Nick Broomfield Talks about His Fetishes With Michele Shapiro

What do Margaret Thatcher and Heidi Fleiss have in common? They have both been the subjects of documentaries by Nick Broomfield, a filmmaker known for bringing humor and intelligence to issues as diverse as prostitution and the commercialization of America's first female serial killer. Broomfield, who has also made two non-doc features -- Dark Obsession with Amanda Donahoe and Gabriel Byrne, and Monster in a Box with Spalding Gray -- has recently completed a new documentary titled Fetishes which takes a look at the luxurious world of Pandora's Box, an upscale fetish parlor in New York.

FILMMAKER: You seem to have an interest in powerful women...

Nick Broomfield: I suppose that's true. I've done a few powerful men too, but I think women's roles and stereotypes have changed a lot more in the last 10 or 15 years, so I think as a group they're more interesting.

FILMMAKER: That certainly comes across in Fetishes. How did you find out about Pandora's Box?

Broomfield: This is one of the films I didn't initiate myself -- I was approached by HBO to do a film about fetishes. Originally I think they saw a sort of travelogue film. So I set out on this research journey and Pandora's Box was one of the places I stopped. It had just opened and it was very lavish and beautiful. I was initially quite disturbed by the whole fetish thing. I found some of it very degrading and depressing. It was only when I found Pandora's Box that I said I could make a film.
With Pandora's Box, I found that there was this celebration of something. Although they still had humiliating behavior going on, they'd have Mozart playing. Mozart not only wrote beautiful music, but he was also a very degraded fetishist himself. He was into soiled underwear and feces and that kind of thing, which is weird when you consider his music which is so sublime and beautiful. But I think those two aspects are probably an inherent part of nature. What I like about Pandora's is that it celebrates both parts. I didn't want to do a film unless I thought I had something vaguely positive to say. And I knew there were so many things to be done which could either laugh directly at this whole world or where it would be more like pornography. I wanted to make something that was genuinely informative, but obviously entertaining and titillating as well.

FILMMAKER: That's what was interesting about the film. I didn't really know what to expect and after watching it, what was interesting to me was that it wasn't a film about S/M per se, but it was more about social commentary, from the mistresses and their dominant role to the subservient role of the clients, who are paying huge amounts of money for this treatment. Do you think the women see themselves as feminists? Would they use that word?

Broomfield: I think a lot of them do. Natasia, one of the mistresses, was very much into powerful dominant women and the whole goddess religion thing. That is certainly an aspect of it.

FILMMAKER: Do you know the extent of their educational backgrounds?

Broomfield: Beatrice, another mistress, has a Ph.D. and had been to the Sorbonne and was very intellectual. Natasia had left the mid-west and gone to a performance art college. Two or three of the other mistresses had all gone through college, and a couple had left school when they were young.

FILMMAKER: Do you have any idea what Mistress Raven's background is?

Broomfield: I think she was actually a New Jersey housewife. At the time of the filming she was very reluctant to participate -- she wouldn't let me film in her home. She was really living a double life, which is very much a part of the scene, people being very ashamed of their involvement. Then when she saw the film, I think she wished she had cooperated more fully. She came from a very conventional Jewish background. For a number of people the film was quite a daring move.

FILMMAKER: Is what they are doing illegal?

Broomfield: No, it's completely legal within the state of New York providing there's no penetration... The place is very upscale and the mistresses are very much into what their clients want. They understand their fetishes and they do very strong sessions. The others who did a kind of play acting and didn't really understand what was going on were really pretty awful and none of them are in the film. I think being a mistress is harder than just giving a person sex. Being a good mistress is probably a really skilled thing.

FILMMAKER: The terminology is interesting -- "sessions" for example -- it seems to be more about psychology than sex.

Broomfield: For me it was a fascinating way of viewing society because everything that comes in there is something that hasn't been resolved satisfactorily outside and is brought in to be worked out.

FILMMAKER: There was a lot of very difficult subject matter -- namely the clients who were dealing with concentration camps and slavery -- that I don't think people, even if they do have some sort of knowledge about fetishes, would necessarily think about. How did you feel about depicting this type of behavior?

