The answers were not exactly a surprise, especially for a medium that encourages shallow thought. A lot of people’s first response was along the lines of “I hate lazy films”. Which is unarguable but not exactly a razor sharp attack on our cultural fabric. Shockingly people also came out against clichés. This is a subject close to my heart, if only because I enjoy the inherent tension between the fact that whilst it is still a cliché to say that we all hate a cliché, it is without a doubt now more of a cliché to say we only claim to hate the cliché and secretly we adore them.

But beneath this prolix sophistry there were some very solid arguments. Alex Richardson started out saying he was fed up with “crap storytelling” but when I pushed him he went on “I think, in part, there’s an issue with shooting style. Long takes, careful composition and blocking give a sense of place which is lacking, for me, in much that I’ve see recently – consequently I’m not connecting with the story and its world. I love the ability of a film to transport you. For me, works best when story and shooting style create coherent worlds.”

M Jackson chipped in with “the thing I’m finding most distracting is overwrought cinematography, particularly colour and contrast.” and Piers Cooper added “The prevalence of thoughtless unnecessary and annoying 3D. I hope it dies very soon.”

It was around this point that the always good Jared Kelly pipped in to say “My latest filmic bugbear is nonsensical film commentary from legions of folk who seem to blindly regurgitate lazy opinion. The very latest of lazy pointlessness … echoed everywhere has to be “Hunger Games is Battle Royale. It’s the new ‘Avatar is Pocahontas’. It’s incredibly lazy & only highlights a lack of understanding of story/structure. The same idiots may as well complain 90% of pop songs are structured similarly & because of that are unoriginal.”

Jared’s tweets arrived in my timeline just as @ange1ina added “too many mainstream films seem to be formulaic and the same goes for TV series” and very soon we were back in the land of the clichéd cliché. The debate roughly falls into two camps. Those disappointed when a story feels formulaic and those who say this disappointment comes not from the formula, but the execution. Or those who hate a cliché and those who think it’s a cliché to hate a cliché. Or to put it another way this is an argument between “the audience” and “writers”.

I’m being unfair but it was noticeable though that most of the people who said they were bored of formulaic story-telling were not writers and most of the people who leapt to the defence of the formula were. I can see why, after all the actual divide is between those who claim to hate a cliché and those who know that a cliché only feels like a cliché if it’s badly written and that well written clichés are everyone’s favourite supper.

For instance, as a writer, I find it fascinating and infuriating how The King’s Speech is used in this argument, co-opted by both sides to make both points. It’s a film that sticks very closely to the genre rules of a story about triumphing over adversity. It does though play some clever strokes to kid you into thinking it’s not doing that. You know, like making him a King and making his problem really insignificant compared with all those guys who are about to die in his name. Clever little writerly tricks like that keep the appearance of novelty and depending on who you are this is either precisely why the film was a surprise success or why you were surprised to find you hated it. Either way, you can see why hearing someone complain about sticking to a formula then praising the King’s Speech for being different is a bit like someone saying that they’re a vegetarian but that they do eat fish. And chicken.

That said, whilst my sympathies naturally fall with those who have taught themselves to see the bolt-marks that hold a story together, there was a certain tone of certainty that caught in my throat. I know the audience are morons and we only pretend that they’re not because otherwise it’d be embarrassing; but nevertheless to hear writers insist that the formula isn’t the problem, to hear that implicit line that anyone who thinks a film is bad because it’s formulaic needs to read to Syd Field… well it does sound kinda out of touch.

I’m here to praise Structure not to bury it, but we must accept that we are in an arms race with our audience. If they feel bored, that’s because we’re boring them. Shouting “You’re not bored” isn’t going to help. So what are the new clichés? What are the elements of genre that feel flabby? What are the story beats that have exhausted their ability to surprise? What are the shots you despise? The scores you have heard?

Come on Shooters… what do you really hate about films?

