“I’m looking for a commission for older children: drama that genuinely appeals to 11-16-year olds. This is a completely unserved audience.

Drama on C4 should continue to help define the channel as provocative, original and genre-busting. Our successful long running series – Shameless, Skins and Hollyoaks – are the perfect training ground and springboard for new talent, on and off-screen.”

Camilla Campbell: Commissioning Editor, Drama, Channel 4

Across 20 categories the 4Talent Awards tip exciting individuals with the potential to make a difference, as judged both by commissioners and the producers who supply them.

All the info on how to apply for the 4Talent Awards is here.

We now have over half of the 40 (yes, 40) judges on side:

Kate Vogel, Editor, 3 Minute Wonder (C4)
Sarah Mulvey, Commissioning Editor, Documentaries (C4)
Robert Wulff-Cochrane, Senior Development Editor, Drama (C4)
Caroline Leddy, Commissioning Editor, Comedy (C4)
Victoria Pile, Writer, Green Wing, Smack the Pony
Shane Allen, Commissioning Editor, Comedy (C4)
Ben Caudell, Creative Director @ Zeppotron
Liza Marshall, Head of Drama (C4)
Charlie Pattinson, Exec Producer @ Company (Shameless)
Cath Lovesey, Editor, Music (C4)
Lana Webb, Head of Music @ Remedy
Debbie David, Commissioning Editor, T4 (C4)
Richard Cook, Exec Producer @ Eyeworks (T4, Popworld)
Matt Locke, Commissioning Editor, Education (C4)
James Kirkham, Manager Director @ Holler
Dorothy Byrne, Head of News & Current Affairs (C4)
Alice Tonge, Art Director, 4Creative (C4)
Ewen Spencer, Freelance photographer (shot for Skins)
Ruth Fielding, Managing Director @ Lupus Films
Adam Gee, Commissioning Editor, New Media Factual (C4)
James Estill, Senior Producer, 4Talent (C4)

Further updates on the way soon.

Words: Nick Carson
Broomfield portraits: Kate Beatty

“It’s a filmmaker’s responsibility to put together something as accurate as possible,” is the Broomfield manifesto. Following 2006’s acclaimed Ghosts, he’s taken his experiments with ‘real cinema’ to a new level with Battle for Haditha - digging as deeply into the principles of filmmaking as he does the universal issues surrounding this symbolic episode.

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“It’s great fun to play around with style,” Broomfield tells me, citing Day for Night - Truffaut’s much-lauded film about making a film - as a creative influence. Certainly since the journalistic frustrations of 1988’s aptly-titled Driving Me Crazy, he’s carved a name as a figurehead for what pigeonhole enthusiasts call les nouvelles egotistes: a growing breed of doc-makers who are themselves central to the action, together with the likes of Louis Theroux, Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock.

It’s all-too-tempting to pin up his two most recent films as the start of a new chapter in his work, given their deviation from this trademark approach. Both are dramatic interpretations of controversial situations, with no bobbing boom or frantic chase in sight; unlike much of his personality-driven back-catalogue to-date, both stories pivot largely on a specific series of events and the complex repercussions for the many characters involved.

But like his intriguing Anglo-American drawl, or one of his elusive heckled interviewees of past films, Broomfield’s not that easy to box in: for him, both style and substance should remain organic. “I think about one project at a time; I never seem to have a problem finding my next film,” he insists. “I’m not one of these people with a list.”

The latest episode to pique his inquisitive instinct was the death of 24 Iraqi civilians in the small town of Haditha on 19 November 2005, in the aftermath of a blast from an improvised explosive device (IED) that killed a young marine riding in convoy. Whilst initial reports from the US military claimed that the deaths were a direct result of the blast and a subsequent gunfight with hostile insurgents, Iraqi witnesses told a very different story - five unarmed men in a taxi shot dead as they approached the scene, and 19 more killed in three nearby houses in an act of violent retribution over the following hours.

