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.

It’s hard not to get angry but in this instance it’s best to try.

A quiet sarcastic snort is uncontrollable. The Prime Minister’s call for us to make more “commercially successful pictures” is a fatuous remark from a fatuous man. It reminds me of the Crystal Maze when those players not taking part in a challenge would shout redundant advice like “TRY REALLY HARD!” or “JUST GET THE CRYSTAL!!” But then a lot of my life working in this industry reminds me of the Crystal Maze.

His choice of movies is a hostage to fortune and telling of how badly briefed he is on the subject. Viewed with hindsight it is easy to demand more films like the multi-oscar winning international box office smash hits “The Kings Speech” and “Slumdog Millionaire”. However you don’t have to be much of an industry insider to know that both are relatively low budget films that struggled to get made and depended largely on the grim determination of a few just-influential-enough people to make it to the screen. Indeed even after it was made Slumdog was heading for a straight-to-DVD release in the States until Warner’s feet got so cold they sold the rights to Fox Searchlight. If we are to base all future movie production on this example then what exactly is the model? Rush into cinemas everything that was about to go straight to disc?

Some Happy Lottery Winners.

So I understand why today’s posturing has created a ringing of hands and a gnashing of teeth. Our Prime Minister sounds like a well meaning Aunt or idiot Grandfather. I’m sure if you see the full text of his speech he’ll have added “And I hear a good way into films is to make a hit TV show like that Fab Abs programme they have now, have you thought of writing to the BBC about directing that?” or “What we really need is another Carey Grant he was nice wasn’t he. Came from Bristol didn’t he. But you wouldn’t know from his voice would you? That’s acting, he didn’t make movies with mucky language like they have these days.”

It is annoying to be given advice on success by the man who failed to win the last election even though his opponent toured the country insulting old women. However the appropriate response is not to turn ourselves into the militant idiots many of his supporters would wish us to be.

The term “mainstream” seems only to have been used by that child’s drawing of buttocks, Julian Fellowes, a man who takes a lot of credit for winning a screenwriting Oscar whilst working with a director famous for preferring his cast to improvise. All Cameron has said today is that he wants us to make more “commercially successful pictures”. To oppose the glib stupidity of making this statement in public it is not necessary to start pretending that there is something inherently great about commercially unsuccessful pictures.

I completely agree with Ken Loach that we want a diverse industry producing a wide range of films. Loach is one of our foremost directing talents and according to Box Office Mojo “Looking For Eric” grossed $11m world wide whilst “The Wind That Shakes The Barely” brought in just under $23m. I can’t easily find reliable figures for production budgets but I would be very surprised if these films haven’t reached something like profitability. In short, though I’d hate to taint a master with such a tawdry concept, Ken Loach makes commercially successful films.

Of course not all of Loach’s films have made money, Danny Boyle has had flops aplenty and Tom Hooper’s are sadly sure to come. Only an idiot in a tie would imagine it could work any other way. However as we gather ourselves in advance of Monday’s report by Lord Smith we would do well not to sound too unworldly, as it is a pose that does us no favours. By hearing calls for commercial good sense as those for dumbed down lowest common denominator dross we not only make ourselves a sitting target but we also insult the intelligence of our audience.

There is a market in this country for independent film, for the intelligent, the unexpected, the delightful and the original. What we need is a better system that enables filmmakers to reach that audience. What we need is less interference from bumbling toffs who clearly don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

The triumphant return of Phil Ilson and his cohorts has also reminded me a of thought I started to have just before the New Year when Kindle King Andy Conway kicked off a Screenwriter’s bulletin with this link to Mish’s Global list of cultural artefacts marked for extinction. Among the items set to follow both Dodo and Dinosaur are the book, the newspaper and all television. Surprisingly for once no mention of the short film so I guess that leaves the score at Phil Ilson 1, Rupert Murdoch 0. Of course it’s not often that these two titans are mentioned in the same breath but they share a common role and if there’s any truth in Mish’s doomy predictions then it’s one that is going to become increasingly prominent.

The curator is a figure who passed through the 20th Century virtually unnoticed. Even now the title conjures up an Ilsonish figure, a passionate intellectual on a mission to make the world better. However a curator is simply someone who brings together other people’s work and presents it to an audience in a way that draws significance as much from the relationship between the works as from the work itself. Murdoch, through his twin roles as mogul and master of the night, has done his best to curate people’s sense of the world for the past twenty years. Every TV programmer and commissioner is a curator, as is every publisher. Often passing largely unremarked through their careers they nevertheless have played a vital and active role in curating mass media and popular culture through the decades in which it first truly exploded.

We haven’t tended to call these people curators, preferring to class TV stations, newspaper owners and publishing houses as “producers” rather than mere bringers-together. We have measured their importance by what they have created, often taking for granted the way they bring to prominence the work of others. It has been what broadcasters chose to make rather than how urgently and cleverly they push the programme upon that has been seen as their key role. It has been what the newspapers print, not the nature of the space devoted to the story.

However if the next twenty years are indeed to see the demise of newspapers and television as we know them today then it is because the role of curator has been pushed to the forefront of cultural jobs. Already it is possible for anyone who cares to access nearly most of everything that our species have said, sung, drawn and generally done. Already this is too much information.

