‘I couldn’t tell my parents I loved them’: documentary-maker Duncan Cowles on giving silent men a voice

The Scottish film-maker on bringing humour to his look at male emotional repression, being compared to Louis Theroux, and his problems with reality TV

Silence is golden - at least where men are concerned. The strong, silent type" endures as an aspirational archetype, whether you are a man yourself, or simply someone who interacts with them. In popular fiction, the Jack Reacher action novels have sold about100m copies. The big man's catchphrase is, tellingly, not a phrase at all, rather, it's an anti-phrase: Reacher said nothing." In film, one ofthe ultimate images of machismo isArnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator: leather jacket, motorcycle and, famously, only 17 lines of dialogue in the whole of the first film.And at the frillier end of cultural representations of men, the likes of Heathcliff in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights depend more on their ability to smoulder a lady to a crisp with a glance than on their emotional articulacy.

It might work in fiction but, in reality, the boys don't cry" approach can be dangerous if it leads to men bottling things up or trying to shoulder their worries alone. Suicideisstill the biggest killer of menunder50 in the UK, with men making up about three-quarters of deaths bysuicide.