British Film Industry: The British Are Coming… Again

Cinema has been a major part of British culture since 1895, when William Friese Greene made his moving pictures at London's Hyde Park. Studio names like Elstree, Ealing, Gainsborough, Pinewood and Shepperton have become part of world movie lore, and blockbusters like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Batman, Harry Potter, Superman and the James Bond movies have all been filmed in the United Kingdom.

Out of Jeopardy?

Earlier this year, tax relief Sections 42 and 48, which have been in place for more than ten years to encourage producers to make films in the United Kingdom, were replaced. "The lowering of the minimum UK expenditure threshold [for foreign productions] from the proposed 40 percent to 25 percent is great news as more films will be in a position to qualify for tax relief," we were informed by John Woodward, chief executive of the UK Film Council, the country's main film agency, who sees the news as something positive. "The announcement by the Chancellor makes the UK an attractive place to make films. It will help the UK consolidate its position as the most important film industry in the world after the U.S." Pact, the UK independent producers' trade body, also welcomed the news that films costing up to £20 million can qualify for a tax benefit of 20 percent of production costs and films costing more able to get a 16 percent reduction.

Even though the old system drove a number of films abroad - like the Wachowski Brothers' V For Vendetta, which went to Berlin for most of its shooting, and even caused some productions to be pulled, like Tulip Fever, which was to be filmed at Ealing with Jude Law - last year's statistics make for uplifting reading. In 2005, there were 125 productions made in the UK, slightly down on the year before but still bringing £569,841,830 into the UK economy. This is a sizeable amount when compared with inward investment back in 2003, which stood at around £383,000,000 for 102 productions, according to figures from the Department of Trade and Industry. The news that Casino Royale, the latest James Bond film, was to be shot outside of the UK and Pinewood sent shivers down the collective spine of the British film world. Since almost all of the James Bond films since Dr. No back in 1962 were partly filmed there, this would have been a massive break with tradition. But, in the end, Eon decided to shoot some of the film at Pinewood. Also, the UK almost lost Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix to elsewhere in Europe but it was lured back to Leavesden Studios, north of London, as its studio base.

Despite a prevailing negative outlook earlier in the year, the country is still seen as a major player in world filmmaking, a sentiment expressed by Pinewood and Shepperton's Chief Executive Ivan Dunleavy: "Filmmaking is a complex business, and the UK has a real depth of understanding of those complexities."

There are some British filmmakers who see the involvement of U.S. companies here as a mixed blessing. Julian Richards, director of The Last Horror Movie (2003), who made the film on DV for £85,000 and saw it make $350,000 on DVD in the United States, feels the UK film industry needs to follow the American indie model to make it a going concern: "It's no good making a British film and then getting an American sales agent to sell it because any revenue the film makes will go straight into the American sales agent's pockets, so the British producer gets nothing."

Richards believes the lower you keep your budget (under £1,000,000), the better the chance that you'll recoup your money. He also thinks following the States' lead in its perception of genre films has meant that films like Neil Marshall's horror Dog Soldiers (2002) and Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright's zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead (2004) have done respectable business worldwide: Dog Soldiers grossed nearly £2 million in the UK alone, while Shaun of the Dead made $13 million in the U.S. and £6.5 million in the UK (not bad for a film made for £2.2 million). "Before there was a snobbish attitude in the UK towards genre films. Now that's changing because they see that there's a niche market for genre," he admits.

Producer Allan Niblo, who made 2005's British gangster film The Business, is one of those new breed of British filmmakers applying American principles of a different kind. It is the way films have been made over here up until now that has caused many of the Brit film industry's problems, in his view, Niblo says: "The biggest problem over here is that people set a company up, make a film and, 99 percent of the time, that film won't make its money back. So the company collapses and there's no sustainable business."

For Niblo, the American mainstream studio paradigm is one British filmmakers should follow. Since the beginning of the Hollywood system, studios have made a number of different films, knowing that one will be such a massive success that it will cover the cost of all the others, but, in his opinion, "British filmmakers have never been able to live by that rule." Ambitiously, it is a model Niblo is trying to follow himself.

The producer sees the presence of foreign productions as a beneficial part of UK filmmaking: "I know a lot of friends who've been trained up on those bigger budget films."

The success of low- to medium-budget British films has had a positive effect. Production company Warp Films, who made Shane Meadows's Dead Man's Shoes (2004), runs WarpX, its Sheffield-based digital film studio whose mission is to encourage and support new filmmakers. The studio is partly funded by the UK's National Lottery, which has come under fire for financing flops like Sex Lives of The Potato Men and other productions that received lottery funding but were never released. The lottery was set up back in 1994 as a way of generating funds for charities through the possibility of the British public winning money. It was agreed that the lottery would allocate a certain amount of profit to invest in British cinema. Niblo feels that some of the press criticism of the lottery is unwarranted: "There's been a lot of bad press about the British films that have survived thanks to lottery money. Part of this is down to media manipulation, as there are a lot of films getting made and not distributed, but there are some good films being partly assisted by the lottery, too."

He feels the outlook is an optimistic one: "There are more and more opportunities to make films with the equipment that's now available and new methods of making them. But more importantly, there are new ways of distributing your project and getting it seen as well, like using the Internet, which are very exciting."