Adam Curtis: 'I try to make the complexity and chaos intelligible'

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/jan/24/adam-curtis-bitter-lake

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There’s a problem with power in the modern world, says Adam Curtis – it’s just too boring. “A few years ago I was filming in Silicon Valley, in the richest postcode in the world, a place called Atherton. You just wouldn’t know it. Everyone is wearing North Face. Or whatever the American equivalent of North Face is these days.” The film-maker is dressed in his own uniform of ill-fitting suit and starched white shirt, a clamshell phone in his hand like he’s Anna Wintour. “Back in the days of the robber barons, they all dressed up, they all had opulence and everyone got angry about it. Now, it’s just… North Face. The North Face world. North Face is a thing of our time. And yet those people might have billions and billions of dollars.”

Getting good images of powerful characters is Curtis’s business. He makes documentaries about the secret histories of power, from the way Freud’s nephew inspired consumerism to the shared characteristics of Islamism and neo-conservatism. They are stories that are grand and disconcerting, but the way Curtis tells them they’re also energising, funny and beguilingly beautiful to watch. His style is comparable to that of a collage artist. From his desk in the BBC archives (at a location he refuses to divulge), Curtis will watch hundreds of hours of footage, frequently in fast forward, looking for the relevant details, the right images to illustrate the stories he wants to tell. He’s been praised as an auteur and one of the most original thinkers on TV. He’s also been denounced as a dangerous contrarian and a teller of tales that simplify the complex realities of the modern world. Right now he’s puzzling over how to make sense of a ruling class dressed entirely in breathable fabrics.

After a four-year absence from our screens Curtis is about to return with a new film, a two-and-a-half-hour BBC iPlayer-only epic called Bitter Lake. It takes as its premise a meeting in February 1945 between the then US president Franklin D Roosevelt and King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. Sitting on a yacht on the Great Bitter Lake of the Suez Canal, the pair struck a deal: the US would support this newly formed state and, in return, the Saudis would ensure a continuing stream of oil to the west. From that one point, argues Curtis, came the spread of Wahhabi Islam, the rise of personality politics and the Afghani version of The Thick Of It.

“I’d always known about the Bitter Lake meeting,” says Curtis. “I’d seen the footage, this really gloomy, almost Edward Hopper-style shot of President Roosevelt – who is about to die – sitting on a warship meeting the king of Saudi Arabia, who’d ruthlessly created this new kingdom 20 years before. I’d always thought this was rather an epic moment and it has stuck in the back of my brain.”

That meeting was epic, Curtis argues, because it saw the US pledge to protect the house of Saud from external threats – while their subsequent dependence on the same people for oil influenced global politics for generations to come. Bitter Lake seeks to track that influence. “I just think we haven’t fully understood how important Saudi Arabia is to the problems of the Middle East,” he says. “What’s fascinating about Saudi Arabia and its relationship with the west is that it actually destabilised politics. One, because of the oil shock of 1973, which really did put a spanner in the works of the grand political dream that you could plan and manage everything in society, and helped bring people like Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to power. It also, in the process, re-established the power of finance, because suddenly there’s all these petrodollars floating around the world that the banks got hold of, and they could trade them and lend them. And the banks began to become powerful.”

If that sounds like a grand hypothesis, well, it’s typical Curtis. He doesn’t do things by half measures and, indeed, Bitter Lake has an entire other angle to its story, the film also covering the last 70 years of western involvement in Afghanistan. “I’ve been writing a lot about Afghanistan on my blog,” says Curtis who, during the gap between films, has been producing shorts and surfacing footage in a shadowy corner of the BBC website. “We’ve been fighting a war in Afghanistan for 13 years, and yet we haven’t done a history on the BBC. But then a cameraman called Phil Goodwin came to me. He’d gone out to Kabul and opened the cupboards at the back of the BBC offices. He’d got out the tapes of everything we’d shot there over the last 40 years, the rushes, the unedited material. He sat there for weeks with his laptop, digitising it all. And he came back with 26 terabytes of footage.

“No one was really interested at the BBC, but he gave them to me about two years ago and I’ve been going through them. They’re wonderful, amazing. And I just realised that you could make a film out of the footage, one that actually captured the reality of the experience there. Not of everything. But it gives you a sense of how complex, strange and knowing the Afghans are.”

