Director's cut

State of the Art

by Matt Ashare

When British documentarian Nick Broomfield, maker of Heidi Fleiss, American Madam and Fetishes, set out on the project that would become the controversial Kurt and Courtney, it's fair to say he had no idea what he was getting himself into. Although he'd been down some bumpy trails before, he'd never encountered the kind of roadblocks Courtney Love threw into his path. Not only did he lose American funding for the film midway through the shoot, but a last-minute injunction prevented him from showing it at Sundance earlier this year. Of course, for a guerrilla filmmaker like Broomfield, such conflicts and setbacks are all in a day's -- make that a year's -- work.

Broomfield had initially intended Kurt Cobain to be the subject of the film. As he explains over a cell phone from a taxi in Manhattan, "I was drawn more to making a film about Kurt because I've done a series of films about icons, and he was an icon to a lot of people. That's why his death was so devastating. Plus, I liked his music."

But Broomfield quickly discovered that he'd stumbled upon a more sinister tale, one that involved drug abuse, sociopaths, conspiracy theorists who believe Cobain was murdered by Love, and a whole lot of people who had nothing but bad things to say about Courtney. And so the focus of his film shifted from Kurt Cobain the icon to Courtney Love the wicked witch of the Northwest.

"That's how I always work," he reveals. "I shoot for a very long time, and the film becomes a diary of my experiences when I'm making it. I'm shooting for like 12 or 14 weeks and I try to do a film that represents that experience. I construct a narrative out of that. I don't do a lot of research in advance. I have researchers working for me, but I start pretty much when I start shooting. That way I think I can take the audience in with me. It's not like I go in as an expert. I don't believe in filmmakers being experts."

Since Broomfield's access to people who worked with and/or knew Kurt and Courtney was severely restricted, many if not most of the people interviewed in the film (including Courtney's biological father, one of Kurt and Courtney's nannies, and the deranged and now dead lead singer of the Mentors, El Duce) don't qualify as experts either. And even Broomfield acknowledges that nobody's made a credible murder case.

"I don't believe that he was murdered but I think there were some pretty weird, fairly wicked things going on that we're expected not to question. And it's stupid to just pretend otherwise because the story [of Kurt's suicide] just doesn't work. There are too many inconsistencies. It makes you realize that somehow his death may have been enabled. I think people knew a lot more about it than what we've been told."

But what bothers Broomfield the most is that Courtney's been able to prevent the story from being told. "In America there are these large corporate entities that own so many things -- magazines, news shows, film companies. And that makes certain stories off limits. I couldn't have done this film without European funding. And the fact that one can't get sponsorship for this kind of story in America is ridiculous."

Kurt and Courtney is playing at the Kendall Square Cinema in Cambridge and the Embassy Cinema in Waltham.