Broken English [+lee también:
crítica
tráiler
entrevista: Jane Pollard e Iain Forsyth
ficha de la película], playing in the non-fiction section, out of competition, at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, was created by the directorial duo that brought us 20,000 Days on Earth [+lee también:
tráiler
ficha de la película], Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth. This film’s main protagonist is British cultural icon Marianne Faithfull, whose last documented performance this would turn out to be.

Cineuropa: We heard the news of the passing of Marianne Faithfull in January this year. How much did this affect the film?
Jane Pollard: We were almost finished, but of course, we now had a work about someone who had been so present during the creation but was no longer here. And in some way, the film needed to address that.

Iain Forsyth: The most important thing for us was not to turn the film into a headstone for Marianne, or an obituary. We have, of course, acknowledged it but without changing the film itself, fundamentally, from the movie we had created, with her being complicit and alive and part of the process.

Did you have all of her footage already in the can by then?
JP: Yes! We moved very quickly. Her health was a lot worse when we first met her, so there was a real urgency, then, to film her. We filmed the interviews with her and George MacKay first. This was two-and-a-half years ago. What we didn’t have at the time was Tilda Swinton’s scenes as the de facto narrator of the film, as we wanted to script her last, when the rest of the structure was in place, so that those scripts could move across Marianne’s life in a clever and interesting way.

Was Tilda Swinton also on board from the start?
JP: Straight away!

IF: She was the first person after Marianne that we attached.

What made Marianne “trust” you with her participation, do you think?
JP: We had already worked with Nick Cave and his long-time collaborator Warren Ellis, who had written and recorded on her last six albums, so that was a help. We sat down with Marianne and told her that when we work on something, we don’t know what it’s going to be. We know what it’s not going to be, but we’re not going to define what it is. And I think musicians work like that – you know, they don’t decide what an album is before it’s out. Instead, you go into the studio with some fragments of ideas, and then you piece it together and find it as it comes together. And that feels like our working process, too: we have an ambition for where we are going to end up, but we don’t know what shape it’s going to take.

Speaking of shape, the film is entered in the non-fiction section at Venice. While it’s certainly not fiction, there’s quite a lot of arranged performing, wouldn’t you agree?
JP: “Documentary” carries with it a lot of baggage, doesn’t it? That search for truth, or reevaluating the truth; there’s a sense of journalistic pursuit there. For us as filmmakers, it’s not what we’re interested in.

IF: That’s the thing for us. I’m sure some people call themselves documentary makers, but for us, it just seems so alien, so sort of limited. I feel like we go into making a film to tell a story, and we want to make the best film telling the best story. For me, “non-fiction” works as well as anything at the moment, because the story we're telling is not fiction, although we might be using some of the devices, techniques and methods of fictional storytelling. I think that the story we're telling, while it might not necessarily be full of journalistic truth, is full of emotional truth.

The film’s framing is a setting called The Ministry of Not Forgetting, where an “Overseer” is played by Tilda Swinton and a “Record Keeper” is played by George MacKay, who asks the interview questions. Did you ever require Marianne to act as well, which is something she does well, in order to get into some kind of character?
IF: I think Marianne Faithfull, on some level, is a character.

JP: Yeah, as much as Nick Cave is a character; it's a construct.

IF: You turn the camera on, and I have no doubt that Marianne is “playing” Marianne Faithfull. Just like I’m “playing” a film director right now, being interviewed in front of a recording device, which is not the person I would be if we went out for a beer tonight.

Among the many participants in the film, Mick Jagger isn’t one of them. Did you ask him?
JP: No; we didn’t really know what to do with him.