Adam Curtis on Politics and AI

Adam Curtis' Docuseries "Shifty"

Excerpt from video above:

...come from being a reality producer, I suppose.

So you started, you used to work on "That Life", right?

Well I mean, yeah. I have reflected on that that, that I was taught that one week you would go and film a talking dog and then the next week you go off and do some journalism about the corruption of a housing estate built on polluted land. And I did I began to realize you could put the two together. You could have pretentious sh*t and trash. I mean talk that's unfetched talking dogs. It was the idea you could bolt high-end and low-end, and just get rid of the middle, which is the bit that when I was growing up and in television I thought was so boring.

So what is that behind the scenes if you're in a current affairs department or a documentary department or a news department in a big organization? Is that a cultural thing? Are there people there who are not interested in low culture? Who don't understand that people like both of those things? Is it a personnel thing, or is it a historical thing that we've always made things that way? Why are you the one that makes things differently?

I think it's a category thing. I think one of the things is that when a society gets rigid its' categories, get very very rigid, and they just go. What was astonishing when I started making films is that I'm just put... and this is really key, the music you use has to be the music you like, because the audience know it when you're cheating, when you're putting in something, when you're putting in ghost town. They know it and they don't like you for it, but if they think your real true inner DJ is coming out, they will like it. The people I knew in television, and still know, when they would leave television, would sit and talk about the music they liked. And they were really good, but when they got into those categories, they felt, "Oh, I have to have money, money, money when I'm dealing with banks.

Well it's like for me, that would be puns on voiceovers on daytime TV. You think you don't need to do it. We're watching people we like. Watching people. I'm watching someone buy a house, i don't need you to say "there's a chicken coop at the back, what an excellent property this is. I don't need you to do it, just show me the house.

Yes, because if you actually convey your feeling about the story, I've always have... I call it mood, you convey the mood you have about something. That's probably how people would also feel. Other people would feel about it, so you connect with them. Yeah, and that's all I really tried to do was to take what you referred to as high-end pretentious and make it, fuse it, with something. Not cynically, to entertain, just because I thought it would be fun. 

But it also, by the way it is, I have come from a certain class, I'm now in a completely different class. And I like to watch both of those things next to each other. In the same way what the BBC used to be, would be, you would have. You know, a documentary, then a sitcom, then a documentary. And so, you would have a sort of sandwich of culture, which of course, we can't do anymore because we're so siloed. But you can do that in an individual film. 

Yes, you can. That's what I worked it out, and some of the BBC were quite shocked. But others work well. People seemed to quite like it, so they just let me go on.