Brian Woods Broadcast interview
Interview: Brian Woods
10 September, 2008 | By Robin Parker
Brian Woods is not afraid of making challenging films about tough subjects that are effectively a call to action.
This month, More 4 will broadcast a documentary that is, in the words of its creator, “100 minutes of three middle-aged white men talking to camera”. Throughout Chosen, the camera barely moves as the subjects recount how they were abused during their time at public school, with only photos to break up their testimonies.
Informed by a visual style that is equal parts Errol Morris, Capturing the Friedmans and the autobiographical photographic collage of Hollywood producer Robert Evans' career, The Kid Stays in the Picture, Brian Woods' film is arresting, disturbing viewing. Not for nothing did BritDoc chief executive Jess Search suggest that he call it Dare to Look Away.
So how did Woods prise such candid recollections from the three men about every stage of the indignities they suffered? Simple, he says - he listened and they talked.
“One of them said I must have been trained by Mossad. He told me things he hadn't told his therapist,” he recalls. “At one point, he'd been talking for two hours solid when I had to call ‘cut'.”
Chosen was filmed in a blacked-out soundstage at Ealing Studios, with each participant interviewed for eight hours over a day. Woods toyed with adding reconstructions and new video shot at the school, but saw a purity in simply allowing the men to speak.
“This is a gripping story and it requires intimacy,” he says. “I wanted it to be a direct challenge to the audience.”
A desire to confront tough subjects for the social good runs through all Woods' work. His BBC film Evicted led homeless charity Shelter to set up Keys to the Future, a scheme to provide education and legal advice for homeless children and their families, while an earlier doc, Orphans of Nkandla, inspired Richard Curtis, Elton John and David Furnish to spearhead charity efforts to treat African children suffering from HIV and Aids.
Chosen was kick-started by a call to Woods' office from one of the men, who had seen Dying for Drugs, a film by Woods' indie, True Vision, for Channel 4. Struck by all three subjects' desire to tell their story on camera, Woods saw an opportunity to make the case for tougher regulation of public schools, and to readdress perceptions of child abuse.
“Much of the stuff you hear focuses on the abusers or features survivors, filmed in shadow, often from the wrong side of the tracks,” he says. “These guys are successful, middle-class professionals.”
Despite this, it proved a tough sell: at the BBC, Richard Klein passed, as did Peter Dale, then head of More 4. Woods says he was told it was “too dark”, and “we've done paedophilia”.
Woods turned to BritDoc, which put up a modest£35,000, forcing him down the small-scale path that ultimately proves the film's strength. He says it has cost his company “tens of thousands” of pounds, but that's to be expected.
“We've never made much of a profit,” he says. “As long as we can break even, the satisfaction that comes from making these films is well worth the sacrifice.”
Chosen's broadcast on More 4 came about through C4's relationship with BritDoc which gives it first refusal on all films that BritDoc fully funds.
Woods sees Chosen's More 4 broadcast as one part of the life cycle of the film, which will live on through the NSPCC-backed Questions for Schools project. Despite this film's unorthodox route, the big money is still with broadcasters and True Vision has benefited from the appetite for socially responsible films at the BBC and C4.
He sympathises with the plight of commissioners trying to “second-guess controllers' whims” and deliver audiences. “They want to spot the next Half Ton Mom that will get them 4 million viewers, and at the same time be a film that will win awards,” he says. “I love TV that is genuinely entertaining. I'd rather watch Doctor Who than the kind of films I make and I understand why other people want to watch it.”
The golden prize is winning audiences for quality documentaries with a public purpose: Woods cites Walker George Films' A Boy Called Alex as a winning example. “The difficulty is that I don't think you can spot which strongly campaigning films will also be ratings winners. No landmark film was landmark when it was commissioned.” True Vision's Bafta-winning China's Stolen Children is a case in point: a Dispatches commission that grew into a two-hour film, largely in Mandarin, that C4 bravely broadcast in full in primetime, pulling in 1.7 million viewers.
The film stands as one of Woods' proudest achievements, not least because it was the first directing credit for Jezza Neumann, a former runner at True Vision. Nurturing new talent is close to Woods' heart: he has since worked with three first-time directors on Channel 4's
3 Minute Wonders strand and he sits on Bafta's mentoring scheme.
The lack of breaks at the BBC for first-time directors is a particular bugbear and one he has publicly berated Roly Keating and Krishan Arora about. “It has a duty as a state broadcaster to nurture talent,” he says.
Woods is staying with C4 for his next projects, a film about the role of social intervention in primary schools and a series about teens and drugs. As with Chosen and True Vision's back catalogue, he's out to change hearts and minds and just maybe, prompt someone else with a story to tell to pick up the phone.
True Stories: Chosen will air on More 4 on 30 September at 10pm
FACT FILE
Age: 45
Family: Married to Deborah (co-director of True Vision), two cats, no kids.
TV break: Green Pages, an 8 x 30-minute “infotainment” show for Ulster TV.
Favourite TV shows: Doctor Who, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Strictly Come Dancing. “My films are deep, but I'm shallow.”
Inspirations: Deborah, and Professor Kevin Bales, founder of Free the Slaves