It was an amateur video clearly showing the bodies of women and children shot in their homes, passed to an Iraqi human-rights organisation and then to Time magazine, that laced the affair with doubt. It identified flaws in the marines’ statement, prompting a formal inquiry - although the initial conclusion was that it was collateral damage, things soon spiraled into a full criminal investigation, with several marines on trial for unpremeditated murder. For Broomfield, this was motivation enough to cement the blood-soaked incident as an example.

“I’ve researched lots of subjects that I haven’t followed through,” he admits. “When you’ve got to be with them for a year, a year-and-a-half, you might as well do something that is complicated enough, or has enough mystery to keep you going. I don’t like going into films knowing what the outcome will be: often it’s the discovery that’s exciting; changing your mind; meeting people with sides that you’d never imagined before. That’s what makes it worthwhile and fun.”

It’s a compelling approach: filmmaker both directing the action and being swept up in it. “It’s all to do with storytelling. Any way you can tell the story better so it’s more real, more entertaining, more contemporary, is great to play around with,” is Broomfield’s take. In the case of Battle for Haditha, this involved building a framework from what few indisputable facts were available - and letting the cast improvise the rest.

As with Ghosts - for which the painstaking research process including hiring Chinese students to pose as illegal immigrant workers, and posing as an Afrikaner worker himself to film the results with a hidden camera in his glasses - finding the right cast to carry the film was crucial. Not necessarily just for their acting skills, but for their genuine deep-rooted emotions, experiences and insider-knowledge that could steer both the general atmosphere and finer details more accurately than any stubborn director with a top-down vision.

Understandably, it feels like a documentary-maker’s approach to drama: letting the action unfold as naturalistically as possible. At first he considered going the full distance: tracking down the marines who had lived and breathed the sweat, smoke and blood of Haditha, and asking them to re-enact the events of 19th November 2005. But in the flesh, as he told The Times, they were “fucked up, much too jittery. Some couldn’t keep still when we were talking to them.”

One of the most shocking elements during this initial research period was the marines’ “distressing and vulgar” sense of humour; arguably a coping mechanism to detach them from the shocking things they’d seen and done, but something Broomfield had to fight through, alongside the jitters and the tranquilliser damage, to understand what they were really about.

Unable to work with those directly connected with Haditha - and with the trial just getting under way - the production favoured a more conventional call-out to casting agents with military connections, tapping into servicemen who had recently returned from active duty to keep that emotional resonance without jeopardising the whole project.

The highlight of their nine-month casting call was unearthing 22-year-old ex-marine and aspiring actor Elliot Ruiz, who at 17 had been the youngest solider deployed to Iraq, and had already had his personal story dramatised in a Pulitzer-nominated play. Corporal Ramirez wasn’t any easy first lead role for Ruiz: dredging up all manner of demons, it was a turbulent process that came to a head in an on-screen breakdown with an uncomfortable dose of realism. Iraqi civilians, many of whom had lost loved ones in the conflict, were also persuaded to lend their stories to the film as part of the predominantly amateur cast.

Despite responding to one symbolic episode, this fresh ammunition for the anti-war canon has an intentionally timeless quality. “Things like Haditha happen in any conflict, any war, anywhere,” reasons Broomfield. “The stuff that we filmed after the IED goes off is all based on reports: that’s all accurate, what happened in those houses. But I don’t want this to be seen as a forensic film. Haditha is a symbolic crime, but not such a rarity that it deserves to be looked at in isolation.”

While it may seem that the collective lens of the world’s media has been on Iraq since those first volleys were fired, it’s the other side’s perspective that has been conspicuously absent thus far: and this is the edge Haditha brings to the public debate.

“It’s a film about the language of war, and the common humanity that people share,” he declares. “In any conflict there are different points of view; it’s rarely good and evil. But most journalists have been stuck in the Green Zone throughout, and genuine Iraqi viewpoints are few and far between.”