Certainly, watching Bitter Lake is a strange experience. Freed from the constraints of TV schedules, the film can feel like watching a dream. A visual Curtis trademark is the quick, ironic juxtaposition, where a passage about the rise of neo-conservatism in 1970s America, say, is illustrated by clips from Perry Mason and footage of an expensive helicopter falling into the sea.

That style is not entirely absent here – there are clips of the Afghani Malcolm Tucker and footage of a poor British Council rep trying to explain conceptual art to a group of baffled young people in Kabul – but largely it’s replaced by something much slower: lingering unedited shots, moments that were perhaps never intended for broadcast, that hang in front of your eyes without commentary. There’s little music either, the most frequent sound being the sort of drone you’d normally associate with the end of a My Bloody Valentine concert. The film acquires different qualities as a result, as you spend more time thinking about the scenes in front of you. One particular passage, filmed during a military operation in Helmand, is just a minute of a soldier stroking a bird that has landed on a branch in front of him. The soldier looks at the cameraman, his eyes bright with a childish wonderment. It left my bottom lip wibbling.

Curtis is only making this film for iPlayer because they won’t have him on TV any more, right? “Not at all. Quite the opposite,” he says flatly. “I have deliberately done this because iPlayer gives me the chance to experiment. I wanted to create something you wouldn’t put on television. It’s a deal I have with the BBC: you can experiment, but don’t cost any money. Bitter Lake was made for £12k, I think – that’s it. And I know that in five years’ time, everyone’s going to watch everything on iPlayer, so let’s get in there before the bureaucrats do.”

A conversation with Curtis is fast, intense and likely to jump off in a new direction without warning. His curiosity is apparent, not just about politics, history and technology but culture too. He makes shorts for Charlie Brooker’s Screen Wipe and has produced high-profile collaborations with Massive Attack and the Punchdrunk theatre company amongst others. His musical tastes cover a broad range. He says he likes Kanye West for the moments he’s “a real soppy badger” and that Burial is a “musical genius of our time”. He’s into both Rihanna’s We Found Love and the country music of Elizabeth Cook, specifically the songs Girlfriend Tonight and Heroin Addict Sister. At a slight tangent, he also has a respect for Jane Fonda. “She’s one of the great ideologues of our time. Starts up as this sort of Marxist revolutionary, but then not only does she start the VHS boom with her exercise videos, she makes that shift towards what I call ‘body fascism’, where you give up trying to change the world and instead manage yourself with an iron will.”

He may spend his working life telling stories about how power is controlled by an elite, but Curtis is not a cynic. “I believe that it’s possible to make the world intelligible – however complex and chaotic it is,” he says. “That is the progressive job of journalism. The other reaction – which is to say, ‘Things are just so complex and unpredictable that you can never make sense of them’ – is, I think, one of the main motors that supports the conservatism of our time.”

Yet to his critics, Curtis is the same as the politicians he attacks. Does he too not simplify complex reality? “My response is this,” he says. “All reality is incredibly complex and chaotic. To make sense of it we have to tell stories about it – which inevitably simplifies. And that is what politicians – and journalists – do. What I try to do is to find new facts and data, things you haven’t thought about, and turn them into new stories. My aim is to use those stories to try and make the complexity and chaos intelligible.”

Being unable to deal with the complexity of the world has seen us retreat into what Curtis calls a “static world”. Instead of looking to change the world for the better, we look either to change small things (our bodies, our own rights as an individual), or we fall back into the past. “This obsession with risk that politicians, terror experts and finance people have, it’s about going back into the past, looking for patterns – which computers now allow you to do – and adjusting everything to make sure things are stable.

“When I was working with Massive Attack, I used an old Bauhaus song called Bela Lugosi’s Dead and [on the big screens] I constantly repeated the phrase, ‘If you like this, then you’ll love that.’ I think in a way that’s the motto of our time. We’ll give you tomorrow something very similar to what you had yesterday. And then the world will be stable. And that’s true in politics, finance and culture.

“Look at the way culture plays it,” he continues. “I mean, look at me. Look at Edgar Wright: he makes movies constantly referencing things. We constantly play yesterday back to you in a slightly altered form, to try and make you feel stable and happy. And the world stays stuck and everyone gets ratty, which is why they all snark at each other on the internet.”

Typical. Just as you’re wrapping up one topic of conversation, Curtis’s mind leaps off into another: digital culture, “feedback loops” and a “free” space owned by corporations. That story is for another time, though, and it will be difficult to tell, he says – just think of all that North Face.

Bitter Lake is available on BBC iPlayer from 9pm on Sun