Choice Brits - Script Factory

Britain's top documentary filmmaker applauds first rate docu-drama

Michael Winterbottom is without doubt the UK's most prolific big-name filmmaker. He regularly produces two quality films each year, and internationally, he's regarded as one of Britain's finest.
 
With Winterbottom's newest, Code 46 on the horizon, Nick Broomfield turned out last Saturday to praise In This World, released earlier this year, for making him look at his own everyday world a little bit closer...

Nick Broomfield introduces In This World on Saturday 6 December at BAFTA
 
Well it’s a great honour talking about Michael Winterbottom’s work – I admire him so much. I’m actually not used to talking about other filmmakers and I think it’s probably an extremely good thing to get into and I’m sure my analyst will be very pleased to hear it.
 
Michael Winterbottom is one of the most prolific filmmakers, and his work has such an enormous variety, both in choice of subject and the style in which he has made his films. The reason I so particularly liked In This World is that it is a great inspiration for me, and for anybody else who is thinking about venturing into low budget fiction films.
 
It was done with a tiny little crew; he and Tony Grisoni actually took the trip from Afghanistan across half the world and actually wrote the script as they were going. They worked with non-professional actors who had actually made it out of a refugee camp. As they learnt on the journey, so they improvised on the acting. It was also shot on a small digital camera. I just think it’s an incredible example and inspiration of what can be done on a very low budget with the emotion and passion that comes with doing something that is so heartfelt and comes with the reality of the situation. I think that that’s a lesson which could be learnt by a lot of more expensive feature film productions as well.
 
The thing which actually inspired Michael Winterbottom, apparently, was reading that there were fifty-six Chinese refugees who died in a container - about six months before Michael actually started work on this film - and they were so desperate, economically, to come and work in another country that they were all crammed in this little container and there wasn’t enough air for them all and they all died. I think it was that devastating event that inspired Michael to go into this story.
 
As the film states, there are fourteen and a half million refugees, and over a million people a year make journeys of this kind basically to earn a living – Michael makes the point that these are economic refugees - they’re not so much political refugees - they’re economic refugees who are trying to make something more than a dollar a day for their work. Countries such as ours obviously depend on them so much for basically running the NHS, cleaning Canary Wharf; it’s all done by illegal immigrants who are contracted out and I think it raises very important issues about our immigration policies and the hypocrisy that goes with it when we’re also so dependent on their labour.
 
I actually had an incredible thing that happened to me a couple of weeks ago: I, in my kind of lazy way, ordered pizza and this pizza guy came round and we were talking and he said he’d come from Afghanistan, and because I’d seen this film I sort of asked him a few more questions and it was almost exactly the same kind of journey that he had taken, and I thought isn’t it incredible that there’s this film that’s really… I think when you pick up a newspaper and you read it you have very little idea of the human story and what it really means in terms of a particular individual. And I owed it to this film that I could really relate to what he had gone through.
 
Anyway, thank you very much for being here today and I hope you enjoy the film as much as I have.
 
Read more about Nick Broomfield.
Find out more about In This World.