Accordingly, the research also included flying to Aman to meet civilian survivors of the massacre - “who were there on the day, and knew the people who were killed” - plus spending a week with insurgents who had been directly involved with Haditha, and quizzing the journalist from Time magazine who first broke the story into public consciousness. The next step was securing government reports and witness statements to build as accurate a picture as possible, from multiple sides.

Iraqi witnesses and insiders in the marines told the same story: that the killings were indiscriminate as a knee-jerk reaction to their colleague’s death. Most shocking of all were the protocols he found through conversations with marines: “Their standard operating procedure rules are so fucking hardcore. If a house is described as ‘hostile’, then you just kill everyone in the house. It doesn’t matter if it contains two-year-olds or the elderly.”

But while he admits starting the project with some bias against the marines, meeting them in the flesh and realising that these were poverty-stricken kids with little or no education, thousands of miles from home in a conflict they didn’t understand, muddied the waters somewhat: “The deeper I dug into the whole story, the harder I realised it was to take a side. It was hard to condemn them out of hand as cold-blooded killers. I hope people will feel that judgment should be passed on the war itself, the architects of the war, and the future of the war. These are just poor bastards who got caught up in it.”

“Everyone has some kind of blinkered view, and it’s interesting that in some of the cinema discussions after the film, the two main camps realised just how blinkered they are. That’s what happens in war - but most traditional war films tend to be black and white, good and bad.”

Broomfield’s already made it clear that beyond the factual framework, the cast should make the piece their own, so I ask how he sees his own role in the production - particularly in still relatively unfamiliar dramatic territory.

“I enable people to deliver their performances in as relaxed a way as possible, and as real a way as possible,” he responds, after a short pause and a contemplative hmm. “It’s creating an environment that people can work in that makes them feel alright to be themselves, particularly if you’re working with non-actors. They shouldn’t be embarrassed: you want them for who they are.”

Of course, dramatic interpretation or not, Battle for Haditha has a grounding in fact - and was released while the trial was still in progress - so surely directorial control was crucial in places? “When dealing with specific milestones in the report, details from a legal document, we had to control people pretty tightly,” he confirms. “They couldn’t say whatever they wanted in those situations.”

“We worked from a pretty rigid structure of the story, but I was often steered by what they had to contribute: ‘We wouldn’t do it this way; we’d do it this way.’ I let them use their own language, being mindful that I didn’t want them acting being a marine: I wanted them being themselves. In a sense, they’re the experts - you don’t need one of those experts standing by.”

Given their deeply personal roots in the conflict, and intimate connections with its victims, surely the cast had their own agendas, even if the director endeavoured to avoid one of his own? “The film is all about agendas,” is the simple answer. “The marines, the insurgents, the people who get caught between those two forces, all have their own rationale for what they do. It’s about presenting those three agendas as accurately as possible, to an audience who probably has their own preconceptions.”

“Showing the film around, an Iraqi audience is very pro insurgents - would they even have taken money to do what they did? They see them as patriots. An American audience is always much more defensive about the marines.”

Three strands of narrative bind the film together, representing these three viewpoints: the pair of newly-recruited insurgents paid to plant the IED, the marines who seek revenge for its fatal detonation, and the civilians who are cut down indiscriminately as a result - several of whom see the bomb being planted in their quiet neighbourhood and choose to keep quiet.

While the brutality of the wider insurgency comes across, the two that plant the bomb are nervous and inexperienced, acting clumsily in the name of patriotism - but tellingly manage to flee the scene unharmed as gunfire erupts. The marines are brutal, dehumanised and reduced to killing machines by fear and rage, but ultimately emerge as pawns in a game much larger than themselves, endorsed by orders from above and crippled by remorse.

Iraqi civilian life is sketched out in various short episodes - a party to celebrate a circumcision, a boy playing with a goat, a family going to market - but this third group is finally crushed from both sides, with nowhere to turn. Crucially for Broomfield, all involved re-creating elements of their own lives, not acting several stages removed from it.

Some 15 years before Ghosts, his first venture into directing drama - 1989’s glossy Hollywood fare Diamond Skulls - he found overwhelming as a process, and readily admits to being embarrassed by the end result. Does mindless escapism and detachment from reality just not appeal?

