BAFTA winning investigative journalist Ross Kemp joined us at NMP Live for an exclusive interview on what his film-making has taught him about human nature and his most difficult interview to date.
Watch the full interview or read the transcript below.
In conversation with Ross Kemp
What started you making documentaries?
I started making documentaries by fluke. Like many things in life, it wasn’t planned; it was a bit of an accident. I had spent 10 years at EastEnders. I had managed, somehow, to get what they then called a golden handcuffs deal; it would now probably be a tin handcuffs deal, at ITV. In the process of that contract I found I had a lot more time on my hands.
I think I was the fourth person they phoned up and asked. I know that because they did ring up the great late A.A. Gill I believe and he flatly turned it down. When they rang me up they said “you’re the first person we have called for this and we think you would be brilliant!”.
Anyway, it was a documentary about America’s relationship with firearms. My dad was in the police and the army; I had relatives in the forces and they knew about that and thought I would be a good person to host or present a documentary about guns.
In the process of making that documentary I was told I was about to meet a guy who was in the Bloods. In those days Bloods and Crips were only seen on MTV. There wasn’t the internet. Mobile phones, in fact, were in their infancy. That is how long ago it was; about 16 years ago.
I met Bloodhound. I was told that he had been shot 27 times. I said that was bull; no one survives being shot 27 times. When I met him I asked him straight away and he lifted his shirt up and he had a body like a tea bag.
He had been cranked open twice; he had taken six 9mm in the chest while he was on the ground. The Crip had come up and put the gun under his chin and pulled the trigger. The bullet had gone up and taken the end of his tongue off so he had a snake tongue. It exited just to the left of his nostril, re-entered over the arch of his eye and slipped between the skin and his skull and lodged at the top of his head. He wore a red bandana, which he took off and he has got lucky tattooed in a horseshoe there.
The most important thing that I realized about Bloodhound was that despite the fact he had a rusty AK-47 and a Smith and Wesson incase the AK jammed, tucked down the back of his pants, and he said very clearly that if a car slowed down and started firing he would fire back. Despite all this he was a very, very bright, very nice man, and the antithesis of what I was seeing on MTV.
He didn’t have lots of bling, he didn’t have a Ferrari, and he didn’t have a model with fake breasts. He had a very large wife with 2 kids on either hip, and a blocked toilet and not very much cash. He was doing what he was doing basically to survive.
The most important thing I thought about him was this; that he was scared, and he was prepared to admit that. Even though he had been shot that many times he was still scared about losing his life, and I thought that was an interesting point that you weren’t seeing on MTV and that you weren’t being shown in the movies.
So, I got on the phone to some people that I knew. I rang them up and said that I’ve got an idea for a documentary called ‘Ross Kemp on Gangs’, and we went on to make 27 of them.
How do you decide the subjects for your documentaries?
We look at what’s going on in the world. We monitor the internet. We have made around 78 documentaries around the world, predominantly in hostile environments. We’ve got access to places that a lot of people can’t get access to and one of the reasons is the actual internet now.
People see what we’ve made and they realise that we don’t go in there with an agenda. We give people a platform, as long as they are not using us for their own ends entirely; we let them talk.
You would be surprised how many people hoist themselves with their own petard as well. They go out there with an agenda, hoping to sway people by giving their point of view, and they end up making themselves look rather foolish. If that is what they are going to do then that is what they are going to do.
You’d be surprised how many people, and we can’t pay people for interviews, particularly torturers, murderers, will talk very openly and very frankly about what they have done, on camera, if you get to know them.
What we do, and what I do with the team, is that we spend a lot of time with these people. We don’t just roll up the day before, we will get to know them over weeks, will get to know their families if they have families. Also people know that if they have asked for their identity to remain hidden we have always done that, always been true to that. So, in a way, the internet has helped us.
The fixers on the ground, they are the most important people. I might walk in at the end and take the glory but the most important person for me has always been the fixer on the ground. When we finish filming we pack our kit away and we get on our plane and fly off, they’re still there.
I have always maintained one thing, there is no film that has ever been made that has been worth a person’s life, so we always make sure that we try to leave the place sort of in the way that we found it.
How important are the relationships within your production team?
If you are risking your life to make a film you have to rely on each other. I would say that no matter how much you need to be a team when you’re working as an actor, for instance, or playing football, at the end of the day, hopefully, no one is risking their life.
When people do die on the ground, which has happened, not my team but the people we have been filming with, particularly in Afghanistan, it is a sobering moment. No matter how many times it happens it will always shock.