I live in London and have never lived more than a stone’s throw from the M25, that magical bounding noose that forms the high particulate perimeter of Greater London. I would, therefore, sound two alarms about my thoughts on this. Firstly I love London. I love its monstrously relentless drive. I love its restless persistence. I love its unforgiving determination and hard nosed open mindedness. Secondly I fully admit that having only seen the rest of the country as a friend and visitor, I don’t know what it’s like to live two hours journey away from a cinema. I don’t know how it feels to have to travel across the country to go to meetings with men like me, mired in our oyster card slapping metropolitan myopia.

However, like so much in cinema, I do think that this is issue is just a trick of perspective. The grass is always greener, even when it’s grey and made of concrete.

From my perspective this moan about the advantages London has over the rest of the country does a great disservice to a great many amazingly successful and hardworking people and organisations. From what I can see there are thriving filmmaking communities in Brighton, Manchester, Sheffield, Bristol, Liverpool and Newcastle and Nottingham has its own talent hot house that easily rivals anything that has come out of London over the past decade. The impact and success of the Regional Screen Agencies was patchy but the best, like Film South and EM Media were very good indeed and hopefully will continue to be so under the reorganised Creative England brief.

Moreover what I can see is a great many opportunities open in the regions that just don’t exist in London. The returning iFeatures scheme knocks the pants off Microwave, not only in budgetary terms but in the depth and breadth of paid development it offers. The BBC is busily closing down TV Centre at Wood Lane and moving everything to Salford, Bristol and Cardiff. Great news if you happen to be in Salford, Bristol or Cardiff, less good news if you’re not but then that’s kinda the point about geography, a Londoncentric approach is no better or worse than a Salfordcentric one if you live in Cornwall.

I can’t pretend that London doesn’t have its advantages and I clearly feel that they work for me, but I’m not beyond an envious glance to the regions. All that funding. That sense of being a big fish. Most of all that sense of differentness. After all, there’s no escaping that part of the initial attraction of Shane Meadows was that his world felt fresh. I don’t care if that sounds patronising, it’s a weapon and he used it to his full advantage. It’s a weapon that you don’t have if you’re just one of the many many filmmakers living in London.

I’m not for a moment denying that it’s hard to make films outside of London – just trying to point out that it is actually no easier to make films in London. More cinemas, production companies and facilities houses means it’s easier to get a job in the industry but it definitely doesn’t mean that there are more people who actually want to give you money to make your film. Here in London our noses are pressed against the sweet shop window but there’s still a sign on the door saying no more than five kids at any one time.

Fundamentally the one advantage I think living in London gives you is that it robs you of the delusion that not living in London is the reason your career hasn’t taken off. Making films is hard, making good films is very hard, making good films that excite an audience and reach into the hearts of millions is really very hard. If you’re not yet the filmmaker you want to be that’s most likely because it’s just a really very hard thing to do. Either that or you’re not yet good enough. These factors are both utterly independent of geography. And class. And race. And gender. And sexual orientation and all those other things that feel like the reason you’re not getting breaks but that aren’t.

You never need to change your address – only your state of mind.

Due to slightly bad luck my post on the subject coincided with someone else’s in a way that made mine look like quite a rude and direct attack. That was no my intention and hopefully Alex will realise this. That though is about as much of an apology as I feel bound to give as the fact remains that anyone expecting a performer to get naked in an audition disrespects all actors, does great harm to our industry and also does damage to their own work.

Heavy stuff but before we get into the niceties of nudity among pros, it is important to remember that Shooting People is a network for all levels of the independent film industry. A blanket refusal of nudity in auditions provides a vital first defence against the wrong sort of people. I’m definitely not accusing anyone who has already posted about this topic of having dubious intentions but we must remember that this is just the internet. We cannot let responding to an audition advertised on Shooting People feel like getting into an unlicensed cab.