“All forms of storytelling are interesting; I just happen to have grown up in a tradition of documentaries,” he reflects. “But I don’t like celebrity and all that goes with it: I enjoy getting to know normal people and their lives. For me, it’s about combining that with telling a structured story in an accessible way.”

Unlike that self-confessed blip on Broomfield’s CV, both Ghosts and Battle for Haditha shun the studio lights and contrived repetition of Hollywood to reveal something deeper about those involved.

“These are not pseudo actors; they’re real people who are being themselves,” he asserts. “That means you have to shoot in a different way; in real environments. You can’t shoot them on a set ’cause then they have to act, and they have no training in acting; they don’t know that the fuck they’re doing.”

Based in Jordan - Iraq was clearly too dangerous - the cast and crew lived as a community. “I had to create a barracks for the marines to live in, and the Iraqis were living in houses. If you’re shooting reverse angles, lighting the be-Jesus out of something and having hundreds of people standing around the set, you’ve got to have actors. It’s very, very difficult.”

By way of example, the bathroom in which Ruiz breaks down - purging himself of all those years of pent up anguish - doesn’t open up into a world of runners, tracks and dollies. It’s the actual bathroom used by the cast and crew. Maintaining the ‘real cinema’ approach are very long cuts. For the heart-rending mourning scene, the camera rolled for 40 minutes straight - no-one was going to ask the genuinely distressed women to go one more time for luck.

“I think the greatest thing that film has is the ability to describe real time,” argues Broomfield. “I don’t like lots of cuts: it’s really interesting to see a conversation, for example, or how long it takes for an argument to develop, rather than just cutting to an argument. We’re used to seeing things in real time, and cinema has the exciting ability to do that.”

“I grew up with anthropological, observational films, where the most interesting thing was seeing a long conversation between two guys in some weird language with subtitles. You get a sense of their rhythm, how they do things, what their humour’s like - no other art-form can do that.”

For Haditha he picked up countless tricks from special effects supervisor David Harris, including how to set up action shots to keep a lot of movement in the camera. “Certain things, particularly action, are also much more involving in real time than if you cut to the effect all the time,” he concludes. “It’s much more threatening if the human eye sees it as being real.”

Words: Miles Johnson
Photography: John Stewardson

In a small central London room a fiery debate has just erupted. “I just think it’s not that simple,” says Lucy Kirkwood, 24. “Female friendships are more complicated than that.” The rest of the group sit up from their coffees, awaiting a reply from the middle-aged man chairing the meeting. “Lucy,” he says with a hint of frustration, “for me, female relationships are about power; are about control. That’s what all the girls we’ve talked with have said.” There’s a pause. Everyone sits back to think again, and takes a swig of coffee.

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On first appearances it could be a particularly engaged university tutorial. Ten or so people are stuffed onto sofas, most of them in their teens and early twenties, and each has been passionately arguing their position for several hours. But there are a couple of mature students sat among the youngsters, one of whom looks suspiciously like the comedian Robin Ince.

There’s also a kid in the corner sipping from a juice carton who, from a different angle, could be the spitting image of Posh Kenneth from Skins. Just as everyone is about to leave a cheery announcement comes from the chair that settles any lingering confusion: “Congratulations on the Bafta nomination, guys!”

If you haven’t seen or let alone heard of Skins yet, you’re presumably a resident of a particularly out-of-touch old peoples’ home, or had your cable connection accidentally switched to North Korean state television. In two seasons, the show’s chronicling of the trials and tribulations of a group of sixth-form students from Bristol has gone from a semi-cult hit adored by its target under-25 audience to one of Channel 4’s triumphs of the last five years.

Whereas most depictions of British teens fall somewhere between gun-toting hoodies and bleach-blonde proto-WAGs, the creators of Skins pride themselves on having crafted a show about young people that doesn’t shirk controversy or paint an overly rosy picture. Indeed with awards, high ratings and a new season in the pipeline it seems things could not be going better.