Broomfield: In a way they're the most interesting fetishes. You can immediately understand where they come from. Fetishes are the eroticization of people's worst nightmares; they are an intellectualization of something, and enormously specific for some people. What you see with the black man who's into the fantasy of being a slave and being sold off is that fetishes come directly out of specific influences in society that we all know and think about. In a way they make a lot more sense than someone who is into feet. I followed a rule in making the film which is that I needed to understand where the fetishes came from in order for them to be in the film, otherwise they seemed fairly gratuitous. The whole thing about fetishes is they're so visual and sensational in a way that one could have gone from one enormous sensational scene to another without really understanding anything. The scenes only really make sense to an audience if they understand where the fetishes are coming from.

FILMMAKER: Was there any material that you felt was inappropriate to show?

Broomfield: I think the whole film was an exercise in making something that went into a topic in depth and gave the audience a sense of it without dwelling on particular things and making something that was enormously depressing. Some scenes, if I let them play much longer, take on a very different significance simply because it's no longer entertaining.

FILMMAKER: Throughout the film, the mistresses kept trying to get you to do a session. In the last scene, the mistresses asked how you could make a documentary about something that you don't have first-hand knowledge of did you have any inclination to do a session?

Broomfield: I really didn't. At the moment I'm making a film about people who are doing heroin and I haven't done heroin either. I think that directors on a whole tend to be dominant and they said to me, "You'd make a great mistress if you ever want to come back."

FILMMAKER: Well that is interesting because most of the men there were heads of companies and used to being in positions of power.

Broomfield: That's true. Maybe I'm not successful enough to have reached that state!

FILMMAKER: What is your background?

Broomfield: In terms of fetishes?

FILMMAKER: Sure, if you'd care to answer, but I meant film.

Broomfield: I went to the National Film School in England and before that I studied to be a barrister. When I left University I did a little film as part of my thesis.

FILMMAKER: Why do you choose to make documentaries?

Broomfield: I think they're an incredible insight into where we live. You also have an enormous amount of freedom in making them. You have a very small crew and a degree of control. I also like working in a very spontaneous and intuitive way. With a documentary, you take the audience through the process of discovery and adventure that you go through. With the one thriller I made from a script, I found the whole process very boring because it took so long and there's so much fussing around. I promised myself that I was going to do another one and I was going to do it with some kind of spontaneity.

FILMMAKER: Would you go so far as to use improv?

Broomfield: In this one project that I'm working on, there will be very careful casting and then we'll work on the particular characters and then write the script out of conversations with the cast. I'd start out with a loose idea and then work around it that way, more in a kind of Mike Leigh way. It's a long way of working because you'll probably spend four months working with the actors and constructing the script. I need to find a way of retaining the best elements of how I'm working right now in feature films.

FILMMAKER: Do you think it will translate?

Broomfield: I think the interesting thing will be finding a way to make them translate.

FILMMAKER: What response have you had to the film?

Broomfield: It was shown in England and the members of the "intellectual" press -- The Guardian, The Sunday Times -- all liked the film both stylistically and in terms of content. They really championed it and wanted the film shown. Then amongst the tabloid press there was a sort of shock and horror, which you expect. When the film was shown in Toronto, Roger Ebert came up and said how much he really loved the film. I would imagine there would probably be the same kind of reaction here -- people who feel it's a good strong piece of cinema on its own and explores subject matter worth exploring and those who think it's disgusting and voyeuristic and awful. When we showed it in Edinburgh, some people disapproved of the film being shown and I said, 'They haven't even seen the film'. A lot of people's reactions are just based on prejudice.

FILMMAKER: What happened with HBO?

Broomfield: Well, I think they liked the film, but I think they are wary about getting their name too attached to things like this. They have a very strong audience that laps this stuff up, but they're worried about their public image within the press, being associated with this kind of film.

FILMMAKER: How are you releasing the film in the U.S.?

Broomfield: It's being released through In Pictures. The original agreement I made with them says it's going to open in about 30 or 40 cities.

Look for Fetishes at theaters across the country this summer.

Michele Shapiro is the entertainment editor for SOMA Magazine and a freelance writer based in San Francisco.