DIRECTOR INTERVIEW

BEN HOPKINS
Thursday 30 November 2006

BBC Four: When and how did you come across the story of the Pamir Kirghiz?
Ben Hopkins: I was making Footprints, my previous documentary, in 2002 in Afghanistan when I met an Afghan academic called Akhtarjan Kohistani. He told me the story of the Pamir Kirghiz (or Kyrgyz) and it sounded incredible - I thought it just had to be a film. It took a bit of time to get an introduction to the leaders of the tribe but once we got that we went over there to see them and were struck rather quickly with their wonderful sense of humour. We thought we should try and do something that tells their story seriously but also reflects their sense of humour and, indeed, my sense of humour. The documentary that I'd just done, Footprints, was extremely serious because it was about cluster bomb victims, so I was quite gratified that I could exercise my humorous side as a filmmaker this time.

BBC Four: At the start of the film you say that you don't want to make a film about the Pamir Kirghiz, but one with the Pamir Kirghiz. Why did you decide to take this approach?
Ben Hopkins: I grew up watching anthropological documentaries on TV with my Mum on the sofa in the 1970s and 80s. And while there were some really great ones, a lot of them had what I would call 'pseudo objectivity' - pretending that the film crew was never actually there and that all these people arrived with this weird equipment and it had absolutely no effect on the people that they were filming. All that stuff just gets excised from the film as being unsuitable and anything which has the pretence of objectivity is allowed. Obviously I understand why that was done, but it does tend to treat people as exhibits if you don't include your personal interaction with them. You don't generally meet people and then put them in a glass cage and watch them to see what they do. It's the interaction itself which is interesting and I think it's very rewarding in our film to watch that happening.

BBC Four: Is there any filmmaker whose way of working has particularly inspired you?
Ben Hopkins: Werner Herzog is that person. I don't think that my films particularly resemble his work, but I'm certainly influenced by him. A few people have spotted that. I don't think Werner would ever make a film as glib or as silly as mine. He does do silly occasionally, but he does it in a much more weighty way. He's my hero, so to speak.

BBC Four: The film at times seems to be as much about the processes of filmmaking as it is about the tribe. Was this something that you were conscious of from the start or did it develop as you were making the film?
Ben Hopkins: It was part of the original proposal that the 'making of' would be included, which I think put off a lot of commissioning editors because it seemed rather trivial or self-indulgent. I had that concern as well actually: that it would be narcissistic or just a bit boring, because a lot of filmmaking is boring. We shot maybe 30 hours of 'making-of' material: you know, the usual stuff like us setting up shots and people making tea and two people arguing about something on the edges of the shoot, and in the end I think we used about five minutes of that. It's incredibly distilled. We just took the best minutes, either the most revealing or the most entertaining of those hours of boring s*** that we filmed. Many of the commissioners were also put off by the idea of reconstruction because a lot of reconstruction in documentary is done rather badly. But I'm a trained fiction director and I know what I'm doing. Much more, actually, when I'm doing the reconstructions than when I'm doing the documentary elements because I have much more experience setting up shots to look like Soviet silent cinema than I do of conducting an interview. So for me it's the other way round, but they didn't really take that point.

BBC Four: You did manage, however, to use the reconstruction and behind-the-scenes footage in a thoughtful way.
Ben Hopkins: It is a record of collaboration - between me and Ekber Kutlu mainly - between two artists and two different worlds. I couldn't have done it without him and he couldn't have done it without me. He's very glad that his tribe have this visual representation of their history, and that it's been travelling around the world in festivals and on television, and I'm delighted that it's done very well for me. It's very much a mutual collaboration and we're showing that process in the film.

BBC Four: Am I right that the film was shot completely in Turkey? Did you consider at any point travelling back to Afghanistan with some of the Pamir Kirghiz?
Ben Hopkins: We wanted to shoot in Afghanistan but we didn't raise enough money to go there. We couldn't raise anything like our ideal budget so we had to re-think what we were doing and the first thing to go was the idea of going to Afghanistan. Insurance is expensive in Afghanistan.

BBC Four: Do you think that might have worked in the film's favour in the end? It captures the nostalgia of the Pamir for their homeland, and the fact that they are unlikely ever to return.
Ben Hopkins: It does have that effect and that potentially works in its favour. Of course it's a hypothesis that I'll never be able to test because we never will shoot the material that we would have shot in Afghanistan. It might have made it an even better documentary - I've no idea. Certainly it would have been interesting, but we might have found that we'd fly to Afghanistan and get up to where they live, which is incredibly difficult to get to, shoot all that stuff and then find that we wanted to cut it all out in the cutting room anyway. I really don't know if it's been for the good or the bad of the film. It was a shame for me not to go there because I actually rather liked Afghanistan when I was there and I would like to go back some time.

BBC Four: You mentioned that the Pamir Kirghiz are happy to have this record of their culture. Did you screen the film for them?
Ben Hopkins: We screened a late rough cut in November of last year just to check that everything was ok with them and then it premiered at Berlin. The second festival it played at was Istanbul, where the three brothers and all the Istanbul-based Pamir Kirghiz turned up and we did a Q&A with the brothers and they were very pleased with it. The whole tribe has now seen the film, and I'm going back to see them on 13 December, just for a day, to deliver all the press clippings and festival programmes so that they can see where it's been. Then I'll find out from the rank and file folk what they thought of it.

BBC Four: This is your third feature film. How did the experience compare to making your previous films, which were both fictional?
Ben Hopkins: Making a fiction film and making a documentary is different, but in many ways it's the same process: it's like two different kinds of cheese - cheddar and camembert are very different, but they are both cheese. We shot 37 Uses for a Dead Sheep quite quickly - in three weeks - but then I shot The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz in three weeks. I think what it's very different from is shooting my first film, Simon Magus, which was in Cinemascope, 35mm, with big actors and classically shot. You achieve 10 shots a day, pretty much, and cover one and a half minutes of screen time a day. 37 Uses is very different from that, but it's not much different from shooting Tomas Katz, which was a small crew, shot very quickly, semi-improvised and so on.