Interview: Chris Atkins
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Also In The News
Tuesday, 27, Oct 2009 10:54
The Starsuckers director on his problem with the Guardian, the borderline idiocy of a certain law firm and stopping Vernon Kay from ruining his movies
By Matthew Champion.
With the threat of an injunction from familiar foes Carter-Ruck now firmly faded and a first press screening successfully aired, Starsuckers director Chris Atkins can concentrate on getting the film on at as many cinema screens as possible ahead of its official release this week. inthenews.co.uk caught up with him at his London offices in the calm before the storm.
Was there a single incident that sparked you to make Starsuckers, as with Taking Liberties?
"There were a few things that happened at once, when we were making Taking Liberties the distributor on that, who was great but a bit celebrity obsessed, tried to get us to put a lot of celebrities in it. So it's a film about ordinary people whose rights have been infringed as part of the war against terror, OK, so, it's about people being arrested and sent to Guantanamo Bay, arrested without charge and all these sorts of things... not the sort of thing a celebrity is going to get involved in or particularly know a lot about.
"But nonetheless they gave us a list of celebrities they wanted to appear in our film and there were dozens of them. Everyone from Tracey Emin to Prince Philip; a bonkers list of random people that they had brainstormed, including Vernon Kay. Their plan was for them to sit there and give their honest opinion on how bad the erosion of habeus corpus was or why the European Convention of Human Rights should stand up in modern society. And they wanted me to get these entertainment dimwits in... and they really wanted that, they were insisting they wanted that. And we did a lot of ducking and diving as producers in convincing them we were trying to do it while at the same time going 'not in a fucking million years, it would make it shit'.
"The film ended up quite good and we didn't put any celebrities in it. And I thought how crazy that they would take something that was trying to have a point, purpose and meaning, and deliberately fuck it up by ramming it with celebrities. I mean these are smart media operators, they aren't stupid people. So I suppose that was the initial point when I thought 'this is insane'.
"Also in that film, the reasons behind Britain becoming a police state are very complex, and we had to simplify them for the movie and we also had to make Tony Blair the key baddy, the boo-hiss villain when he came on, which isn't hard but to make it a simple, coherent thesis we had to kind of make him the central figure, the central baddy, and it meant the media, who I thought were as equally culpable in this climate of fear, didn't get any criticism really. I felt that the media got off lightly, and I wanted to give the media a kicking inherently. No-one's really done anything on our own industry, no-one's taken all these tricks that we use on the gun industry or Tony Blair or whatever, or these environmentally movies exposing oil companies... well whose done that about Viacom or News International? Why hasn't anyone done that? Oh yeah they'll never work again.
"That was it really, I saw a gap in the market, no-one's really done that."
Did you always intend to be a documentary film-maker?
"I'm a massive fan of cinema docs and I've always been very jealous of people that made them. 'Oh shit, you're kind of doing something that has a point and what I do has no point', so that was it really, I wanted to do something with meaning.
"I really liked the idea of doing theatrical documentaries because you can do things you'd just never be allowed to do on TV, I mean tonnes of this stuff I would just never have been allowed to do if it was Dispatches or Panorama, or any of those worthy but ultimately very dull documentaries.
"Bowling for Columbine editor Kurt Engfehr once told me 'You've got to do it big, you've got to do it exciting, you've got to have entertainment in, you've got to go for the jugular, you can't fuck around', like the Brits normally do with their documentaries."
How has the movie been funded?
"The funding has come from myself and two producers, we haven't been paid in about two years. Ironically after my last film I did get a lot of work from big evil media corporations, so I did some work for Universal on Billy Elliot the Musical and that paid really well.
"But yeah, no one's going to touch it with a barge pole."
The tabloids aren't really your target are they?
"I don't have a problem so much with Heat magazine. Heat magazine is honest, it says at the top 'first place for celebrity news', I have a problem with the Guardian. I am mortified that my film is a reason for the Guardian to put fucking Amy Winehouse on their newspaper and I told them as much. And they gave me some stuff about the realpolitik.
"But when serious news outlets who are supposed to sort out truth from falsehood, and you know are very hoity toity and smug about this, are actually filled with celebrity PR or repeating stories that have been run in the tabloids that may have been sourced from criminal acts that is where the real evil star suckers are in my mind, it's in the serious news outlets that are following in that direction. At least in the Sun you open the Bizarre column and it says 'the hot celebrity gossip stories' you can take with a pinch of salt. But when those get run by the BBC for example that I think is much more problematic and more difficult to fix."
