By Kerry McLeod
Michael Grigsby has just returned from a day at his old school. His visit is the result of a string of events that began with the discovery of the first film he ever made – a humorous documentary about life in the school. It seemed a good addition to a programme of his work that the National Film Theatre was then preparing, with one drawback: the sound recording has been lost over time. What began as a visit to view the footage became an opportunity for the school orchestra to play over the film during the screening at the NFT, in the style of a silent-movie. This soon became a full-scale project, involving camera and editing facilities and the advice of industry professionals for a group of the current students to make their own short documentaries.
As he recounts the events, it becomes clear that the passion and energy, the total commitment to his craft that has seen him become one of the country’s foremost documentary makers, is still pulsing through his every project. Grigsby speaks of his beginnings with enthusiasm, whether in relation to the film society that he organised at the aforementioned school – screening Carry On… movies and discovering the films from the Documentary Film Movement that were available for free – or his first job at Granada. He got a job as assistant editor at 19, working with the legendary Harry Watt (Nightmail), who then left just as he began. He was subsequently offered the role of studio cameraman, which by his own admission was numbingly dull, but gave him the chance to buy his own camera and to start shooting in his spare time. By chance, Lindsay Anderson heard of his project, and asked for the footage. Impressed, he and Karel Reisz secured funding from the BFI Production Fund to complete the film as part of the Free Cinema movement. Grigsby never looked back.
His 1970 documentary, I Was A Soldier, conceived while he was working at Granada, concerns American Vietnam veterans; young men whose stories at the time had not been heard. Grigsby went to small town Texas, far from the liberal coast areas where anti-war demonstrations were taking place, and found three men who had recently returned. He says, his hands waving as he speaks and a sparkle in his eyes; “I banged on the door and told the guy there what I was doing, and he looked at me like I was a madman, and he said, ‘you’re the first person who’s showed any interest in me at all’.”
This is key to Grigsby’s work; his reputation is as a man who gives a “voice to the voiceless” – incidentally the name of the subsequent NFT season. From the conception of the idea through its production to the finished article, a few things are apparent; the long research periods (five or so months) to gain the participants’ trust; the still frames and long takes, allowing people the space in which to get their points across; the stories themselves, which are those that would not ordinarily be heard. From the fishermen in 1973’s A Life Apart to a family in modern Vietnam (Thoi Noi) and the people of Lockerbie, he works with a community to voice their questions.
“I always believed – and still do – in the power of that box in the corner of the room… [it] should give a voice to the voiceless, actually be a part of our democratic institutions… But that thing in the corner doesn’t do that any more, because now the only thing you hear from Joe Public is a 30-second sound snippet, which has been manipulated and perfectly cut and controlled.”
Grigsby speaks with a palpable disappointment at the state of documentary in Britain, how so much television is formatted. The commissioners want ideas that are fully developed and written. “No chances, no risks. Life ain’t like that. Documentary ain’t like that. For me, documentary is about evolution – getting to know people.” All very different from how Grigsby works, which is perhaps why he expresses a desire to look elsewhere for funding – including cinema – as such a necessity.
“I was very humbled once. I walked down the street one night just before one of my films was shown – and I saw in the corner of all the suburban houses, the little blue glow in the corner, and I thought ‘this is incredible’. When people say films have been shown in one, two… five million houses, it doesn’t really mean anything. But when you walk down the street and you see those little blue glows in people’s apartments or houses it really hits you and you think my god, what a privilege to reach people in their homes, and what power we have to reach people.
“To do it responsibly you have to give people the space and the chance to be themselves, otherwise I feel we are betraying, minimalising, trivialising people’s lives… I haven’t lost any of that passion… I’ve just had to find new ways of trying to beat the system.”
Grigsby sees documentary like free-form jazz, the structure coming to him only after he has built up a real understanding of the place, the people, the subject about which he is shooting. He has been to communities – such as Lockerbie – where they have a deep mistrust of the media, and where his method of gaining and holding their trust has been what has allowed him to make the film at all. One of the conditions of any project he undertakes is that he takes the film back to the participants first – sometimes before the production company sees it. Though he prefers to take it to people’s living rooms or the local pub, if he can’t, then they come to the cutting room. He talks with relish about the making of the seminal A Life Apart, when fishermen came on a trip to the London cutting room to view the film.
