Adam Sweeting

‘Netflix are incredibly conservative’: documentary-maker Nick Broomfield interviewed

The celebrated filmmaker discusses his latest project for the BBC on the forgotten Rolling Stone

The original Rolling Stones: Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Keith Richards, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts in 1963. Credit: Getty 
issue 20 May 2023

A documentary by Nick Broomfield is always to some extent about Nick Broomfield. He has cultivated an image as a gonzo filmmaker, striding into shot holding a boom microphone, headphones clamped over his ears, and in the politest possible way provoking chaos. ‘Unfortunately it comes very easily to me, to be slightly out of control,’ he confesses.

His previous adventures have included getting on the prickly side of South African white supremacist Eugene Terre’Blanche, striking up a strange rapport with the convicted serial killer Aileen Wuornos on death row in Florida, claiming to have worked out who killed the titular gangsta rappers in Biggie & Tupac, and provoking a firestorm of legal threats from Whitney Houston’s estate with his varnish-stripping portrait of the singer, Whitney: Can I Be Me?.

As a 14-year-old schoolboy, Broomfield met Jones on a train and fell into conversation with him

But there’s no glimpse of microphone, headset or indeed Broomfield himself in his latest film, The Stones and Brian Jones.

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