UK: Sarah Palin--You Betcha!

The Guardian

How Nick Broomfield didn't meet Sarah Palin

When documentary film-maker Nick Broomfield asked Sarah Palin for an interview, she said: 'You betcha!' But as her family and colleagues began to spill the beans, America's favourite 'hockey mom' became more elusive …
By Catherine Shoard

Nick Broomfield has not had an erotic dream about Sarah Palin. Not yet, anyway. "But I understand those who have," he says. "It's like how Christopher Hitchens said he found Thatcher arousing. They both hold an incredible fetishistic attraction. In a fundamental Christian society that's so repressed and fucked up, Palin represents the forbidden in a weird and mischievous way. I think that's an enormously tempting fantasy for a lot of very religious men. And that's why she's such an effective poster girl for a movement for which she's meant to represent something very different."

Attracted or not – and he details appreciatively her "kinky outfits and leather gear and those pointy shoes" – Palin has been much on Broomfield's mind. His latest film, Sarah Palin: You Betcha! takes the Tea Party pinup as its topic and its title from Palin's dazzle-grinned (if hollow-bottomed) response to his request for an interview. It follows the director's attempts to hold her to her word, and to root out the truth about Palin from others in her absence.

The testimony he gathers bring into focus a woman so frightening that You Betcha's closest cinematic relative may well be The Omen. One after another, friends, colleagues, neighbours, relatives, mentors, employees, campaign advisers, cops, teachers and even priests step forward to grind axes, blanch at the prospect of a Palin presidency and, armed with anecdotes, outline why they think Palin is, variously, "dangerous", a "sociopath" and "disrespectful to intelligence". "Nice lady, charming, genuine smile, but she'd kill you like that," says the Rev Howard Bess, snapping his fingers sadly – Bess's 1995 book, Pastor, I Am Gay, was among those Palin had removed from Wasilla public library during her tenure as the Alaskan town's mayor.

The film's impact stems less from fresh evidence unearthed, than the cumulative effect of so many voices damning from the same hymn sheet. The damage is compounded by Broomfield's civility. He arrives in Alaska the picture of amiability, cracking gags, slapstick-sliding on the ice in his lumberjack winterwear. He's friendly to her pals, respectful to her parents, whose kitchen he sits in for tea and whose antler-sucking puppy he pats. "Her father is an amazing teacher – he's got tusks and fossils and rocks and he's like an Alaskan David Attenborough," drawls Broomfield – half surfer, half aristo. "I really liked them both. When I did a film with the US army I got on with a lot of people who politically I didn't agree with at all, but who I'd prefer to have behind me in a difficult situation than my leftwing friends. But at some point there are certain lines in the sand where it all changes."

We meet on 11 September, two days after You Betcha!'s premiere at the Toronto film festival. Broomfield, 63, sports a crisp white shirt and bright blue jeans and the faint swagger of the veteran rocker (his PR minder, Erik, also looks like he has just walked out of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue). He flew into town the previous evening night and has already dodged banana skins laid in his path by the flying monkeys (as Palin's online cheerleaders themselves). Before he touched down, there was "the odd threat … nasty calls in the office". Last night, there were mysterious Skype overtures from strangers. "Some of the people working on the film were worried about coming here. You tend to imagine the worst thing is gonna happen. Emotional and irrational people do stupid things and there is a lunatic fringe, I think. Once God comes into the equation anything can happen."

His chief thesis is that Palin is primarily a product of the isolated, deeply evangelical community in which she was raised and still resides. "To understand her, you have to understand the thing she has about right and wrong, God and the devil, bad and good – all that stuff which we don't really have, fortunately, in England." Wasilla is famous for two things other than Palin – the amount of crystal meth its residents get through, and the amount of praying they do. There are 6,000 residents and 76 churches, including the Assembly of God, Palin's devotion to which, thinks Broomfield, overrules all other passions. Even a local pastor tells Broomfield that Palin believes she's "the anointed one" – as well as thinking humans and dinosaurs once co-existed.

"Like George W Bush, when she has a problem she listens to God much more than having rational conversations with her ministers," says Broomfield. "When she was in office, she wasn't interested in day-to-day legislation, the practicabilities, logical debate. She operates on a spiritual level that is very worrying I think."