Beyond concern for the safety of actors, there are also very good artistic and professional reasons for saving nakedness for rehearsals and performance. This is the start of a post that was also in today’s bulletin…

> While all this is true, just out of curiosity: how does a
> director or casting director make sure that an actor or
> actress will actually on the day take of their kit and not
> balk and demand an on the spot rewrite or walk off or
> whatever?

It’s a fair enough question from a young director but also a very revealing one (your own pun about the word “revealing” goes here). It’s easy to get lost in the bums and bosoms of this debate and miss what we’re actually discussing. At its core this isn’t a question of tits, but of trust.

The relationship between director and actor has to be built on trust. This stands for any role in any production, whether naked or dressed a wookie. So, yes, to answer the question posed, at the end of the day you do just have to trust that the actor will be professional and disrobe as agreed. Same way they trust you to be professional with the working environment you create and with the way you edit the material. More importantly you don’t just trust them – you go out of your way to inspire trust in them.

Nudity is an easy example as it’s easy to see when that failure of trust has occurred. But whenever I watch an unconvincing performance my first thought is always that this stems from the performer being unconvinced by the director, being unable to really trust the direction of the work.

Trust starts from the moment you meet someone so being able to audition professionally is actually part of getting the right performance. This is not just about roles that involve nudity – for any production it is essential that you make the best possible first connection with your actors. Expecting them to get naked “to prove they are willing” is an instant denial of your trust in them as a professional. It’s like demanding your stunt man sets himself on fire the first time you meet.

Don’t forget – getting what you want in an audition is not as useful as getting what you need in a rehearsal. Both of these things are utterly useless if you don’t get what you need on camera.

Appropriately for a LeCarre adaptation Tinker, Tailor has had a strange looking-glass existence. A wordy, slow paced, book adaptation packed with three generations of the UK’s finest acting talent it seemed perfectly placed to make-up for modest box office with an unending stream of awards. Whilst nothing exactly remarkable, its $62m gross must have been a very nice surprise, if perhaps not compensation enough for the comparative award drought that followed. Winning anything is always an achievement and I certainly wouldn’t complain about a pair of BAFTAs, yet after the film’s initial reaction even this victory felt oddly like defeat. Tinker, Tailor is a film which garnered the highest acclaim you could hope for, yet only six months down the line it already feels like not the real deal.

I remember some years ago being lucky enough to hear Tim Bevan discuss his then newly released film The Interpreter. He admitted that political thrillers have always been a genre close to his heart and something he always wanted Working Title to do more of. The idea of a thriller wrapped in the complexities of translation and diplomacy remains one of my favourites but there is a fundamental flaw to the movie that came from this concept. Somewhere along the line the decision was made to make the interpreter a speaker of an entirely fictional african language. The good reasons for this are legion, not least saving Nicole Kidman from having to learn how to speak Tado or Lingala. It also meant the film ran no risk of offending a real african nation. It was, in effect, a political thriller without any politics. This, once again, is what Working Title have achieved with Tinker, Tailor.

"I think he said 'UmBongo UmBongo they drink it in the Congo'..."

For cinema’s key demographic, the 16-20 year-old, the struggle between East and West isn’t even a childhood memory but it is a mistake to imagine that this leaves Tinker, Tailor simply as a museum piece. Told well, for instance when Radio Four recently ran all of Le Carre’s Smiley novels starring the magnificent Simon Russell-Beale, this story still has a powerful message about the way countries are run and the way ideology works.

There is a key scene in which George retells his only encounter with his opposite number in the Russian secret service, Karla. In the 1979 TV adaptation this role is taken by Patrick Stewart who glowers at Alec Guinness with a nerve jangling intensity. However Alfredson’s film at least equals this by refusing to flash-back to the encounter and instead keeping the scene entirely in the retelling. Karla is simply an empty chair, his brooding, over intelligent presence purely the creation of Gary Oldman who somehow conjures an Indian prison cell into a small dark room in London. It is a bravura moment yet it is also where the film falters.