What I do is a thing called TRiM, Trauma Risk Management. We sit down as a team and we discuss what has happened. Now, it could be that someone has been killed, sadly, it could be an interview with a rape victim, or it could be the fact that we get in to a lot of road traffic accidents, or road traffic collisions as they are called, because they’re not accidents apparently in health and safety.
We will talk about it individually from our point of view, and that’s a very good way of stopping PTSD and other sorts of mental trauma from incidents, because you’re explaining how you saw it and what happened, that person’s explaining how they saw it. That stops a lot of people feeling guilty.
Also you are happier to admit that if you have made a mistake, get it out of the way and don’t allow it to fester inside the team. The next day you are going to have to be sharp, you’re going to have to be up early, and you are going to have to be on your game, and you can’t be holding any grudges.
Thankfully, over the years we have got to know each other so well that we can speak very freely with each other and transfer that information. Also, the most important thing is to have a sense of humour.
How do you make difficult decisions within the team?
The way it works, really, on the ground, particularly if we know we are going in to somewhere dangerous, is that there is a democratic autonomy. We will discuss it, everyone has a right if they don’t feel good about what might happen, and it happens on a regular basis, they have got a right not to go.
Most of the time, you know, I do own the company, maybe I have two votes, but obviously I will listen to my team.
We have all got a lot of experience of hostile environments, and we often agree that if we think something is too dodgy, too iffy, if we are putting ourselves out there too far, we won’t do it. Because as I say, there is no film that has ever been made that is worth someone’s life.
We were recently in Madagascar meeting a bunch of guys called the ‘dahalo’. Now, these guys are cattle rustlers, sounds like something out of the Magnificent Seven, but they kill, they rape, they go in to villages, they’ll kill all the men, take the women, steal the children as well, and take all the cattle. And it is a big business; it is a million, million Euro business because of demand for beef from the Far East.
We were told on numerous occasions that they wouldn’t meet us. They don’t have mobile phones, this is an area on the world where there is no electricity either, there is no advertising and it takes three days to get there. You could have flown to Australia and back quicker than it took us to get to this part of Madagascar. There is a reason for that.
It is very, very isolated and no one is going to help. There’s no one, there is no phone signal anyway, and there is no one to call. If you rang 999 no one is going to come and get you. So, you have to be very careful and you have to be very guarded, and we felt, definitely, because of the reputation that these guys had, that we would not meet them.
Eventually after about a week and a half’s negotiation we actually made contact with someone who knew one, and from that one we met two and three, and eventually we actually went up and met them in this canyon.
But, we always turned the vehicles round to make sure we could make a quick exit, you let the powers that be back in the UK know that you have to ring in by a certain time if you can get signal, which we found a place where we could get signal, and you take all the precautions that you would do to make sure you come out alive. But, there is always a risk.
What has been your most difficult interview to-date?
I talk about a Mr Kahn when I do speeches as being probably one of the most evil men I have ever met. We had no idea! We knew that he had been a honey trap merchant, so he’d go in to a village in the poor areas of West Bengal and he would buy a girl that he thought was attractive a coke, which means a heck of a lot to a very poor person. Then he might buy sweets for her, he might buy jewellery, he might even give money to the family, in terms of trying to get the girl to be able to go out with him on her own. And eventually he’d get her to go on a train, and once she got on that train she would be drugged.
Once she was on that train and drugged she would be sent to a larger city; Mumbai, Calcutta, and there she would be chained to a bed and she would be chained to that bed for probably 6 months, and she would be raped. No means of ever leaving that brothel, no means of ever getting home.
We knew that he did that but what we weren’t really prepared for, we had been told that he killed girls if things came on top for him with the local police, that he had murdered girls, or ordered their murder. The guy had started off being a honey trap merchant but now he had, we reckon, around 700 people working for him, doing the same thing.
That, for me, will always be one of the hardest interviews that I ever did.
Throughout your travels and film-making what have you learnt about human nature?
What I have found, if you look around the world at people, is that most people want the same thing. They want to live peacefully, they want a better life for the children than they had, they want to have enough food then maybe have a drink, and they want peace.
The majority of the people that I have met around the world actually want that. It’s just that we specialise in meeting the few that don’t. I witness incredible inhumanity but also unbelievable generosity.
You would be surprised, with all the things that I have; television, computer, car, nice house, I know people who are a damned sight happier than me on Monday mornings when they get up than when I get up and they have nothing in comparison to what I have.
I think it is always a great thing about my job; it’s a constant reminder that you don’t need all those things, necessarily, to be happy. And, maybe we rush a little bit too fast, you walk a bit too quickly, and we should slow down and occasionally smell the flowers.
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