EXCLUSIVE: Marianne Faithfull, the renowned British singer-songwriter-actress who first catapulted to fame with her 1964 song As Tears Go By, was no stranger to public scrutiny during her extensive career, but what is clear in Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s new film Broken English is that she might just be one of the most misunderstood female music artists in recent history.
The bold, hybrid documentary from the BAFTA nominated directors of Nick Cave doc 20,000 Days on Earth is premiering Out of Competition this week at the Venice Film Festival and the project– named after Faithfull’s 1979 studio album of the same name – gives a searingly intimate portrait of a fractured but determined woman whose life was shaped by fame, creativity and relentless public attention.
Faithfull stars alongside longtime friend Tilda Swinton and 1917 actor George MacKay and the project marks one of Faithfull’s last appearances on camera before she passed away on January 31, 2025. It also features her last ever performance as a singer with friends Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. Faithfull, sadly, was never able to see a version of the film before she passed.
“There are so many of these kinds of Wikipedia-style music films out there at the moment that feel like they could be done by AI,” Forsyth tells Deadline in advance of the film’s Venice world premiere. “The challenge, therefore, as a filmmaker, is to find the humanity and the heart in these stories and I think hopefully that’s what we were able to do with Marianne, find the humanity that she was so often denied. The British media really just wanted her to be Mick Jagger’s girlfriend, the woman who was found naked at the Rolling Stones party or a junkie who lived on a wall.”
But while those things were indeed true of Faithfull – she had a four-year relationship with Rolling Stones frontman Jagger before suffering from a heroin addiction that saw her live on London’s Soho streets for two years – Forsyth and Pollard are keen to show audiences there is so much more to British cultural icon. Faithfull spent more than six decades defying expectations and releasing more than 35 albums throughout her career all while consistently reinventing herself.
“I knew Marianne for about twenty years,” Swinton says. “I sort of fell into her orbit in Paris, via my friend Jerry, and she always made me feel like a familiar. I was immediately very fond of her, beyond knowing and revering her work – and knowing the shape she made in the world – in person, she had a beautiful knack for cosiness and complicity just when it was needed. And, of course, her incomparable laugh, and her voice, are unforgettable.”
Tilda Swinton in ‘Broken Voices’
First steps
Forsyth and Pollard, whose previous film The Extraordinary Miss Flower was released in the UK earlier this year, first came into contact with Faithfull four years ago via the film’s producer Beth Earl of Rustic Canyon Pictures. “She was in the midst of making a much more controversial documentary with Marianne,” Pollard says. “She organized and had all the access – all of that was sorted out. But then she brought it to us and said, ‘What would you do with it?’”
Meanwhile, Forsyth and Pollard’s friend, Bad Seeds band member Warren Ellis, had been working with Faithfull on a poetry record during the pandemic when Faithfull, who was 73-years-old at the time, was hospitalized after catching coronavirus.
“We were in touch with Warren during this time and he didn’t even know if Marianne was going to hear this record because it was so touch and go with her,” says Pollard. “So, although we’d never met Marianne at this point, we’d started to feel very close to her emotionally.”
She continues: “We have lots of mutual friends with her but when we saw how much Nick [Cave] and Warren [Ellis] adored her and held her as a real icon and true artist, we felt that was so at odds with how the general public perceived her. It was at this point that the idea for the film came about, and it all just started falling into place.”
The project, says Pollard, required “a lot of perseverance” and the big challenge was to make sure they made a film that could accurately translate Faithfull’s innate theatricality into a distinctive cinematic language. “There was no desire for pity from her,” she said. “She wouldn’t put up with anything like that on set – she was hardcore.”
Broken English unfolds within ‘The Ministry of Not Forgetting’ – an imagined cinematic institution where memory and mythology collide. The film boasts a stellar cast including Swinton, who plays the Overseer, the film’s de-facto narrator, and MacKay, who plays the part activist, part psychoanalyst Record Keeper, who weaves in new narrative from Faithfull’s fractured past.
Sophia Di Martino, Zawe Ashton and Calvin Demba also have roles while Faithfull, Cave, Ellis, Courtney Love, Suki Waterhouse, Jehnny Beth and Beth Orton all lend performances in the film.
Forsyth and Pollard knew the project could only work with Faithfull’s involvement and fortunately, she was willing to play ball. Filmed at Elstree Studios in the UK, the As Tears Go By and Sister Morphine singer-songwriter participated in nine, 40-minute unscripted sessions with the filming team. Three cameras rolled as MacKay’s character, which was semi-scripted, guided the narrative.
Jane Pollard & Iain Forsyth
“It was almost like live theatre or multicamera directing, which is something that we really enjoy and just feels quite natural,” says Forsyth.
Swinton, who had been aboard the project from its inception, shot her scenes two years after MacKay’s takes. “We really loved this idea of being able to use her character in a semi-narrator way,” says Pollard. “It felt like it made sense to hold that back so we could script her into everything once we had the shape of the film. We could really use her to glue things together and work in a way that, when you’re filming normally, you’re not really able to do.”
Swinton admits that she was a big fan of Pollard and Forsyth’s Nick Cave documentary 20,000 Days on Earth, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2014, where it won directing and editing awards. That project, she says, was her “introduction to the world of their work.”
“It’s very much a world of its own,” Swinton says. “Their way of viewing a life from all its lived and unlived angles breathes into the fantastical in a way that I find fascinating and inspiring. No life can be truly assessed from any but a peripheral vision. Iain and Jane take this thought and fill it to the brim with heart.”
“Projects have to take you to places and they tell you things if you have invested enough into them,” says Pollard. “And then, you should, at points, trust them and sit back a little and let it pull and push you to places.”
Born to Live
Faithfull passed away on January 31, 2025. The singer had previously suffered multiple health problems including breast cancer and emphysema caused by years of smoking. She never saw a final assembly of Broken English, something that Pollard and Forsyth are deeply saddened by.
“We used to go and visit her at her home every couple of months, and we’d try to take something that she hadn’t yet seen to show her,” says Forsyth. “So, she was kind of keeping in touch with what it was becoming but sadly never got to see an assembly, which I wish she had.”
“I really miss her,” says Pollard. “She was lucid and funny and fierce right up until the end and I really miss that.”
Swinton adds: “I believe Marianne would be truly tickled and satisfied with what Iain and Jane have made for her, and I’m extremely proud to have been any part of it.”
Broken English premieres Out of Competition at the Venice Film Festival on August 29, 2025.