The encounter ends with George apparently defeated yet, looking back, he is able to draw a vital lesson. In the novel and every other adaptation of it, that lesson is given as…

‘…Karla is not fireproof because he’s a fanatic. And one day, if I have anything to do with it, that lack of moderation will be his downfall.’

But the film has this as…

“…And that’s how I know he can be beaten. Because he’s a fanatic. And the fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt.”

It’s an astonishingly bad translation. For starters LeCarre’s version has a beautiful natural truth to it, history proves time and again that extremists do indeed bring on their own defeat. In many ways he not only summarised the failure of Fascism but predicted the failure of Communism, not bad for 8 words. The reworking is as ugly as it is wrong. It’s just wrong to say that a fanatic always conceals a doubt. It’s comforting but it’s not true. That doesn’t mean the fanatic is right, just that many are sadly fully capable of being wholeheartedly wrong and again history is proof of that.

More importantly the difference between the two statements is what robs the film of its political edge, what actually robs it of any real meaning. The point of the original is that Western Democracies were a mess but that this mess was better than the brutalised certainty of the Communist East. It is George Smiley who conceals a secret doubt, not Karla and the novel celebrates him for doing so. The film leaves us with George oddly triumphant, his enemies vanquished, his humiliations behind him, his questions answered. In yet another example of the mirrored nature of this film, it ends up offering us an entirely opposite version of the conclusion of the book. This turns the film simply into a rather long winded account of a how a retired civil servant got a promotion.

"Do you like my new office? I didn't chose the wall paper."

Oldman’s performance is sublime and I do hope he wins the Oscar for it but I’m a little glad that the film as a whole has finally started to sink. As you can probably tell I love the original book and this film struck me as a beautiful wasted chance. After all, we are still a nation less free than we like to protest yet much freer than our extremist enemies would wish. Faced with a certainty that self-detonates on the tube I would have thought LeCarre’s story in praise of doubt would have been timely.

All of which is really intended just to point up the falsehoods in the two favourite maxim’s of those who distrust words on the screen. The first is the easiest to dismiss. I have always hated the expression “a picture tells a thousand words”, it ranks alongside “the fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt” as a clever sounding piece of stupidity. I do know of pictures that are far more eloquent than bad prose, I also know a thousand pictures that could be more than adequately described without straining the limits of a tweet.
The film of Tinker, Tailor is 2 hours and 7 minutes long. That means it’s made up of something like 190,500 pictures yet it means less than those 8 words that didn’t make the final draft.

The other favourite saying is not wrong itself but it is often badly misunderstood. It is easy to translate “show don’t tell” as “visualise don’t say” but that’s not actually what it means, it is not a commandment against dialogue. Surely it means “demonstrate don’t lecture”, and pictures can be as guilty of this as words. Tinker, Tailor is full of gorgeous images, images designed to tell me that this story is important and political and still relevant and powerful but none quite has the power to actually show us anything. I think because no one actually wanted to show us anything.

So when you watch it back and feel more cheated than you remember, don’t forget that it’s because “show don’t tell” is a far tougher commandment than it looks at first glance. It’s not the same as “say nothing” and it certainly offers no hiding place if you just have nothing to say.

The narrative is usually basically the same. “I’m a young unknown talent, here’s some visually arresting ideas, please help me put this onto a screen.” Well, in many ways that’s the same narrative behind Shooting People and the BFI’s current JustGiving campaign that hopes to get your cash to support a film called The Manxman. The only difference being that the film was shot in 1929 and the young talent who made it was the late great Alfred Hitchcock.

This trail contains material from all 9 of Hitchcock’s surviving silent films, all of which the BFI have been hoping to restore. As they say, “Film is a fragile medium” and these would not be the first early movies to be lost to history.

