He counts Louis Theroux as a fan but struggles to find funding for his off-beat drama-doc hybrids. He explains why he uses non-actors to play themselves – and why he filmed his cleaner finding a cat with a defrosted pigeon in its mouth
While making his first documentary 20 years ago, Marc Isaacs spent two months in the lift of a London tower block, filming the residents coming and going, and asking whimsical questions (“What did you dream about last night?”). That short film, Lift, also featured a fly, which he bought from a pet shop; the insect expired in the final shot. Isaacs hadn’t intended that to symbolise the death of the fly-on-the-wall genre – “It only occurred to me afterwards” – but it fits his philosophy, which spurns any notions of unmediated reality. For two decades, he has prodded, coaxed and intervened, all from behind the camera. “I like to provoke,” he says, “but not to be seen.”