He has her down as a political opportunist who'll simply try to fill any power vacuum – a theory that fits neatly with the portraits offered of her as an overgrown prom queen, a beauty pageant back-stabber (there's some great footage of her puffing on a flute during Miss Alaska 1984, a dead spit for Rula Lenska) who thrives on gossip and vendettas and formulates policy with populist short-sight. Any allegiance to intellectual or fiscal ideologies is flaky at best. Her erratic decision-making meant she left Wasilla with a £22m deficit after her stint as mayor, then, as state governor, slapped an enormous tax on oil companies in Alaska. "She got that through with Democrat support," says Broomfield. "Most of the Republican party were against it."

While the Democrats are still, he thinks, pursing an 18th-century idea of politics as a forum for rational debate, Palin and her Tea Party chums "have a romantic view of something that probably never existed – the American dream – and that proud Americans don't need healthcare or welfare benefits, that those are for the weak." And it's this individualism that Broomfield thinks connects with voters. "The more you look at it the more worrying it is. And worrying is a pathetic word for it because it's really troubling. You get a feeling of a lot of people are looking for a way and finding they can't find it. Their solutions are more and more extreme and I think she embodies all that."

Broomfield thinks the Tea Party is now ploughing forward with an approach that exploits people's lack of faith in anything wider than their own fate. "Palin is very good at whipping a crowd up in basic emotions; she wears the right gear and she's this earth-mother figure. Even if a lot of what she says doesn't make sense, she says it with a lot of rah-rah-rah. Her legislative director said to me: 'She's great in a crowd of 10 to 100,000. It's in a room with two other people that she's got real problems.'"

Broomfield, batted back on the latter, is reduced to sitting in on the former, being one of the crowd, rather than an intimate quizzer. He attends a variety of Palin rallies including one, at the film's climax, that is billed as featuring a Q&A. But the questions are a stitchup: rabble-rousing prompts with soundbite pay-offs. So Broomfield stands up to yell an impromptu one: "Do you think your political career is over?" There are some nervous bleats from the crowd. Palin sips from her bottle of water and asks Broomfield why he doesn't ask everyone else. On cue, they whoop and holler and Broomfield and crew are hauled out of the hall by some heavies.

It's a strange little stunt: there's really no way that the director could have come out of it well, no way Palin wouldn't win. Why do it? "That scene is kind of despair really. We knew we were going to get chucked out. And what we didn't show is that they then tried to wrench the stuff off us and get the footage. They smashed the cameraman into the wall and it was very ugly."

What else would he have asked, had he got the chance? He thinks, brown eyes blinking. "Why there are all these people who have pretty much given their lives to her, been totally charmed and enslaved by her, worked with her round the clock, are all now having feuds with her. What happened? And what is in her that does that?"

And what does he think she'd say? Not a lot. Or not a lot of much import. "She learns speeches but there's a weird Sarah Palin verbiage that indicates she's not understanding some of the sentences."

In fact, of course, actually bagging that interview might not have been in Broomfield's best interests anyway. His USP, after all, lies in an outsider's perspective and in the rejection of a traditional template to make his own quest part of the narrative (an approach he pioneered, and the likes of Louis Theroux, Jon Ronson and Morgan Spurlock now practise). "You have to find a structure that is a portrait by omission. I think sometimes people reveal more about themselves by the questions they won't answer. I work that way and I've done lots of subjects that are off-limits. And unless you're Fox News, Palin is too."

It's true. Many of Broomfield's previous films have been about people – Kurt Cobain, Biggie and Tupac, Aileen Wuornos – unavailable for interview: pieces of history, rather than part of the process. And one senses a slight defensiveness in Broomfield over this. One area in which more lukewarm reviews of You Betcha! converge is in questioning the purpose of making a Palin documentary at this point in time.

"I thought she was an interesting phenomenon. What makes it confusing is that it's so topical and newsworthy … it's almost following daily events. Personally I don't think she really has anywhere to go now. She might well run for president but I don't think she's going to get an nomination."

If she does, it'll boost the film's chances of wide theatrical distribution – Broomfield says he wants it seen by the widest audience possible, and its crowdsourced roots ($30,000 drummed up through the fundraising website Kickstarter to supplement Channel 4's funding) suggest there is a strong appetite. But he's also eager to be sober, to contextualise it within his back-catalogue. "I made it in the hope that in 10 years it will stand up as just an accurate portrait of a rightwing politician from a fundamentalist community."

Doubtless it will. Yet the quote which Broomfield himself coaxes out of an interviewee – that it's only when Palin is in a room being with one other person that she's really vulnerable – lingers with you. Broomfield may prefer the preparation to the roast, but you're left hungry for his subject to be given a proper grilling.

You Betcha! screens at the BFI London film festival on 14 and 16 October