character in the film. It is an oddball approach but it enables my experience to be part of the film. When I was first making films, it was like going into a boxing ring with one arm tied behind your back. It was a revelation. Now it’s quite a mainstream and popular style. I’m almost bored with it.”
So, is Nick Broomfield a sensationalist?
“I never think my films are sensationalist,” he says. “With the Fleiss film, it was more a look at her weird relationships. I thought I made a weird home movie that played up her humanity. There was some sensation in it, but it was funny and very accurate.”
With a Broomfield retrospective due on DVD, featuring Kurt & Courtney, Biggie And Tupac and the two films he made with Aileen Wuornos before her execution, he’s in little doubt as to who his favourite documentary subject was.
“Meeting a lot of people is the real pleasure of the job,” he says. “I was very fond of Kurt’s aunt Mary, but the person I grew closest to was Aileen. I cherish the emails she sent me.”
He may have bonded with a serial killer, but he had a rather more intimidating time making Tracking Down Maggie (1994) on the tail of the former British PM.
“That was the most terrifying experience of my career,” he recalls. “I would say the people surrounding Thatcher back then were by far the most frightening people I have ever met. We were looking at the underhand arms deals her son, Mark Thatcher, was involved in. Once you get into that murky world anything can happen. Suge Knight has nothing on those guys.”