printable version

NICK FRASER INTERVIEW
Storyville Series Editor

October 2004

Nick Fraser has been series editor of Storyville since its first run of just six films on BBC Two in 1997. Here he discusses the new documentary renaissance and how filmmakers from around the world pitch their ideas to Storyville.

Please note that some of the information in the following text - the number and scheduling of films, commissioning strategies, and so on - may have changed in the years since this interview was conducted. We have left this here as a snapshot of Storyville in 2004. For more recent interviews, please follow the links on the Storyville homepage.

BBC Four: How did Storyville start and what were its intentions?
Nick Fraser: Storyville was born out of another BBC programme with an awful name: Fine Cut. That tells you that 10 years ago the BBC had a high-minded, somewhat arty, specialist conception of documentaries. The BBC would run ordinary documentaries - but they also wanted a few that were extraordinary or masterpieces.

After Mark Thompson became controller of BBC Two we wanted to change the name, and Storyville fit very well. Practically, it fit into TV guides; but it also indicated that here was a place for any sort of programme - different styles, different attitudes, different subjects - the only requirement being that they should all be strongly narrative.

BBC Four: What was the environment like for international documentaries when Storyville started?
NF: I'd been watching documentaries since the 60s. There are a handful of really fantastic documentaries from the 60s, but after that I felt there was a big blank period. Documentaries were made by very earnest left-wing people whose self-perception was that of educating people and raising their consciousness. My arrival at the BBC coincided with an explosion of interest in documentaries.

BBC Four: Which films in particular were part of that?
NF: The first film was Hoop Dreams - a three-hour-plus film that depicts the life of two black teenagers in Chicago who struggle to become college basketball players, and which took five years to make.

It was absolutely extraordinary. I thought that films like this would take the place of the realist novel, that in 10 or 15 years people were not going to be interested in novels written in the style of Theodore Dreiser or Thomas Hardy. They were going to be watching documentaries. The next film, I think, was When

Hoop Dreams: "Extraordinary"

We Were Kings, an astounding film about Muhammad Ali, based on a lot of footage shot in Kinshasa 20 years previously. It's a homage to his extraordinary qualities, and a description of this surreal combat with George Foreman presided over by Mobutu. I had never seen things as good as this.

BBC Four: There's now a Storyville film nearly every week on BBC Four. Could it have existed in a similar format 10 years ago?
NF: Storyville would not have been able to run 40 slots of real quality 10 years ago. Three things have changed. The first is that documentaries now exist independently, or half-independently, of television. Documentaries have become fashionable because there's been a reaction against the platitudes and stereotypes of television. It's no coincidence that this movement has got furthest where the platitudes of television are strongest - ie America.

The second reason why documentaries have exploded is the steadily lowering cost of equipment. It's a transformation. People can now afford to make documentaries. There's no equivalent form of journalism, or writing or entertainment that's been changed so totally as the documentary.

The third reason is that if you go to any documentary festival and look around, you will see that the audience consists, not of old farts - though there's nothing wrong with that - but of people under 30. Twenty years ago people wanted to write novels or lyric poems. That became unfashionable, so then people wanted to write film scripts. Now they want to make documentaries. Everywhere you go in the world there are people who've acquired cameras, have a subject they're interested in - it could be themselves or could be something around them - and want to make a documentary. It has become a very convenient form of self-expression and a contemporary cultural form.

I like to think of it as being somewhat like the explosion of journalism that Tom Wolfe described in the 1960s. All of a sudden people got bored of staid journalism, in the same way that people have got bored of staid television. They realised that journalism implied the possibility of authorship - that if you described something, you had to say who you are and what your relationship is with the thing you are describing. In documentaries at the moment, I believe we are seeing classics comparable to New Journalism classics like Norman Mailer's The Fight.

Month by month we are seeing amazing films coming out that break all the rules, and break them very successfully. If you think I'm exaggerating because I run Storyville and have a vested interest in doing that, turn to Nigel Andrews - not an impressionable man - in the Financial Times, who thinks that My Architect is one of the greatest films ever made. Of the crop of this year's films, I think Control Room is a stunning film. I've worked in journalism a lot of my life, and it told me things I didn't know about journalism. And these films are all made by people under 35.

BBC Four: Is this explosion of documentaries that are getting into cinemas a trend you think will continue, and is it something that the BBC and Storyville can be part of?
NF: Opinion is divided over whether this is a blip in popular entertainment or something that is likely to continue. I'm cautiously saying that it's a long-term trend. Like I said, it started in America. Documentaries are shown in European cinemas, but they are heavily subsidised and, with some exceptions, they haven't got large audiences. The breakthroughs come with films like Michael Moore's, which have started to perform very well outside America.

You're starting to find more and more people interested in the possibility of showing documentaries in cinemas. I don't think you'll necessarily have as many high-scorers in American cinemas as there have been this year, but I think you can expect a more steady flow of more moderate successes.

Michael Moore: Breakthroughs

Instead of taking $60 or $120 million they may take $10 or $15 million, or even over $5 million. In Britain it's slower, but you're already starting to see cinema chains getting used to the fact that among all the homogenised offerings in the multiplex it's good to have a documentary here and there. And the documentaries can be quite odd because that's what people like to go and see.

As far as the BBC goes, I think the BBC has always been a patron of documentaries. It commissions its own documentaries and has a huge archive of its past successes. I think the BBC should not only come to terms with this development but embrace it and encourage the production of ambitious documentaries that go first into cinemas, or indeed are shown in cinemas at the same time as they appear on the BBC. It seems to me that the BBC is prepared to do this and I'm very happy about that.

BBC Four: How do you find all these incredible films for Storyville? Can you describe your job a little bit?
NF: The interesting thing about the current documentary movement is that people are just going out and doing it in an almost 1960s way. The combination of economics and this new culture of documentaries means that they are not worried about how world broadcasting is organised; they are worried about how they will get the money for their next film.

As a result, an informal network of filmmakers has arisen in countries all around the world making films for Storyville. We keep in touch through festivals, and through the internet. These people know about Storyville, they get our newsletter, they can see exactly what we are doing, they can look up films that we have shown, and they can acquire some of them through Amazon or some other way.

There are people making documentaries in countries like India, Argentina, China, a lot in South Africa. There are good films made in Israel. In Russia it is difficult, but we have hopes there. In Western Europe the whole thing is very established; also in Canada. But the best films are being made in America. I have to resist the temptation of turning Storyville into an American strand.

BBC Four: Why are American documentaries so strong?
NF: Somehow the new ethos in documentary-making, coupled with the tedium of American mass media, has created circumstances perfect for the production of brilliant documentaries. I also think there's something in the American character. Americans are live-or-die empiricists. There's a tradition in American life and American thought that, if you observe something long enough or earnestly enough, you'll understand it. It goes with the kind of can-do American mentality. And that ideally equips Americans to make documentaries because they spend a long time making them, they are very good at observing, they sometimes have polemics - but on the whole the best American documentaries are not polemical - and the result is very satisfactory indeed.