Shooting People have swung to the cause of the last of the 9, The Manxman, which was also his last silent movie. With The Artist full of BAFTAs and poised to devour the Oscars like a delicious pudding, there has never been a better time to put your money where your mouth isn’t. This is your chance to support a genuine silent classic and to save a film by one of British Cinema’s greatest ever auteurs. Surely a duty we all owe to world cinema?

Any sum can help so do what I did and donate via this link: www.justgiving.com/shootingpeople

First I should declare my bias. Following its triumphant night at the BAFTAs I wouldn’t be surprised if The Artist soon suffered something of a backlash. Certainly its Hollywood enemies have been desperately trying to engineer one for months. Side-stepping Kim Novak there’s still no escaping the fact that the film has been over hyped. If you go to see it in the wake of the BAFTA victories expecting some revelatory experience that enables you to see with fresh eyes your entire relationship with the art of cinema then you will be disappointed. It is, after all, just a jolly film about a fat man and a dog.

The real strength of The Artist though is that it never much tries to be anything other than this. It has moments of surprising depth, flashes of visual brilliance but none of these distract it from the task of being charming. It left me beaming and feeling delighted with the world and for this fact alone I hope it wins in every category because Hugo hit me as, without a doubt, one of the dullest, most poorly played and fundamentally disingenuous films I’ve ever bothered to sit through. So I’m not a fan.

Disingenuous is the key point. Both films seek to pay tribute to a past age of cinema, one does so by showing it still has a relevance, the other by smothering its subject in contemporary gloss. I have heard complaints that The Artist is inauthentic. Most convincingly a tailor I met was outraged by the George Valentin’s shirts, a period detail that I have to admit had passed me by. Amid all the adulation it is certainly worth remembering that the style and tone of The Artist owes a lot more to the more recent and more accessible movies of Fred Astaire than it truly does to the silent classics it appears to emulate. Cleverly Hazanavicius keeps the hokey melodrama of the silent film to short sections of movies within the movie and the real story told, albeit almost completely silent, is actually a homage to a far more modern style of old cinema.

Yet, whilst this is a subtle shift of the goal posts, the film’s overall achievement stands. Michel Hazanavicius shows it is still possible to make a popular, populist, slice of entertainment that nevertheless is shot in black and white, with next to no dialogue and few recognisable faces. The film never seems to set out to do anything other than that which it achieves – to put a large and delighted smile on your face.

This is where Hugo comes most unstuck, twice over. Firstly the authorial programme of praising the great Georges Méliès is always placed ahead of the demands of telling a story. Scenes in which characters recite chunks of his biography would have felt clunky had this been a children’s TV show. More importantly the plan of making a film which shows how magical early cinema was, is ruined by Scorsese’s inability to let the work stand on its own feet. If Méliès was able to tell such magical stories with dodgy back drops and low-fi effects then why did this film have to be swamped with such a lazy array of ugly computer work? Or is the clanging paucity of so much of the visual treatment a deliberate attempt to mimic Méliès’ own short comings? Is the hammy auto-queue reading performance style supposed to be aping the wide-eyed gurning of the silent performers in Méliès’ work? Or is it all at another level still? Is this film, with its nasty buzzing stereoscopy and cut-out CG background characters, supposed to make us long for the simple handicraft of pre-war cinema? Certainly when clips of the real work of Georges Méliès appear on the screen I was struck with a delight I’d thought my body had become incapable of feeling.

This is why The Artist would get my Academy vote had I a vote to give it, which luckily for Martin Scorsese, I don’t. Hazanavicius trusts the audience to follow a good story whatever the picture quality. Scorsese instead lectures us that the past was great but seems reluctant to trust us to pay attention to him unless the film is wrapped up in all the orange and teal gloss that modern cinema can offer, all the gloss that his subject clearly didn’t need.

Remind me again, which of these is a mechanical prop?

