Paradigm shift: acclaimed filmmaker Adam Curtis talks politics, filmmaking, and Wollaton Hall

Could you tell us what Shifty: Living in Britain at the End of the Twentieth Century is about, and why you gave it that title?
I think it’s what it says on the tin. There's a great confusion at the moment, not just politically, but socially as well. There is a sense that a lot of what people feel, and the organisations that run them and help them explain why they feel, have become unmoored. I wanted to go back because, especially with a lot of social media, it's very ahistorical. It's as if something just happens. And then something else happens, and you've forgotten the previous bit. It's all like it started yesterday.

I wanted to point out that there are roots to all this. There are reasons behind it - I was focused not just on the political events, but also on moments that show you the way people's thoughts and feelings about themselves and society began to change.

Your works are often composed of archive footage taken from the BBC Archives. This film features footage of the natural history museum at Wollaton Hall, and I also spotted Castle Donington in there. Could you talk more about uncovering that footage?

There was this great early 80s film in the BBC Archives made about animals and our relationship to animals. There was a section set in Wollaton Hall as they were preparing this new exhibition of stuffed animals. It was about this strange, frozen relationship we have with nature. The person who took you through it all was trying to reanimate our connection with nature, because people were feeling in the early 80s that we'd lost that connection. He goes into some strange back room in Wollaton Hall, opens up a freezer, and starts to bring out frozen animals of all kinds.

It was a symbol of this desire of a sort of an old, slightly patrician class who would tell you about the world, trying to freeze it and hold it together at the very moment at which its foundations were beginning to rock. It’s a wonderful symbol of an old country still trying to hold itself, and its nature, together. 

Something that stands out in Shifty is how different and odd people from the past seem. What do you think we can learn from that? 

Human beings aren't fixed. If we went back 200 years, the people we would meet wouldn't be like us. Because somehow, the way we understand the world, the way we appreciate each other, and what we think of as funny just wouldn't connect. And it does make you think about what someone in thirty years time will think about us. People will look back at Ozzy Osbourne and say, why? Why did thousands of people lie in a field in a completely comatose, dribbling state, listening to Kerrang! metal?

That’s one of the things I was trying to get into the film subtly – a sense of two perspectives on our time. This is what it was like to live through, and it was wonderful and exciting, and sometimes frightening, but also I just wanted to get that sense of pulling back a bit and realising, they were quite weird, you know, that lot.

In the film you portray the shift away from traditional political power and toward financial power, initially via Thatcher. Could you summarise that shift?

Mrs. Thatcher was one of the great believers in the rationality of economics, that it really was a scientific way to transform society. She introduced this economic theory called monetarism, which said that, rationally, you just squeeze the money supply in the economy, inflation would be squeezed out, and Britain would become great again. She went around saying Britain could become great again, a harbinger of what was to come. Very quickly, it went completely out of control, because an economic system of money is so complex that you cannot just run it on those rational scientific lines.

I love the sequence showing Tony Blair walking into Downing Street juxtaposed with Atomic Kitten’s Whole Again...

I try to do it in ways that surprise you. You make jokes, because that was a joke, right? And then you switch it up by going, ‘No, that was really serious.’ Well, he did it. It was one of the most shocking things ever. But, you know, the politicians are helpless at the moment because they gave away so much power, and they were persuaded to do so, as I try to show in the series. It was by being told that if everyone's a bit self-interested, then they must be self-interested as well. Therefore they should give away power. Well, that's a pretty negative view of human beings, if I might say so.

With the debate currently raging around flags and asylum hotels, is what we’re seeing today a genuine working class revolt or something serving other motives?
It’s something filling a vacuum. You've got a system that doesn't work any longer and doesn't seem to care about many of the people. The global economic crash of 2008 is on a level with the First World War, with massive effects on the world which we are still feeling. They went down the austerity route which cut services across the country. No one has done anything to deal with that ever since. In that vacuum comes a nostalgic nationalism. You could argue that looking historically at Britain, you had a very confident patrician class who grew up with the empire. When the empire declined, the attitudes and the structure of that class still continued for quite a long while.

What would you say to anyone wanting to enter journalism, documentary making or storytelling?
Surprise me. Make it in such a way that I don't know what's coming. You've got to tell a story. You can't just have an opinion. Opinions are boring.

Everything is so formalised in our journalism, especially television journalism – you can tell exactly what's going to happen within seconds. Go out and start filming. Don't try to think about it too much. If you film something that at the back of your head excites you, it might be the building blocks of a new kind of storytelling. Get out and realise that, in television, there are no rules.

Shifty: Living in Britain at the end of the 20th century is available to watch on BBC iPlayer. You can listen to a longer version of this interview as part of our LeftLion Interviews podcast series.