Really interesting article I found from The Guardian about the future of British Cinema...My Thoughts: UK FILM COUNCIL is being wound down, films such as Made In Dagenham were part funded by this body and so it's definately hard to see a next chapter clearly for the film industry here in the UK BUT... I have faith. Where there are camcorders, excellent colleges and programmes for budding storytellers and a thriving market for fiction cinema; then new stories will continue to reach us and inspire us... you may be able to take away some funding but you can't kill a great story...
The tone of the article is pretty helpful so here's hoping chaps... let's get together and tell a story together some day!
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If one were to dramatise the history of the British film industry, it probably wouldn't be a film at all. A soap opera would suit it better. How else to frame this litany of false dawns and hubristic triumphs; ignominious collapses and agonised soul-searching? On and on the drama runs, dragging so much history in its wake that certain incidents start repeating themselves, and the latest cliffhanger can look suspiciously similar to the last.
I'm on my way to meet director Nigel Cole at a London hotel. Cole has recently returned from the Toronto film festival where his new picture, Made in Dagenham, was one of a number of high-profile British success stories (Submarine, The King's Speech and Another Year among them). That's good. And yet Made in Dagenham (like Submarine, The King's Speech and Another Year) was bankrolled in part by the UK Film Council, which is being closed and will cease operations by April 2012. That's bad, another cliffhanger. As such, it's altogether par for the course.
"I've been around on the fringes of British film for 30 years now, and all that time people have been saying that the industry is in crisis," Cole tells me. "I'm not sure it's in any worse a crisis now than it has been in the past. We live in uncertain times. But then we always have." Poor Cole: he's like a longstanding cast member, rolling his eyes at the latest twist in the script.
In the case of the British film industry, the desired conclusion is self-sufficiency, a time when movies will be made without US interference, and the profits will flow back to the pot and fund fresh productions. The industry has traditionally been so shackled to the Hollywood system of funding and distribution that film-makers have long been forced to sell off the intellectual property rights to their movies in order to get them a) made and b) seen. This, no doubt, was what the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, was referring to when he described Slumdog Millionaire as "a creative success for Film4, but a financial success for Fox Searchlight".
In the government's opinion, the Film Council has not worked; or at least not well enough to justify its survival. But what comes next is anyone's guess. According to its outgoing chief executive, John Woodward, the decision to scrap the body came out of the blue. It was, he said, "short-sighted and potentially very damaging, especially as there is at present no roadmap setting out where the UKFC's responsibilities will be placed in the future".
The UK Film Council was set up in 2000 with a brief to "create a self-sustaining UK film industry". Over the past decade, it has ploughed £160m of Lottery money into more than 900 productions (some good, some awful). It has also funded the British Film Institute and Skillset, which furnishes the industry with a steady supply of trained technicians. Veteran producer David Puttnam has hailed it as the strategic glue that binds a disparate sprawl of auteurs, craftspeople, circus barkers and market traders and its abolition sparked fierce criticism, both here (where 50 big-name actors signed a letter of protest) and in the US (where Clint Eastwood and Steven Spielberg waded into the fray).
Even its most ardent supporters, though, will concede the UKFC was far from perfect. It has been accused of cronyism, arrogance and waste. It has been attacked for throwing public money at the arthouse (courtesy of its New Cinema Fund) on the one hand and for backing mainstream work (courtesy of its Premiere Fund) that would surely find funding elsewhere on the other. Its foes, meanwhile, revile the UKFC as a classic example of state bureaucracy – an all-powerful quango that presumes to tell businesses what films they can and cannot make. For the film-maker Julian Fellowes, the body is a "behemoth" that epitomises "the anti-commercial mindset of the film elite". For Michael Winner, that bumptious remnant from the unregulated days of British film production, it's a needless extension of the welfare state. "The council gives a lot of work to people who are out of work and who probably deserve to be out of work," he says.
Officially speaking, the UKFC remains in operation, limping on until 2012 like a lame-duck presidency, or a TV soap that's jumped the shark. When I ask Peter Buckingham, its head of distribution and exhibition, what morale is like, he lets loose a mirthless roar of laughter. "Never better!" he says. "Never better!" I suspect he may be joking.
Yes, admits Buckingham, the UKFC failed to realise its initial target of a self-supporting film industry, the "holy grail" we've been chasing for the best part of a century. But the old model is now breaking down. Previously, he says, the focus has all been on cinemas; on finding a home for independent British films in a distribution system that is largely controlled by the US studios, with all the loss of freedom and revenue that this entails. But as we evolve from an analogue to a digital landscape, the game is bound to change. The rise of social media points to a time where every producer can become a push-button publisher, and where international distribution is no longer in the hands of the Hollywood gatekeepers. Except that we still have some way to go to reach that point.
"There's a whole shift going on," Buckingham insists. "And I instinctively and academically think that with some good strategic leadership, and possibly some pump-priming, it is going to lead to a sustainable UK film industry. We are right on the cusp. The danger, though, is that at the very point when all that opportunity comes together, something gets taken away. And then the opportunity may be lost."
He makes it sound as though we have arrived at the latter stages of a difficult birth, only to discover that the midwife's been sacked. Yet Buckingham is uncomfortable with the analogy: he doesn't want to be caught lobbying for the council's survival. The issue, he says, is that something needs to fill the gap. "Whatever it is, whether it's private or public is not relevant. But how do we get independent producers to move into that digital landscape and understand it properly? We need to figure that out now. Otherwise the chance will be missed and nothing will change and we'll still be having the same debate about British film in 10 years' time. The same conversation we've been having for the past 100 years."
But what of the producers themselves? Over at Revolution Films, Andrew Eaton advocates a more laissez-faire approach. Eaton served as deputy chair of the UKFC for four years, but was never entirely convinced by its agenda. It was too prescriptive, he says, too dictatorial. "It's like a parent giving pocket money to their kids. If you give pocket money, you have to then let the kids buy the clothes that they want to wear, and spend the money as they see fit, otherwise they're never going to grow up. And yet the industry is stuck in this dysfunctional parent-child relationship."
Eaton, alongside director Michael Winterbottom, is responsible for the likes of 24-Hour Party People, A Mighty Heart and The Killer Inside Me. The answer, he says, is to divert Lottery funding to interesting projects and able film-makers, and then stand well back. "The strength of any industry is talent and ideas," he says. "That's the real currency." He mourns the demise of the UKFC only insofar as it suggests homegrown cinema is now off the agenda. "We've spent 10 years building up a dialogue with government to the extent that they took the film industry seriously. And now that's all been shot down. But it remains to be seen whether that's a long-term disaster."
In any case, we have been here before. The UK film industry boomed in the 1910s and slumped in the 20s. It went up in the 30s and down in the 40s. The 60s were a golden age, while the 70s tunnelled into the ground. It reached its lowest point in 1981, when just 24 pictures rolled off the production line. For all that, the gears grind on and some good films get made. To misquote Harry Lime, we've had 100 years of pain and upheaval, but they've produced Ealing and Lean, Powell and Pressburger and kitchen-sink realism; Lindsay Anderson and Monty Python; Mike Leigh and Alfred Hitchcock. All that and The Third Man, too.
Small wonder the cast have grown accustomed to their roles. "It's life," says Andrew Eaton. "It's all bad, but we've had worse."
"We survive," says Nigel Cole. "Just as we always survive." And so our protagonists waltz ever onward, from good news to bad, and to the cliff edge and back again. Will they flourish or will they fall? Stay tuned. The next episode is being scripted as we speak.
