For our latest episode we are joined by veteran BBC documentary filmmaker, whose latest project Shifty promintently features some 1980s footage of Nottingham's Wollaton Hall...
Bafta-winning documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis has a long career under his belt of making surreal films exploring how people think, feel, and act in the West.
He first began his career as a conventional documentary producer for the BBC throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s. However, the release of Pandora's Box in 1992 marked the introduction of Curtis's distinctive presentation that uses collage to explore aspects of sociology, psychology, philosophy and political history.
Since then he’s made dozens of films and series in this style, many of which can be found on BBC iPlayer, including Bitter Lake (2015), HyperNormalisation (2016) and Can't Get You Out of My Head (2021).
His latest work Shifty: Living in Britain at the End of the Twentieth Century is a five-part series of hour-long episodes, which just happens to feature archival footage from Wollaton Hall, filmed back in the 80s by the BBC. With this in mind we jumped at the opportunity to pick his brain about filmmaking, politics and more.
This interview took place over Zoom in September 2025.
Head over to the LeftLion Spotify channel to listen and subscribe to all of our podcasts.
We have a favour to ask
LeftLion is Nottingham’s meeting point for information about what’s going on in our city, from the established organisations to the grassroots. We want to keep what we do free to all to access, but increasingly we are relying on revenue from our readers to continue. Can you spare a few quid each month to support us?
