Watching Finlay Pretsell’s new feature documentary Douglas Gordon By Douglas Gordon (a world premiere in Panorama Documentary at the Berlinale), you can’t help but think at first the director has gone deep into the belly of the beast. He is filming at the Berlin studio of outlaw Scottish artist, Douglas Gordon. Pretsell has entered a world of blow torches, fire, bubbles and continuous phantasmagoric happenings.
Gordon (the Turner prize-winner behind such seminal works as 24 Hour Psycho and Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait) is charismatic, outspoken, “extremely opinionated, super intelligent,” and sometimes also seemingly a bit deranged. He has very definite ideas about what shape a film about him should take.
The documentary, sold by Autlook and produced by Sonja Henrici and Pretsell, is as close as you can come to watching a major artist in full flow.
Pretsell first met Gordon 20 years ago when he made his Zidane film. “That was a massive inspiration for me…I followed up with all his other work. I thought this guy is amazing, singular, astounding, fascinating!”
At their first encounter, Pretsell found his future subject to be “flamboyant but also humble.” He adds that “there was something not…dangerous, but something simmering there.”
They stayed loosely in touch. Then, in 2021, almost on a whim, Pretsell sent Gordon an email to ask if he might participate in a film. Gordon didn’t reply. Pretsell therefore dropped him another message saying: “OK, I thought that might be the answer. No worries. Hope you’re well.” At this point, Gordon called him out of the blue and said he was “up for anything.”
“From that point, it must have been a year at the very least, maybe a year and a half, before I actually made it into the studio. There were many phone calls in-between.”
The documentary immerses viewers in Gordon’s world. There are no talking heads or interviews to contextualise the story. Instead, audiences get to experience the artist in a direct and unfiltered way, in effect as if they are freebasing him.
Put it to Pretsell that it’s like watching a shaman at work and he agrees. “That’s exactly it. I was fascinated by what makes a great artist tick, I suppose…he’s almost in some sort of trance, making this work. This would take hours. We would often spend 12 to 15 hours [a day] in the studio.”
It was an intense experience for Pretsell and Martin Radich, his DoP. “You’re with this person [Gordon] and he’s like a raconteur with constant stories, monologues. He was playing different music, cooking us food. Other people would come and go. You’d be smacking golf balls down his studio, almost breaking things, kicking footballs. There were these elaborate, very decadent games. For us, it was like…a release!”
Pretsell would find it exhausting to spend so much time in the studio and he’d be desperate to sleep. Then, the moment he left, he yearned to be “back in there. It was so free. You have this idea you can do anything, create anything. You’re encouraged to participate…strangely enough, the only time I would feel fear of anything was when he was cracking that fucking whip!”
Despite the mayhem and Gordon’s habit of incinerating t-shirts or placing blazing objects on top of photocopying machines, Pretsell never “felt the place was going to go on fire or something was going to fall out of a window. I never felt that. Douglas has been burning things for years. It was normal in a way.”
Gordon was in control and worked to his own rhythm. “When we were there, he would allow us in; he would say right, yeah, I’m up for this; he would do these spontaneous performances which are amazing – but he had to get to that point. There is no forcing it.”
There were moments of exasperation along the way. Early on Pretsell would find himself wondering if any of the material he had shot was “usable.” However, Gordon was always respectful of the filmmakers. Tensions and bad feeling would quickly be smoothed over.
The documentary was shot in separate blocks. “Each shoot, we would get some amazing material.”
Pulling together the finance was a struggle although legendary French designer agnès b came on board the project recently. French co-producer Estelle Robin helped secure some regional funds. Screen Scotland were staunch supporters and BFI Doc Society provided some development finance.
“It was really difficult to present this film.” the director acknowledges that the lack of a conventional narrative structure made some backers “nervous.” The focus was entirely on Gordon himself. The snippets of information we get about his upbringing in Maryhill in Glasgow or his family come from the artist himself, when he chooses to talk about it. As in his previous documentary Time Trial, about the cyclist David Millar, Pretsell was determined to show his subject’s world from the inside.
“You’ve got Google,” the director explains why he has such little interest in providing the kind of biographical context you get in more conventional arts documentaries.
As Gordon prowls around his massive studio in his Napoli no. 10 Maradona shirt and with chains around his neck, he may look like a typical Glaswegian hard man, but the director marvels at how “sensitive and gentle” he is.
“Family is massively important to him.” He would always ask the filmmakers about their relatives too. At the same time, Gordon is “an extreme personality who gives everything to his work.” That’s the paradox the film wrestles with.
And, no, Pretsell didn’t ever feel that Gordon was trying to usurp his authority as the director.
“I thought he would be much more involved in the edit but, in the end, he had a generosity that I hope comes across [in the film]… I think he really respected that we would stay in that studio for that amount of time and capture these moments of creation,” Pretsell says. “It’s definitely my film and he accepted that. There was this massive trust.”
In advance of the Berlin premiere, Gordon has already seen the documentary several times. He has also expressed his gratitude to Pretsell for having had the time and patience to make it.
“We had a screening in Glasgow at his house first. He watched it once and then almost immediately watched it again. We then sent him a link…he’s delighted. He knows it’s intimate and he knows there is a vulnerability there but he its blown away by the authenticity of it.”
