This is apropos of nothing, take from it what you will…
The boy was about sixteen, if memory serves, and he’d left the family home in a piss-poor area of Burnley to seek his fortune in Blackpool, a rancid shithole of a town. His parents thought he was going to work in a restaurant or maybe tear tickets at the amusement park. I don’t know if they thought that because that’s what he’d told them or if they just assumed. I don’t even know if it was his intention to get a job like that. Probably it was. And I don’t know what went wrong, why he didn’t manage to land a proper job or what fucked up the one he did get. Either way, the police think he became a rent boy. They think he probably got hooked on something and had to get money, maybe he was already in debt to someone he shouldn’t have been and selling his body was the only chance he had to pay them off. Apparently this happens a lot in Blackpool.
Sixteen years old. Someone killed him. Someone chopped his body into several pieces and distributed them in a series of dumpsters at the back of a row of restaurants. The boy didn’t have a criminal record so the police had to wait a few days until someone found his head and he could be finally be identified.
They told the family their son had been murdered. When she heard the news, his older sister committed suicide. This piss-poor family with no education lost fifty percent of their children in the space of a few weeks.
A man confessed to the crime. He wasn’t the guy. He was some nut who liked to confess to crimes because he was fucked in the head (excuse the medical terminology) and he liked the attention. On top of a murder and suicide, the family had to suffer through someone claiming to have killed their son for the fucking glory of it.
“We want YOUR take on this,” the producer lied, “we want the documentary YOU would make. No interference.” I’d made one movie and now someone wanted me to do a documentary on Channel Four about people who confess to crimes they didn’t commit. I thought it would be fun to make a documentary and I believed the line of bullshit that was being spun about creative control because I thought that people who made documentaries for a living had integrity. You don’t get to be that wrong many times in your life.
A few weeks later and I’m sitting in a tiny living room in Burnley with this tragically bereaved family who have been persuaded that it will somehow help them to talk to a television crew about their experience. Dad is sitting in front of the TV with an ice cream tub of shag tobacco on the arm of his chair. He’s chain-smoking and watching a Steven Seagal movie that he doesn’t want to turn down even though we’re trying to record sound. The youngest kid is probably nine years old and he’s running around the place causing havoc. Grandma is in a wheelchair in the corner, also chain-smoking roll ups. Dementia has her firmly in its grip and she’s screaming “HELLO?!” at the television every few seconds for no apparent reason. I don’t think she even knows we’re here.
Mum, meanwhile, is trying to cut through all this chaos to talk to us about the murder of her son and her daughter’s subsequent suicide. “Ask her how she feels about it”, suggests the producer. I don’t think I will. I don’t think we have any business being here and I don’t think we’re helping anyone at all. I feel sick.
Grandma: “HELLO?!”
The cameraman wants to shoot the mother in a big wide shot, so as not to make the footage too invasive. “No, invasive is good” says the producer. The researcher is crying quietly behind me. This is the worst day of my working life.
“HELLO?!”
We have to get the mother to sign a release form, saying we can use her image and what she says and broadcast this to the nation. She has said she doesn’t want her face to be shown because she’s embarrassed by what has happened to her family and she doesn’t want the neighbours to find out. Anonymity is not stipulated on the contract but that’s okay because it suddenly becomes clear that she never learned to read and can barely sign her name. This, apparently, was lucky for us.
“HELLO?!”
I want to quit. I want to get up and walk out and tell the production company and Channel Four and anyone at home who actually wants to watch this to go and fuck themselves very hard with something sharp. But I’m twenty-seven years old and this is my second job as a director and I don’t have the balls because I imagine I may never work again.
Another lesson learned: Always Quit.
“HELLO?!”
The kid is running around and now he has a marker pen in his hand. I can’t see what he’s doing with it. We’re ready to shoot something. It’s not the wide, it’s a big close-up of Mum. She’s already crying. The shot is ugly and invasive and undignified and everything it shouldn’t be. “I love it. Shoot it.” says the producer, who’s forgotten his own lie about this being MY film.
“HELLO?!”
I look at the cameraman, who shrugs and shakes his head and mouths “up to you” at me. I look at the researcher. She’s wiping her eyes and getting her questions ready. The producer grins at me. The Steven Seagal movie suddenly mutes; the sound man has finally persuaded Dad to shut it off. We’re ready…
“HELLO?!”
The kid with the marker pen clears my eye-line just as Grandma turns to look at the room for the first time. Mum turns to her, to tell her to be quiet, and starts laughing. There are still tears rolling down her cheeks but now she’s laughing. The researcher looks up and gasps.
Grandma is staring at me, like she’s never seen me before in her life. She’s hunched over in her wheelchair, a soggy roll-up screwed into the corner of her mouth. If she’s even aware of people laughing at her, she certainly doesn’t know why…
“HELLO?!”
The kid with the marker pen has written “TWAT” in big block capital letters on Granny’s forehead.
Mum and Dad have lost two children in horrible, gruesome, tragic circumstances and they are now pissing themselves laughing. The cameraman and researcher are sniggering behind their hands and I have lost my shit completely and am doubled-over on my chair.
“HELLO?!” shouts a demented old lady with “TWAT” written on her forehead.
The room cracks up. Everyone is laughing uncontrollably. Everyone except…
“Get a close-up of the old lady” says the producer.
*
The battle I lost on the shoot, I won in the edit: none of this footage, nor the story itself made it to broadcast. I will never make another documentary.
