Nick Broomfield is a documentary legend. If every documentarian attended the same high school, most of them would eat lunch alone or in the library, but Broomfield would be the quarterback on the field, practicing and eating with different people. Broomfield is one of those rare documentary filmmakers whose image comes to mind if you know his name or films at all. He inserts himself into many of his documentaries, usually by necessity — he lugs around camera and sound equipment as he hunts down interviews, saving money by taking on multiple roles. He would speak to possible murderers, definite murderers, and people who just wanted to kill him. Handsome, fearless, and talented, Broomfield is an anomaly, a documentary star.

However, he’s vanished from the screen in his latest film, The Stones and Brian Jones. It’s an ironically bold move to be traditional here, with Broomfield attempting an archival documentary for technically the first time. He delves into rare footage from the 1960s in order to explore the first years of The Rolling Stones’ existence and their early founding member, Brian Jones, who is often forgotten today. That’s because Jones quickly became overshadowed by his bandmates before dying in 1969. It’s a sad, culturally revealing story that adds to Broomfield’s pedigree of great documentaries about musicians, including Kurt Cobain, Leonard Cohen, Biggie and Tupac, and Whitney Houston.

Broomfield spoke to us about The Stones and Brian Jones, his interest in musicians as documentary subjects, and the process of making an archival film. Ahead of the interview proper, we’d like to share a beautiful summation of Broomfield’s intentions with the film that he provided during our conversation:

It was a complex story about somebody who’s full of contradictions; who had a wonderful, talented, brilliant side, and also a very nasty, cruel side; who tested everybody’s patience, including his friends. And getting that balance right was difficult.

Why Brian Jones, and Why Musicians?
The Stones and Brian Jones Release Date November 17, 2023 Director Nick Broomfield Cast The Rolling Stones Runtime 93 min Main Genre Documentary
MovieWeb: You’ve made some amazing documentaries about musicians. What interests you about musical artists, or how are they different from the other individuals you’ve explored?

Nick Broomfield: I guess, in a way, they’re a vehicle for looking at very common human stories. They’re all obviously different, because the people are so different, but a lot of them have these almost Shakespearean elements to them. Like, Whitney Houston was sort of made out to be completely different to who she was by Clive Davis, who had built this kind of statue to Whitney Houston as a sort of Queen. And, of course, she came from the slums of Newark, so no one could understand her behavior and being with Bobby Brown, whereas in fact, it was entirely representative of how she’d grown up. So that was kind of a portrait of somebody who had been put on a pedestal and then was decimated because they didn’t live up to something which they’ve never actually claimed they were themselves.

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Nick Broomfield: And then I guess the Brian Jones story is really a story of a very talented guy who had a vision, who probably was trying to escape from the confines of Cheltenham, this very repressive little town, and into the blues. You know, he thought the blues were going to be his salvation, and he forms The Stones, but his past would never let him escape. His parents were incredibly disapproving. He had that sort of Welsh Baptist background. So all these stories are really very complex human stories, but about people who we know and love who have a big following, and whose story I guess we’re interested in.

The Anti-Authoritarian Rolling Stones

MW: Why Brian Jones? And what made The Rolling Stones so different from all the other mods and garage rockers emerging in the 1960s?

Nick Broomfield: Well, I met Brian when I was going back to this rather remote school that I went to for many years, a boarding school in the middle of the countryside. And so The Stones, who were so defiant and broke all the rules and ran around with so-called really long hair and were anti-authority, were kind of our heroes. I just think they were different from the others, in that they were so openly rebellious, and I think we all wanted to be rebellious.

Nick Broomfield: There was this famous thing where they were all in a truck, and they drove into this garage forecourt. The guy wouldn’t allow them to use the toilet at the garage, so they all got out and just peed on his wall. They then ended up in court being fined, you know, 100 pounds each for doing this. People had not really heard of this kind of behavior. It was like, everyone was very good, they were almost like Cliff Richard or whatever. So, they were our natural heroes, really. They seemed to have their own way of doing things.

The Kid Strays from the Picture

MW: So many people know you as that eccentric and bold documentarian, seen in his own films lugging around audiovisual equipment as you pursue intimate interviews with people. In The Stones and Brian Jones, you provide the voiceover, but we don’t see you as usual. Is that an approach you want to move on from?

Nick Broomfield: I think there wasn’t really the excuse with the Brian Jones film to sort of go around and bang on people’s doors or harass them and chase them down the road, as much as I love doing that. So this is just a different discipline. And I’ve never really made an archival film. This is really all archive, and it’s a real discipline that I didn’t know. So I always like, on every film, to learn something new. I think if I’d known how difficult archive films are, I probably would have chosen to do something different. But you know, once you get in too deep, you can’t really get out of it. Finding the archives that hadn’t been seen, that was really refreshing and revealing, and was really difficult and time-consuming. And then editing it in such a way that it comes alive and tells a moving, intimate story is really a challenge, and it took a lot of time.

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MW: Do you think you want to do more archival films? Has this awakened a new phase in you?

Nick Broomfield: I think it is interesting, and it’s a very labor-intensive way of telling a story, and a very expensive way of telling a story, because they charge you so much per second. Whereas, if you’re doing interviews or a more traditional kind of documentary, you own what you shoot. So yeah, it’s horrendously expensive, but at the same time, I think if you’re doing a film about the ’60s, which this is about, you want to stay in the ’60s, and you want to immerse the audience in that experience of being in the ’60s and get a sense of the ’60s values. The problem with having lots of interviews and stuff is that you pull the audience out of the ’60s each time you cut away from it.

So I did learn an awful lot. I really like learning on each film, and I learned a lot quite painfully on this film, I seemed to be endlessly re-cutting it and re-mixing it. It actually looks simple. Of course, good films should look simple. They shouldn’t look really complicated, difficult to get through.

MW: You’ve made films about so many iconic, infamous, or interesting people. Is there anyone in particular who you’d love to make a film about, but haven’t yet?

Nick Broomfield: Gosh, I don’t know. I guess it will be the next film. Because right now, I don’t know. I’ll let you know when I do.

We cannot wait. In the meantime, The Stones and Brian Jones is available on demand and digital platforms