'Chosen' Confronts Abuse with Candor

Brian Woods explains how he turned the testimony of three middle-aged men into a powerful documentary on sexual exploitation.

This is what Tom Perry, a man in his forties, has to say about what happened when he was eleven and alone with his teacher:

“When I went into that room, I crossed a line that was invisible, and once you have crossed that line ... and you have got into that bed, everything in terms of self-worth, self-respect goes down the pan. That is it."

The words have an impact by themselves, but to fully appreciate their import, it helps to see the speaker’s face. In usual documentary practice the eyeline is slightly off the axis of the lens barrel. In “Chosen,” an award-winning documentary film directed by Brian Woods, three men in their forties — Mark Payge, Tom Perry and Alastair Rolfe — look straight at the viewer and describe how they were abused at the elite, public Caldicott Boys' Preparatory School. All highly-articulate men, they speak candidly about their abuse, and how that betrayal affected them over the following thirty years.

Last Wednesday, Woods was at The Televisual Intelligent Factual Festival in London, discussing the difficulties of getting the film made. He admits that on paper it looked like a tough sell: “Three middle-aged men talk about sex abuse for an hour.” But he was an established industry insider with a strong contact book, and he was convinced.

The pitch was rejected by 17 British commissioning editors. Several did so more than once. It is easy to speculate why. It was too dark for primetime. It was yet another abuse story. It was too long.

When a film subject tells a difficult personal story on camera, viewers are rarely forced to sit there, experiencing the subject's presence, for very long. Instead, stories are clipped short. In "Chosen," the three men have space to talk: The total running time of the film is more than 90 minutes.

Nonetheless, after word of mouth snowballed on the festival circuit, "Chosen" was picked up by Channel 4 and funded by their BRITDOC Foundation, which is dedicated to funding and distributing independent documentaries. According to Woods, after chief executive Jess Search of the BRITDOC Foundation previewed footage, she wondered whether it should be called “Dare to Look Away.”

The duration is as much a challenge for the subjects as for the viewers. Even a professional presenter would find it hard to speak at such length straight into the soulless vacuum of a lens barrel. The technical solution developed by Woods' team was to place a half-silvered mirror at an angle between cameraman Sean Lewis and the interviewee. That way, Payge, Perry and Rolfe would have the impression that they were speaking directly to Woods. None of them could see either the camera or Lewis.

Woods told the festival audience how everything else in the room receded: “It was a sound stage and it was absolutely silent, and everything else was draped in black, and nothing was lit except for Tom and myself. There was a sort of hypnotic quality about what you could see in the this rectangle of glass in front of you, because that was the only thing you could see.”

The documentarian Errol Morris often employs a similar technique, using a device he calls the "Interrotron." But he uses two autocue screens: one placed in front of the subject, the other in front of himself. His approach requires two separate camera feeds and two separate rooms for interviewer and interviewee, something Woods didn’t want to do.

The real secret to interviewing, though, isn't technical: It hinges on knowing how to give subjects space to talk and knowing how to listen. After his interview, Rolfe warned another contributor that he would find it hard to stop talking. He joked that Woods might have received formal training in interrogation techniques, perhaps even by Mossad.

The truth was simpler than that. Woods recalled that he started the second of three interview sessions with this question: "Alastair, just before we breaked you started talking about the grooming process, and you used the word seduced, which is quite a romantic word. Can you tell me more about how grooming works?”

The next time he spoke was just before the hard disk ran out. “We'd been talking two hours and I had not said a word,” Woods remembered. “There had been lots of times where he'd stopped and he expected me to ask a question, and my instinct had just been to sit there in silence and wait and wait and wait, and then he started again.”

No tricks: just a well-placed question and plain, simple listening.

See Dart Center's Tips & Tools for resources on covering Sexual Violence and Interviewing Victims.