His films are noted for their sparseness and simplicity. He shoots by available light and works intuitively, making decisions immediately. The important aspect for him is that there should be the space for interpretation in his work, as he explained in an interview with the School of Sound: “If we have no space to think and no space to feel, then how do we have space to question, and to question who we are?” He follows that by saying “I don’t think we [as filmmakers] should ever be giving answers – that’s arrogance.”
When asked about where this untiring impulse to create such moving films about ordinary people comes from, he pauses (a little) to think. “Two answers spring to mind immediately. One is that when I was 11, I was very, very ill. I had to lie in bed for six or seven months on my back. I wasn’t allowed to sit up. And that’s a hell of a long time for an eleven-year old. I got rid of a lot of baggage when I was eleven. But I thought a lot, and I felt a lot and I think it produced in me a kind of a stillness, which comes across in my movies.”
He also talks about the culture shock that he found on first moving north to Manchester: “I’d never been to the north of England before, and I remember now, crossing the bridge on the train at Stockport, looking down at all those cotton mills and seeing the conditions in which people were living and it absolutely shocked me to my roots. I never realised this was happening in my country… Living in Manchester I saw it every day, all the time, and I think that entered my consciousness very, very quickly. It was like a wake up call.”
One of his first films, Tomorrow’s Saturday, screened as part of the Free Cinema movement, is set in a cotton mill and got its name from the overheard comment: “Thank God tomorrow’s Saturday”. He talks about going home to his parents, who were “very modest, conservative with a little c” and having arguments about what he had seen in Manchester with his father over Sunday roast.
“And I think that experience, perhaps, laying in bed for eight months, I recognised stillness, and I learned to look and listen. And then going to Manchester, and suddenly seeing another world that I never realised existed, that had a massive impact on me - that I’ve never lost.”
So there are films like I Was A Solider, more poignant for its silence than words. “[The men would] start to talk, and they would stop, but in their eyes you would see their pain. Meanwhile you heard all the sounds around them; you heard the sheep, you heard the cows, and the car running down the track – the sounds of normality. I think the Guardian said something like ‘I’ve never been so moved by a film that doesn’t move.’ It’s very still.”
A great believer in working collectively, he seeks the input of the whole of his crew – carefully picked for their understanding and sensitivity, “I feel the best energy, the best creative potential, the best understanding socially and politically of one another, is a society that’s based on collective compassion, and that is something that is sadly lacking more and more in our society.”
At heart though, Grigsby is an optimist. He talks about how much he loves cinema – from American independent filmmakers like the Coen Brothers, to Iranian, Palestinian, and Chinese cinema – all national movements arising from oppression with a creative and humanistic response. “It doesn’t matter where our films are made… Ultimately we all share the same stories – life, living, oppression. That’s why I love movie making because it’s just such an exciting way of communicating.”
“Excited”; “privileged”; “passionate”… these are the words that litter Grigsby’s speech, revealing the force of energy that surrounds him. “I’ve got a huge amount to say and I’ve got all these ideas, and when I wake up in the morning there’s another idea on the floor that’s slipped out of my ear in the night.”
It seems that perhaps the biggest problem facing Grigsby now, is the climate of documentary-making that resists long research periods and unknown outcomes; freedom that is vital to his work. He talks about the genesis of one of his seminal works, Living on the Edge, a documentary about four very different British communities living in Thatcherite Britain in the late eighties. Apparently, he sold the idea to the commissioner in one sentence: “I want to make an impressionistic film about contemporary Britain”. The commissioner said yes – something that would never happen now. The film was shown at the ICA, and all the contributors came along. He describes the scene afterwards, as all these people who had never met before, gathered together around the central figure of the farmer who during the course of the film lost his farm, and started swapping numbers, “and I thought: ‘this is why I make films’.”
It’s the creative freedom and the impact of documentary – like his experience with Living on the Edge – that continues to draw him. “That’s why I’ve stayed close to documentary. I believed in documentary at 15, and I still believe in it now.”
Interview by Kerry McLeod
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