Talk about the myriad legal problems the film has experienced since day one
"I'm just thinking about the ones I can talk about, the ones you can write about. People in the news seem to not want to write about them. With Max Clifford we had this letter from Carter-Ruck on Friday morning threatening us with an injunction and over the last few days that has basically gone away. I'm not allowed to say much more than that but there was a threat of an injunction on Friday morning. I think that the timing was an issue against them, I think they thought the press screening was in the evening, they were running around trying to get an in junction or to make movements to get an injunction, we don't know, while you and 250 other members of the press were watching their client on a 50ft high screen in Leicester square."
That sounds like borderline idiocy
"It is borderline idiocy. I think there is another point here as well; Max Clifford is supposed to be this super PR guru, for him to pick the world's most unpopular law firm. There's got to be a dozen law firms out there that do this, but it's like why did he choose Carter Ruck, for if there's one thing to get everyone from the media back on our side it's by setting Carter Ruck on an independent, low budget movie.
Was Max Clifford difficult to pin down?
"He's someone who holds this unique position of being able to sell his brand through the news without question. So what no one's picked up on but you're more than welcome to check online is even with our film, when we broke our Guardian stories and when ITN or CNN needed a commentator on celebrity media issues they call up Max Clifford. And Max Clifford gives the Max Clifford interview, and that means he's got one minute of free advertising on primetime television. And this happens every single week. Yet the man has as everyone one of us knows these very dark and immoral practices while he's simultaneously presented to the public as this honest Joe pundit.
"Anyone who calls up will get an interview, I swear to you if you call him up he will give you an interview. That's what he does, he gives interviews as an impartial commentator, which actually sells his brand. So we called him up, said we're doing a documentary about celebrity culture, can we talk to you, and he said 'yeah'.
He's remarkably forthright in the film...
"He has a very clear demarcation between selling his brand when he's on camera and what he says when he's off camera, and that's what we wanted to illustrate. Absolutely, I was shocked, I was extremely shocked. We were there for quite a while, and only a small element of what we filmed is in the movie for all sorts of reasons.
"The beeping out of the names was something I wanted to do even without the extremely strong legal advice that we do it, because we're a film that is essentially critiquing the mechanisms of celebrity gossip and if we were to have in our film all this sensational gossip and if people paid to see the film because they knew Max Clifford was really going to do the dirty on all his clients, all their sexcapades, all their dark secrets, then I think we would have been quite rightly hoisted by our own petard. Because we're standing there going 'it's toxic, people are using celebrity gossip to sell' and then for us to use it as well, I think we would be quite rightly burnt for doing that. I didn't want it to become the Max gossip show, it's irrelevant who he protects, it's important if you know that on one hand he'll cover up for politicians and the other he'll blackmail politicians
"So that was sort of the point. The thing is that throughout working in the media you hear of these stories, you hear stuff, none of it really gets into print because no one can really prove it. You hear tonnes of things, but what can we source, what can we fact check, and only that really got put into the film. In terms of salacious gossip, absolutely tonnes; I don't know what's true or what's not."
What sort of feedback have you had from journalists?
"There have been some angry phone calls, not a huge number. Our lawyers have certainly had a lot of angry phone calls. They door-stepped my old house, and my ex-neighbours' houses, but I respect the right of journalists do to this.
"We've deliberately gone to tweak their noses, so I'd be a bit of a cry-baby if I sat by and said 'oh yes I got this angry call from this person who knocked on my door'. In six months to a year something unpleasant will be written about me in the tabloids but that's their right."
And how is your overall mental wellbeing?
"It's not as bad as the last time. When I did Taking Liberties I really did go a bit Private Pyle. This time around I literally signed off the final re-edits and all the last legal bits two days before the press screening, which was the first time anyone has seen it. It's nice to talk about this, I haven't been able to talk about this film for two years and I've got a really big mouth. Being able to talk about it is like therapy."
You've recently joined Twitter at a time when the site is making waves in the mainstream press
"I certainly have more belief in Twitter on Trafigura than Jan Moir - 'God the Daily Mail is a racist paper, who knew?' There's a fantastic amount of glee in the reverse ferret thing [Charlie] Brooker initiated in inviting complaints to the PCC as that's what the Mail does. 'You haven't seen this, see it, be insulted, complain, here'. Don't stoop down to that level. How many of those people would have read Moir's article, would have complained? So the same problem I have with the Daily Mail saying 'here look Russell Brand is offensive go here and complain'... doing the same thing was a little sinking down to their level but fantastic fun.