Large swathes of Hugo are set aside to holler about the “magic” of cinema. Méliès apparently called his studio the Dream Factory and Scorsese’s characters are forever looking skywards with misty eyes and talking in hushed tones about dreams. Yet there is no magic in Hugo. There’s no magic because everything happens on the screen, no thought is left unvisualised, no dream undisplayed. The digital tool kit open to a modern director is vast and full of potential but it is a mistake to imagine that seeing is always the key to believing.

There are just enough moments of real visual elan in The Artist to make me criticise it for not having enough. A sequence in which George Valentin pours drink onto a table and we see him reflected in the mess is as clever as it is beautiful and had it had a couple more I might have left feeling less like the film was too long. However my favourite sequence in the entire movie is when Peppy Miller sneaks into Valentin’s dressing room and, finding his suit and hat hanging up, slides her arm into his empty jacket sleeve so as to hug herself as if he were holding her. It’s a sublime moment, witty, delicate and sensuous.

Watching I was left unsure if the hand that comes out of the sleeve is Bejo’s or actually that of a Dujardin himself. Whether this trick is achieved through effects or performance is immaterial to the impression it leaves. I can smell what Bejo smells, I feel the love that she feels. This is where cinema’s third dimension truly lies, in the ability to create a sensation in the viewer which is more than the sum of its parts. That’s the magic.

In Hugo, Scorsese adopts the hectoring lecturing tone of a man dragging a child round a dusty museum, insisting that each exhibit is actually really impressive. In his passion for his subject he forgets not only the basic rule of “show don’t tell”, but the far subtler lesson taught by The Artist – magic doesn’t happen in front of your eyes, it happens in your imagination. Don’t show, imply.

I mentioned this ambition to my friend the filmmaker Lousia Mayman and she obligingly signed off a text message by describing our arrangement to meet up as “major”. Flattered though I was, I wanted to let her know that I am aware of the utter futility of my quest and was going to reply that I felt confident the expression would be in the script of Skins by the year 2030 but I found I couldn’t actually write this.

I suddenly realised that I had no workable concept of 2030. Written down it doesn’t even look like a date. If I told you something was going to happen in 2030 you’d expect it at half past eight tonight. Held transfixed on the edge of my train carriage, the high pitched door alarm squealing in my ears, I was suddenly aware that my mental image of the future extends no further than the year 2020. Anything beyond this date is utterly meaningless, cotton wool in my mind.

"Will Newt Gingrich's dream of a moon base by 2020 come true?"

I have always had a pretty clear mental map of the future. I suppose there is the exception of a brief period in my childhood when I was convinced that due to a quirk in our numbering the 90′s were never going to happen. I’m not sure where this came from, possibly from the French and their still dazzlingly bonkers refutation of logical progression once their numbers hit 80. Whatever the cause it took me until quite someway into the year 1990 before I was certain that the sequence wasn’t 1989, 1990, 2000 and that we would have to sit out the whole the decade before the millennium fell.

This episode aside I’ve always felt like I knew where I was in time. True I’ve never thought much beyond the year 2020, but until trying to send that text message I’d never felt I needed to. 2020 has been, for sometime, the limit of the near future. Of course science fiction is written about any date, often those picked at random, but generally speaking I’ve always felt a divide between people imagining the safe impossible space of the future like the year 3288 and those wishing to comment on contemporary culture by projecting forwards into the tangible nearly-now the early 2nd Millennium.

Imagine that! By 2020 all cars will look like mobility scooters! WOW!

Perhaps it is purely a result of paying less and less attention to bad science-fiction the older I get but my own sense of the distant present is fixed at a point which is rapidly because the actual present. With a mere 8 years until 2020 is the actual real date of the date and no longer the outer reach of our present culture I am struck by the realisation that I have no idea what 2021 might be like. I am also struck by the sliding doors of a train at Harringay station.

Lightly bruised in the freezing cold of the platform I watch the lights of the train pull away into the deep unknown future. Life is major, I think to myself, rubbing my arms.

Nah. It’ll never catch on.