“It’s not usually that heated,” says 23-year-old Skins co-creator Jamie Brittain an hour after the writers meeting, seemingly more relaxed now away from the creative coalface. “This time round was a little more intense than normal; we’re obviously all excited about making the new series.”

It would be hard not to be excited in his position. Not only does Jamie have to sort his laundry for an award ceremony later that night, but his phone has been ringing constantly with mysterious calls from Japanese numbers. “The explanation for that is a bit strange really. When we were filming one of the online bits I accidentally left my phone number in one of the scenes after the edit. Now I am getting constant calls from Japan from people there who watched it.”

Being ‘big in Japan’ is a measure of success in any field, unless you’re Spinal Tap. But it’s not only the show’s ‘conventional’ success of good ratings and awards that have seen television industry types get their pantaloons in a twist. Targeting a teen audience notoriously difficult to pin down, the show’s arsenal of blogs, social networking profiles and podcasts – a development now referred to a ‘360-degree marketing’ by those in the know – has had executives across the land weeping with envy.

If, for example, you felt the need to get closer to the show’s young Asian character Anwar, you could check up his MySpace page. There you would not only discover his penchant for Lethal Bizzle, but would also have access to a web-exclusive video diary with the character discussing his girl problems. Head to Posh Kenneth’s page and the fan can enjoy a loving Wordsworthian ode to Jal interspersed with his signature brand of street patois.

If even then your appetite for all things Skins was still not sated, you could plug into Bebo video updates, or switch to iTunes and download the podcast presented by Daniel Kaluuya, the actor who plays Posh Kenneth who is also a writer on the show. Including phone-in questions from audience members and interviews with the cast, the Skinscast, as it’s been termed, was at one point the most downloaded podcast on the whole iTunes playlist.

Alongside the overall quality of the programme itself, it seems clear that the multiplatform ingenuity of Skins has enabled it to reach and hold onto a loyal audience in ways previous shows could only dream of. It is, in its own way, the defining televisual project of the British YouTube generation. But at a point in television where television executives and producers are increasingly heralding the possibilities brought by new media platforms, do the writers of the show ever feel their creation is being distorted by the marketing men?

“There is obviously a gulf between what the show says and how Skins is marketed,” says Lucy Kirkwood, one of the writers on the show. “But I think there’s something quite fun about the marketing. I really like this season’s advertising campaign. It captures the spirit of the show and is quite dark.” Ben Schiffer, another writer, agrees. “I think it would be really churlish of us to complain about the marketing – it brought us an audience, and that’s great.”

Shiffer however sees the significant noise made about Skins’ various multiplatform tentacles more as a generational issue than something specific to the show. “Whenever I mention Skins to people, it’s always the people who work in the media who are interested in the multiplatform stuff. They are always the people who are like ‘Skins, oh yes, it’s the big multiplatform thing and you guys have done this, this and this.’ They are the people that seem to find it so new and interesting. But for the audience I think it somehow feels natural to them. They don’t find it particularly remarkable and that’s why I think it’s successful. We’re communicating with them on a really natural level, which isn’t new or strange for them.”

Daniel Kaluuya also sees the success of the podcast he presents and the Skins blogs, Bebo and MySpace presences as being more a natural progression to suit an audience that has grown up with the Internet, rather than a novel marketing ploy. “The important thing to realise is that all the online stuff helps the fans get more into the characters. We just take the characters seriously. On the podcast, it’s not like we just say, ‘Oh, these are make-believe characters, this is a make-believe land and these things aren’t really happening. It’s a TV show that quite a few people really care about and we always take it seriously, whether it’s online or not.”

Ben agrees: “That’s why Skins is perceived to be such a success – we’re the only show to have really captured that audience. Advertisers are desperate to hit the audience that we’ve captured. And we work because we don’t condescend to them.”

