Nice Jewish boy Tom Brook celebrates 50 years as BBC’s film guru

The self-described “nice Jewish boy” who began his career as a news trainee in 1976 has, in the 27 years since Talking Movies first broadcast, interviewed some of the most famous figures in film and reported live from the red carpet of nearly every Oscar ceremony from the 90s onwards. For someone who’s been obsessed with films since his adolescent days, getting to meet the stars of the silver screen has been a dream – as well as an occasional reality check.

“I grew up watching people on TV and in cinema who were larger than life, and I think Bette Davis was a good example – I remember watching her in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and it made such a big impression on me,” says Brook, who had the chance to interview Davis during the promotion for one of her last films, The Whales of August.

“I was very intimidated when I met her. The film had great actors in Lilian Gish [who was then 93] and Vincent Price, and was directed by a great British filmmaker, Lindsay Anderson. Davis had not been behaving very well, she’d been pretty awful to Lilian Gish… and she wasn’t easy to interview.”

But Brook says he actually liked the fact that Davis, despite being harder to interview, was opinionated and feisty: "So often you meet movie stars, especially at press junkets, where they’re so inauthentic.” He also has a problem with some actors who are either long-winded, like the late Robert Redford, or tongue-tied and unable to express themselves, Robert de Niro being an example, he says.

“I do think perhaps we place an unfair burden on actors – they may be brilliant actors, but they may not be very comfortable or very articulate in talking about their work,” he says.

Tom Brook and director Martin Scorcese. (Photo courtesy of BBC)[Missing Credit]

Another Hollywood figure who’s made Brook’s job tricky? Joaquin Phoenix, who notoriously groaned “Oh, man, do I really have to do this?” during interviews with Brook, to which the seasoned journalist would respond, “Yes, you do”.

“There have been awkward moments,” Brook admits. “Tommy Lee Jones, for example, does not like doing press events.”

But Brook has been doing the job long enough to know how to turn things round when an actor behaves badly in an interview: “If they say, ‘That’s a stupid question’, I might say, ‘Well, why is it a stupid question?’ Interviews can get testy and confrontational…. [But] on the whole I think people realise that I’m not doing an interview to get gossip, it’s because we are serious about cinema.”

Because it isn’t just A-list glamour that attracted Brook to the industry, it’s the substantive issues cinema can explore. When he talks about the Holocaust, he gets very emotional indeed.

He visited Auschwitz for the first time in 2023 as part of his reportage on Jonathan Glazer’s 2023 film, The Zone of Interest. “I think when you grew up Jewish in the UK, what happened in Nazi Germany can seem distant, but that brought it home to me,” he says.

Brook and his sister, born in London, are German-Jewish on their father’s side (the original family surname was Bruck) and Russian-Jewish on their mother’s. “My grandfather was an academic in Breslau [now Wrocław in Poland]. They were very assimilated German Jews, and thought of themselves as more German than the Germans. But Hitler came to power in 1933, and within weeks my grandfather was forced into retirement, which devastated him psychologically.”

Tom Brook as a trainee. (Photo courtesy of BBC)[Missing Credit]

For a brief time the family moved to Amsterdam and then Brook’s grandfather got a job in Cardiff, where Brook’s father was sent to school, at first speaking only German. His mother’s family lived in Belarus before moving first to London’s East End and then Coventry, where Brook’s mother was born.

Brook’s own upbringing in West Hampstead was not religious — which he now says he rather regrets. But his Jewish identity manifested itself in subtle ways: “In our household there was always an emphasis on meals, eating well, good education, and a humanist approach to the world, that you have to give back as well as receive. Those things came through very clearly.”

In the food-centric sense, Brook says his mum was almost stereotypically Jewish. At one point in his new anniversary film, we see Brook talking to the celebrated film director Martin Scorsese about the similarities between growing up with Jewish and Italian mothers: “Scorsese’s mother explains a lot about him as a gifted storyteller,” Brook says, adding that he has always felt that the Jewish and Italian communities’s emphasis on family and food means they have two significant things in common.

These days, Brook is living in “the most Jewish of cities”, New York, with his husband – “a Jewish doctor, no less” – but the couple also have a home in Berlin. And 50 years into his career, he brims with passion for all things film and the benefits it can bring.

His over-arching belief is in “a duty of care, so that we do not harm people” — and he is proud of the BBC’s ability to bring the educational possibilities of cinema to a new generation.

And there is nothing, he says, to match experience of going to the cinema, and sitting in a darkened auditorium as a film begins. “It is always a magical moment.”

Watch ‘Talking Movies: Tom Brook's 50 Years with the BBC ’on the BBC News channel at 13.30 and 20.30 on Saturday, April 25 and at 01.30 on Sunday, April 26. It will also be available to stream on BBC iPlayer