Nick Fraser: The Storyteller (PART II)

Do you read critiques of your books?
I read them fairly quickly; I think it's much easier dealing with critiques of your books when you've run something like 'Storyville' because you learn basically not to take them too seriously. You learn that people have their own agendas. George Orwell, when Animal Farm came out, he read all the critics. I think about probably six of them or so and three of them were negative, and he said that they never said how beautiful it was, and he's absolutely right. Most criticism that filmmakers get, 80% is just summarizing. I think many more readers or viewers figure out what's wonderful about a documentary, but a lot of that never surfaces in the review.

Do you have a writing ritual?
Hardly. I've got two pieces to write at the moment. I did get up at 6:30 a.m. every morning for about four years to write books and it's very, very grueling. You go to bed at 11 p.m. and then you start feeling really exhausted. I couldn't do this job and do a big book. I mean having got through the whole Democracy experience, it seems to me I must start writing again; I'm looking for topics now.

I'm actually, at the moment, doing a piece for The Observer newspaper about an American novelist, Richard Yates. Because when I tried to stop going crazy through the Democracy experience, I read all his seven novels. Revolutionary Road is just a stunning book and it's being made into a film directed by Sam Mendes and starring Leonardo DiCaprio. The interesting thing about Richard Yates is, to me, he speaks more than Updike does, and as much as Bellow or Roth. I think Richard Ford is a crazed Yates fan, and when you meet these fans they'll fix you in the eye and go on for hours about what a great writer he is, and he is a great writer. He usually writes about failure, which is unusual in America, and his books are deceptive. They appear simple - they're not simple - the characters are very complicated, and I find this about documentaries, the overlap between fiction and documentaries for me is that in really good documentaries you sort of feel you've known the person most of your life. We had one that's just come in - the working title is The Chuck Show, but I think they're going to call it The Art of Failure.

So I'm writing about Richard Yates, and also very interested in the new philanthropy, the way saving the world has been taken over by individuals and foundations. I'm very perplexed by this. I tend to write about things that I don't understand. There are lots of things I don't understand. But I tend to understand fewer things as I get older. I think shedding certainty is an absolute life obligation; I think that you should grow into skepticism. And I think many types of polemical types of writing that you might have admired 20 years ago cease to be interesting because the more you know about the world, the more reasonably complex it appears. And that's not a problem, that's a huge plus because it makes it more interesting.

I wrote about my old school because after all these years I didn't feel I quite understood the importance of it, and then before that I wrote about Europe. I'm not sure that it's a good way to make a living. I think if you're more hardheaded you have to take much more of marketing. You know it's said Saul Bellow said to someone, he doesn't have ideas, he has buttons, and this is in the days when everyone wore those dreadful buttons and I think really a lot of bestseller writing is in one way or another about buttons, it's about slogans, it's about marketing, et cetera, and I think this is what writers have to do. But it's sort of what I have to do with people and their documentaries, so I wouldn't want to do it, especially in relation to my own writing, although I'd love to sell more copies. It's a very difficult business being a writer in my view.

Do you feel more pressure when it comes to book deadlines as opposed to 'Storyville' deadlines?
No, I don't think so. I've never had that tight book deadlines, and I've never had trouble meeting them. I've never had trouble with deadlines. I've had trouble getting other people to meet deadlines - that's much more difficult. And I don't understand why people have a problem with deadlines; it seems to me if you say you're going to deliver a film on X day and then you sort of count back you know exactly when you have to hit all the things. But evidently, not everybody feels like that - they have huge problems with deadlines.

Is it becoming more of a problem?
I don't think so. The film The English Surgeon was actually spot on the deadline. I think on the whole filmmakers will always, if you give them a deadline, will do it a month late. That's the problem: when you write out a first deadline and you say there's a second one, they deliver it a month after the second one. Some friends of mine think that documentary filmmakers are fantastically unprofessional, and wouldn't survive in any other medium. And in my view, they're just the same as journalists or magazine writers: they want to do their best and they have high standards and they just spend time on things and they don't mean to.

What was going through your mind over as talks of the cuts were circulating?
I felt in a state of near split personality, because most of my time by this stage was trying to sort of herd the 10 filmmaker calves to get them to finish the Democracy films on time and try to, with my colleagues, organize the logistics of this unwieldy fascinating project, which is always so overstretched and under funded. When we started doing it, everybody knew that. So that was taking up a huge amount of quite stressful time and at the same time I was thinking 'What the hell is going on? I don't know what's going on at the BBC, I don't know where we are.'

Earlier this year there was this notion that the BBC would cut the strand so badly we would just be basically an acquisition strand rather than be able to commission anything, and they have restored the cash. What the last painful four months tell me is that the BBC, which is in a bad shape financially, does love 'Storyville' enough to keep going on in quite a major way by their standards. I would always wish there would be far more money because I don't think documentary filmmakers get paid well enough. I think it's very rare for them to earn a decent living and there's only one Michael Moore. It's actually a very difficult thing to be doing, making good films, and I don't think we give them enough money - I don't think we recompense them enough, and this is a real problem for me. But, they do make great films and at least I can go on showing them, and I can pay them adequately.