Eastman Kodak Co. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in New York early Thursday morning, after the struggling photography icon ran short on cash needed to fund a long-sputtering turnaround.

The storied former blue chip said it had secured $950 million in financing from Citigroup Inc. to help keep it afloat during bankruptcy proceedings. The company also named Dominic Di Napoli, a vice chairman at FTI Consulting Inc., as its chief restructuring officer to help steer the company through bankruptcy court.

via Kodak Files for Bankruptcy Protection – WSJ.com.

Whatever Fellowes’ may have hoped to achieve by proclaiming that public money needed to be spent on “more mainstream” projects, the report that he contributed to is decidedly closer in outlook to Ken Loache’s response that what we need is diversity or as the report has it “the broadest and richest range of British films”. So whilst Fellowes may well be Lord Golden of Globe, he clearly didn’t get much of a say in the final text of the report. Which is probably why its conclusions are not a bag of contrived gibberish couched in bizarrely melodramatic tones and lacking in any form of realism or historical accuracy.

The Smith Report is certainly not escapist Sunday evening fiction. There are no misty eyed plans to create a rain sodden British Hollywood, a Brolly-Wood set out to solve all our problems with the glamourous hammer of production. Rather, the main thrust of the document is clear from the title – “A Future For British Film: It begins with the audience.” The stance is clear, we tried “Built It And They Will Come” but they didn’t come because they couldn’t get there, so rather than the field of dreams let’s think about widening the road that leads up to it and perhaps maybe a bypass.

As a result we have a report which is unshowy, quietly pragmatic and broadly in line with the thoughts of everyone I’ve ever spoken both inside and outside the industry. For the most part it is dry and managerial which is no bad thing for a government report. It would, if implemented in full, be a massive boon to everyone making films in this country, and to everyone who loves cinema.

So there we go, Lord Smith gets my approval whether he wants it or not. There are things missing but at least what’s there is sensible, practical and would broadly achieve what it sets out to. The biggest omission from the text was any recommendation for the tax system. This is strange since the report does stress how essential the current tax break is in securing funding. Indeed here’s the report’s own chart which lists the tax credit as the third highest source of funding for British Film (in 2009).

It is great that finally voices that carry authority are calling for the action needed to grow the UK audience and strengthen the reach to our domestic market. I agree that if it is possible to shake the general public from their narrow convictions about what British film is then we will effectively be cleaning the green house windows and letting in the sunlight. But what of the seeds currently in the soil?

Once this process of audience building has taken hold the financing of film will get smoother as it becomes easier to demonstrate how a film would make a mid-term rather than long term profit. As an aside I also admire the report’s calls for stronger links between producers and distributors, an attempt to end the war of attrition which sees both sides finding ways to guard their income stream rather than necessarily maximising the film’s. Similarly I applaud the suggested changes that would enable producers to keep more of the revenue brought by a successful film and the gentle pushing back of the BFI’s need to reclaim it’s Lottery Fund. This would mark an easing of the need for the Lottery distributor to act both as an instrument of state intervention and as a hard nosed market beast – a schizophrenia which the UKFC struggled to cope with for many years.

However there’s still an obvious dip in this positive cycle where audiences are enticed towards British films yet producers are left with little hard evidence to calm their investor’s nerves. Unless this happened to coincide with a general economic uplift then we run the risk of ruining all the hard work done. Improving the tax credit available, even as an explicitly short term measure, would have been a good step to avoid this.

Herein lies my second doubt about the document. There is a lot of talk of film clubs and communities sharing our amazing cinematic heritage. A prospective “British Film Week” is sketched out with that whiff of bunting and street parties that all politicians love to invoke. There is nothing wrong with these proposals and everything right about trumpeting the brilliant films already exist, films that certainly inspired me to enter the industry. However it is very easy to create a “A Future For British Film” which hinges around the cakey nostalgia of old films. It is too easy to do this. If a mission to “connect the widest possible range of audiences throughout the UK with the broadest and richest range of British films” and the “developing and launching [of] a British film ‘brand’” turns into little more than an annual screening of both Kes and The Lady Killers, then we will simultaneously delight our audience, who always enjoy what they already know they like, and cripple our future.