"Obviously the Trafigura thing was sensational, I was actually in the Guardian building when that all kicked off, someone ran in and went 'Stephen Fry's Tweeted it' and this changed everything in the Guardian, who thought that Carter Ruck had to back down."
Do you think there's any hope left for journalism?
"I think there is. I think that's the thing, I would turn it on its head and say if you were surrounded in an industry of very, very ethically-responsible journalists who were fact checking everything and running off after these very real stories, then I'd go 'bloody hell there's always competition out there'. But if you are surrounded by idiots... surrounded by people who aren't checking their facts, who are only regurgitating other stuff, there must be tonnes and tonnes of stories that aren't being told that you as a journalist can go out and get. That's how I feel as a documentary maker because I insist on doing stuff that takes a long time to do; it means I can get stuff that has comparatively much better content. Because I just take more time, I've been offered stuff where I've had a two month turnaround on it. It takes me two months to research something; I'm really not that fast. So by taking my time I can find good subjects and good stories.
"If everyone else is doing stuff in a very short amount of time it means that the competition isn't very good. So there are tonnes of stories out there that no one is chasing because of the situation. Just put some serious time on and do some serious digging for six months and then you'll come up with a front page scoop. It's what we did - we wore a wire and tried to sell medical records because no one had thought of that before and it worked."
What shocked you the most in making the film?
"When we got stories in the Times of India I thought fucking hell, this is ridiculous. This is like what we thought times ten. But that was one of many very silly moments and it was about celebrity stuff. But you know when the woman actually spells out to me without any coercion just how pointless the PCC is, that was like when I thought 'OK we've got something here that truly no one else has done'.
"But actually the most worrisome thing is when you see something and think 'oh my God I didn't know that', but it turns out that was released in the public domain three years ago. The Live 8 stuff, when I realised just how tricked we all were by that and I was like, 'I watched that concert, I love Pink Floyd'. I believed that I had done the right thing by supporting that, and then, because I hadn't followed up on it hadn't dug deeper, I later actually found out there was this all other thing with Make Poverty History and the money was then never spent. So there was a certain feeling of anger with Live 8, we'd all just been had. If I had spent any time researching this at the time I could have found this out, it's just because I was going 'oo pink Floyd' that I missed it. It's even worse when you've actually missed something. Live 8 was the biggest shock."
What's next?
"I'll probably be directing Celebrity Paint Drying. To be honest what's next I really don't know, we're in talks with some people and talks with some other people have suddenly stopped. I suppose the other thing is that you don't really want to talk about it anyway because you don't want people to know you're coming.
"But something definitely different. After Taking Liberties people wanted me to do stuff on ID cards, but I thought 'I've kind of already done that'. And on this I think if I get any work it will be on celebrity something, I'm just going to be a commentator for shows on Sky Three about worst celebrity meltdowns, that's my idea of hell... Hell would be to do anything with celebrities again, I irritatingly know huge amount about this, about celebrities, and I don't want to.
"So I want to do, I don't know, polar bears or something, nothing to do with the media, nothing to do with celebrities, nothing to do with anything I've just done. Looking for things that other people aren't doing something on, that's what I like. I like people being surprised at what we're doing. Or people backing away from a subject. If you're doing a doc and there's five people doing something on the same subject then it's time to just leave them to it."
How did the film come to be screened at the London Film Festival?
"The London Film Festival was extraordinary, I didn't think they'd book it. They came to us, they knew about it because some people knew a little about what we're doing. But it wasn't finished at all and it was at a very early stage, it was about three hours long and there were all sorts of bits about school shootings and lots of weird bits in there and it didn't really to my mind make a lot of sense. But I showed it to them just thinking 'this will be interesting, they'll say no but we'll get some good notes'. And then they said 'yeah let's do it'. 'Are you sure? What film did you watch, are you sure you watched my film?' It was amazing, for them to book us at such an early stage when the film wasn't anywhere near finished. This is a thesis-led movie where you need all the bits there, but they showed some very good foresight I hope and it was absolutely fantastic in terms of giving the film credibility... a lot of people want this film to go away.
"And that's clear from the fact that we had huge coverage in the Guardian, on radio and TV but in the press: no one wants this film to be talked about. It's very clear because they don't want people criticising other journalists, it's understandable. They've got vested interests at heart, but as a way of the film going on the map, whether people wanted it to or not, the LFF was a lifesaver. This film would have been buried otherwise or have gone the way of those ghastly internet films. I think it needed a stamp of some kind of credibility and it looks to have changed the fortunes of the film, so fingers crossed it will."