Nick Broomfield On The Trials And Tribulations Of Documenting Whitney Houston

7 June 2017 | 2:50 pm | Anthony Carew

"The more time I spent learning about her, the more I fell in love with her."

For a generation of filmgoers, Nick Broomfield is the English guy holding the boom. The 69-year-old documentarian inserts himself into his own films, quite literally: he's forever shown walking in front of the camera, bumbling his way into the frame, mic in hand. For critics, Broomfield is a doorstepper and a muckraker, but his presence can be disarming. His twin portraits Aileen Wuornos: The Selling Of A Serial Killer (1992) and Aileen: Life And Death Of A Serial Killer (2003) are about his relationship to his subject, and 2014's excellent Tales Of The Grim Sleeper finds this elderly British man heading into the crack-blighted Los Angeles neighbourhoods that the LAPD had abandoned. When Broomfield made a series of commercials for Volkswagen, in 1999, he even played on this trope: even when selling cars, he was holding a boom mic.

But for his 28th feature — in a long, chequered career that's crossed paths with Heidi Fleiss, Courtney Love, and Sarah Palin — Broomfield removes himself entirely from the film. Whitney: Can I Be Me? is a surprisingly tender portrait of the late singer Whitney Houston, without any of the provocations in his studies of Kurt Cobain, or Biggie & Tupac.

"I didn't know that's how I was going to feel until I was making it," says Broomfield, from his adopted home of Los Angeles. "The challenge was to get Whitney's soul into the film. To me, the answer quickly became to have her talking as much as possible, so that it felt like she was telling her own story."

"She was the first black female crossover artist who was really successful. There was her and Michael Jackson, and their ends were, in a way, not dissimilar."

Broomfield was interested in making a film about Houston — who died in February of 2012, at the grim end of a downward, drug-addled spiral — because "she was the first black female crossover artist who was really successful. There was her and Michael Jackson, and their ends were, in a way, not dissimilar".

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Whitney: Can I Be Me? is built from 100 hours of concert footage, shot by Rudi Dolezal during a 1999 tour, 100 hours of newly-shot interviews, and a wealth of archival footage from '80s TV interviews to the trainwreck 2005 husband-and-wife reality show Being Bobby Brown. "I found it a tiring, exhausting work to make," Broomfield says. The filmmaker was wracked by sleeplessness throughout the editing, becoming "haunted by [his] subject", obsessed with a ghost.

"The more time I spent learning about her, the more I fell in love with her," Broomfield confesses. "I think that happened to lots of people. You can see that the bodyguard in the film, he's completely in love with her. There was a lot to love. She was a kind, caring, charismatic, funny person, who also looked amazing and had this incredible voice... I was surprised that she was such a funny person; that she had this amazing comedic timing and an incredibly infectious laugh. She was a completely different person to this Clive Davis [peddled] image of the impeccably groomed ingenue. Her friends called her Nippy. She was very mischievous. I found her story much more moving than I ever expected."

Broomfield saw this story as being, like anyone's life story, "a tale of the central relationships" in Houston's life. Yet, those key figures — her mother Cissy Houston, long-time best friend/assistant/companion Robin Crawford, and husband Bobby Brown — weren't interviewed by Broomfield. Instead of trailing after them with a boom-mic, hectoring them to talk, Broomfield cut them out entirely.

"I don't think you could make a really honest, revealing film with the estate on board," Broomfield says. "The estate are a group of people who lived off her when she was alive, and continue to want to live off her now that she's dead. I don't know the estate, but I think in no small part they're responsible for a lot of the misconceptions about Whitney. I was very happy to have nothing to do with them."

Broomfield is unconcerned about any legal action ("I don't think they have a leg to stand on"), or what many of the people shown within think about the film. He was glad, with Whitney, to make a film that was a pure, warm "tribute" to its subject, after being disappointed with the ultimate effects of his last feature, Tales Of The Grim Sleeper. That documentary was a dire indictment of the LAPD, alleging that their failure to catch the film's titular serial killer was due to him targeting victims — crack-addicted black women, often working as prostitutes — that the police deemed weren't worth pursuing justice for. "I was, frankly, disappointed by the lasting impact that it had," Broomfield admits. "I hoped that there would be an inquiry into the LAPD, and what they didn't do. But nothing happened. This country is deeply racially divided, and obviously, the current administration is not going to advance that argument. This is just another chapter in the long history of the way [America] was founded and developed."

Broomfield's other cinematic indictment of the LAPD, Biggie & Tupac, followed ex-cop Russell Poole, a whistleblower who alleged that the LAPD were involved in the hit on Biggie Smalls. In Brad Furman's upcoming Labyrinth, Johnny Depp will play Poole ("I'm curious to how he's going to play it"); echoing how Broomfield's films about Aileen Wuornos led to the Hollywood feature, Monster, for which Charlize Theron won an Oscar.

The director is sure, too, that one day a big budget Whitney Houston biopic will be on the cards. But, for now, he's hoping that Whitney: Can I Be Me? can redress the public perception of her; being a reminder of the great talent that blossomed before her ignominious end.

"I'm hoping Whitney is warmly received in Australia, because the last time Whitney herself was in Australia, it was a pretty tough time for her," Broomfield says, evoking her disastrous 2010 tour. "She was mocked towards the end of her life, she was humiliated. A lot of the things that have come out about her have been so critical of her. But when you have a great artist, you want people to be able to remember their essence, too."