In a suitably 21st century take on the creative process, the writers also recognise the possibilities media like blogs allow them for character development. While pre-Internet shows relied on scripts in the traditional manner, creating MySpace pages for the characters placed a new developmental tool into the hands of the writers.

“If you looked at Chris’ MySpace page last year, he actually became much more fleshed out because of it,” says Lucy. “You see that he likes Adam and the Ants and can find out much more about his character than would be normally possible. Skins is about a group of friends, and the whole appeal in the first series was about meeting a group of people you would have wanted to be friends with if you knew them. When you first make friends you sort of do what a MySpace page does by saying, do you like this or that, what are your top five bands? It’s like an electronic friendship. It allows you to show a side of the characters that might seem forced if it was in the show.”

Each of the writers contributes to the online features by writing blogs and video snippets for the characters, a side to the show that allows a young pool of talent to cut their teeth away from the glare of terrestrial television before graduating to penning hour-long scripts. But the writers are also quick to emphasise that they don’t see the online material being in any way less important than the show proper.

“All the online material comes from the same place as the show, so we all try and aspire to the same level,” says Shiffer. “No one ever goes, ‘Oh it’s just for the Internet so we’ll just bang it out. We’re trying to broaden out the universe of the show, rather than just providing lame ancillary storylines because we heard it was a good marketing tool.”

But are they ever worried about the potential for the online content and podcast to become gimmicky and distracting from the more serious side of the show? “The audience doesn’t view it that way,” says Shiffer. “I don’t think our audience makes any qualitative difference between watching something on MySpace and watching something on telly. It’s not worse or immediately lower-status because you watched it on the internet; it’s just the same thing.”

Jamie agrees: “The podcast did very well, so it obviously reached a lot of people who didn’t view it as a gimmick,” he points out. “All the material is well read, well commented on and discussed. It seems to do well in getting people talking about the show and contributing to it through competitions, which can only be a good thing.”

While they are rightly confident that the multi-platform approach has helped rather than hindered Skins’ aim of portraying British teenage life in a realistic but entertaining way, the first series’ pre-air marketing campaign (featuring a bunch of handsome actors looking elegantly wasted) gave some the wrong first impression. The Guardian’s TV critic Charlie Brooker for one said that the first episode had him “harrumphing like a four hundred-year-old man.”

Since, though, Brooker and many others have repented – and now recognise the greater levels of depth the writers have strived to instil into the characterisation of storylines. The series is now well-known for featuring delicate issues in its plotlines, such as anorexia, drug consumption and racial tension.

“The first ever episode did have its faults, but I think we’ve since shown we can deal with complicated issues and entertain young people,” says Jamie. Another writer on the show, Atiha Sen Gupta, agrees. “I think that’s the Skins philosophy really: taking a character that could be a stereotype, but doing it well. In series one, we had an anorexic girl but we subverted it. That gives the show its strength.”

There’s also been the odd critical voice attacking the show for glamorising drug consumption and casual sex, an argument the writers feel is unjustified. “People are going to take drugs and throw big parties whether there was Skins or not,” says Sen Gupta. This is also a point Daniel Kaluuya feels particularly strongly about. “I think it was Eminem who said something about people not being able to handle looking in the mirror and not liking what they see. Skins isn’t trying to glorify drugs; people just take them. People do drugs and have sex, so if we’re trying to write something realistic why can’t we put them in the show?”

Puritans aside, it seems more of the British television-watching public are beginning to awaken to the fact that Skins is not merely a fancy exercise in new media or empty pandering to a ‘youth demographic’, but is actually a show that could stand the test of time. On that matter Jamie, for whom the show’s characters were once merely vague ideas inside his head, is philosophical.

“I think it would be arrogant of us to assume we impact upon peoples lives in any major way, but it’s clear that this show means a lot to the people who watch it. We aren’t sure how long it will go on for, but we are defiantly going to do another series after the next. It means a lot to us, and we just want to keep it running for as long as feels right.” And with a talented and passionate gang of writers, an innovative approach to new media – and of course all those calls from Japan – Skins could probably continue for as long as they wish.