This is not a stick with which to beat Lord Smith or his well tempered report. However the real caveat I have about Monday’s celebrations is that this is only a report. The good sense contained within it has no legislative weight. Indeed a lot of the time it seems to actively wish not to, usually preferring to “call upon” or “urge” the key participants and only really putting on the tough talk when it comes to piracy. Ed Vaizey our Culture Minister says he looks “forward to examining what the report recommends…” which is a timely if gentle reminder that this is 111 pages of advice. In one crucial sense the “Future Of British Film” doesn’t begin with the audience… it begins with Ed.

When most British talent moves almost directly to Hollywood (from Edgar Wright and Duncan Jones, to Sam Mendes and more) we should be asking ourselves what we can do to keep commercially and artistically successful filmmakers working in and making films about Britain.

It is a commonplace complaint that the failures of the UK industry force our brightest hopes to emigrate to LA like rare butterflies dancing just above the foam of the Atlantic. Though it is true that most English speaking filmmakers who find success will at some point work on a Hollywood picture, the fact that this is so often seen as some sort of failure tells us a lot about why we see our domestic cinema in such gloomy terms and why we therefore take such buffoonish steps to try and look after it.

What does this migration of brilliance actually mean? That we lose our brightest stars or just that we loan them? Those who actually abandon these shores for good are surprisingly few. Most of the actually successful names you care to throw around, Danny Boyle, Guy Ritchie, Tom Hooper, Sam Mendes, Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, Duncan Jones still count the UK as their home. Indeed, unless my twitter feed is deceiving me, Jones has just directed a TV advert for one a British bank. Even the Scott Brothers (who for all I know now live in a base on the moon) still keep their company firmly straddling both the US and UK.

In purely economic these people are little different from migrant workers from Eastern Europe sending cash home across the channel. In more creative terms their impact on world cinema is impressive and that remains good news. The benefit our domestic industry gains from exporting its talent is not something to be classed as failure.

Yet so often we make out as if they leave because of our failure, as they are forced out by our sheer lack of comparative talent. No one ever says that they might be leaving of their free will, to pursue a type of filmmaking that is best done within Hollywood’s purview. One of our finest screen actresses, the immaculate Kristen Scott Thomas makes more films in French than English these days yet I don’t hear many people sighting this as a damning failure of our ability to create compelling lead roles for women over 30. I think it’s great that the French love her and I think it’s great that the Americans adore Simon Pegg. How does their success make the rest of us look bad?

Most importantly it is not a one-way street. They go, they come back, the essential truth we need to recognise is that talent moves freely between Hollywood and the UK because we are not actually at war. We are not actually in competition with Hollywood.

Don’t throw things. Of course I agree that in the battle for bums on seats UK films are in direct multiplex competition with Hollywood’s. Worse this is a battle in which Hollywood doesn’t play fair and in which those who have power over the situation here refuse to act. However outside of the domestic box office we are just another branch of English language cinema, one that believe it or not, is surprisingly popular when you consider our relative size.

I don’t see any need to create a UK industry that mirrors Hollywood, that beats the yanks at their own game. Making films is not the same as international football. There isn’t a world cinema cup handed out once every four years and we don’t have to be constantly dismayed when the Germans win it. I love world cinema, a term I don’t use euphemistically to mean worthy art-house films in black and white but simply to mean cinema made somewhere in this world.

By imagining we are locked in an entirely fictional battle with Hollywood we turn ourselves into the drunk outside the tube, still trading blows with an opponent who was never there. This mindset infuses much of the popular discourse on film planning and policy. This leads us toward short term strategies aimed at creating precisely the kind of industry we can’t hope to sustain.