Faced with the onrush of instant reporting the newspapers, creaking along a full day after events have been tweeted and forgotten, have attempted to turn this overabundance to their advantage. As the news sections decrease so the pages of comment and speculation increase. A newspaper is a bad tool for telling us what’s happening but it hopes to prove to be a good tool for exploring why. The more tv channels proliferate the more they focus in on a specific genre, the more clearly curated they become. What for decades was merely part and parcel of the job of creating and broadcasting is increasingly becoming the raison d’etre of the channel. The rise of Dave means for the first time we have a channel so good at curating the scraps it could pick up that it has been able to secure a loyal audience and so transform into a producer of new work (albeit not especially original work…) No longer able to be the first or freshest voice they instead focus on being the most authoritative, most dedicated, most complete – best curated.

The interesting question is not so much whether 20th Century media will survive long into the 21st, it’s what form their competition will take. It used to be that our views and viewing were formed by what was recommended in the papers and what happened to be on when we slumped down in front of the box. Everything else was loftily bracketed together as “word of mouth”, the largely irrelevant chatter of your friends. Now though your “friends” are probably legion and their chatter is almost constantly updated in the palm of your hand. Increasingly tools like Twitter and Youtube have enabled clever, passionate people to talk directly to an ever growing audience.

However I don’t want to get too hung up or starry eyed about the technology. After all, both those examples run at a loss and exist purely on the sufferance of wealthy backers – in one case Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, in the other “How-Long-Before-They-Give-In-And-Become-Evil” internet giant Google. Whilst it is fun to foretell the collapse of all newspapers and the implosion of TV as we know it, it is less deliciously modern but still probably more likely that either one or both of these democratising technologies will, if not disappear, at least be twisted out of shape by market forces long before the ink dries on the world’s last printed headline.

"Hallo I own all your tweets!"

Whatever happens the fundamental point remains that what we crave most of all is someone we trust who can point us in the direction of stuff that’s good and the more stuff proliferates and the faster and easier our access to it becomes the more important and powerful will be the best curators.

And remember you heard it here first…

So get along to the Curzon Soho this Saturday. Not to mention the opening night tonight at the ICA where mine and my brother’s own brief silliness “The Maestro” will be part of the fun.

Happy New Year and apologises for my silence but I remain somewhere in the middle of this lot, rattling under the streets of London to where I’m finishing an edit. People hate rush hour. In many ways I hate rush hour to. An asked for invite to a game of twister with strangers. However that unexpected proximity to the rest of London is really a treat to be grateful for.

Here are some of the people I’ve enjoyed sharing my mornings and nights with over the past few months.

Chris and I have been editing and doing a lot of the visual effects and it seems strangely appropriate to our Victorian theme that we’re doing so with what are increasingly ancient tools. The whole show has been cut on Final Cut 7 and most of Chris’ more complicated and beautiful effects shots have been put together in Shake. These are both tools that, in their wisdom, Apple have discontinued.

Each time one or other system falls over we share a nagging dread. Mainly this is prompted by the automatic post-crash question of “do you want to inform Apple to help fix problems…” which always provokes a grimly bitter laugh. What would be the point?

Who knows, hopefully Apple will soon bring out a major upgrade to FCP X and bring it at least half a step closer to being the radical reinvention of the nature of non-linear editing that they boasted it would be when they released what instead turned out to be a souped-up edition of iMovie. That day still seems some way off though. As to Shake, the future is clearer and blacker. Apple bought it, Apple ate it. There are still rumours that it will rise again phoenix like in the guise of a new super-powered compositing tool currently codenamed Phenomenon. But this still sounds more like the plot of the next X-Men reboot, doubtlessly with a naked Michael Fassbender staring as the mysterious and deadly FCPX… Sadly what seems more likely is that the tool, once used to help Apple crowbar their way into the market, will remain condemned to gradual obsolescence now the market is less interesting to a company whose main profits come from selling telephones.

Alexander Graham Bell with a top secret mock-up of the iPhone 5.

All I know is that the digital age has ushered in an interesting conundrum. In the past most technology became outdated because it was superseded. The barge was bettered by the steam train which itself only became a relic due to the invention of a better technology. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this steam-powered Final Cut 7 I’m using, though since it’s not been updated for some years it is starting to feel the strain of dealing with brand new video formats, hence the crashes.

A true Apple Zealot would probably tell me that this is precisely why it has been hung out to dry. That FCPX’s ground-up rebuild was the only sensible way to ensure they could create a platform that would be stable for the next decade of advancements in video formats. I’m already at the edge of my technological comfort zone so to that I argument I can only shrug and mutter that be that as it may, it’s still a shame FCPX wasn’t born in better shape, most especially a shape less like that of a major player turning its back on the industry.

But hey-ho, bah and-indeed humbug. Just remember that when you watch The Bleak Old Shop Of Stuff This Christmas do remember that it was lovingly hand carved on a genuine Victorian non-linear editing platform and composited using exactly the same node-based technology that a 19th century Shake compositor would have used.

We shall never see his like again. On that you can be sure.