Written evidence submitted by Anonymous
The excellence of British storytelling is admired worldwide. Across every role – from screenwriter to director to actor to producer, to our amazingly hard working, professional and creative crews – the UK is perceived, for good reason, as one of the very best countries for high quality film and TV destinations. Beyond the quality, there is also the commercial potential of British output. I will speak mainly as an independent film producer since this is very much the focus of my company. Anecdotally, European counterparts have told me that they loved working on co-productions because the quality of the writing and directing was fantastic, that access to world renowned Anglo Saxon actors reached a much wider audience and that on the whole, the handful of British co-productions they had been involved in had been more lucrative than all their local productions combined.
I would separate the UK in two categories – on one hand, the Above-The-Line attractiveness of the UK, on the other hand the Below-The Line attractiveness of the UK. These are two separate considerations. Whilst I can absolutely see why the latter is of great interest to US studios and streamers in search of attractive tax credit, top of the range crews and actors, and fantastic facilities; as a UK independent producer, I do not look at the UK as an attractive place to shoot my British projects: crews are expensive because of the inflation caused by US studios and streamers and the explosion of high end TV, crews have very limited availability and there is a crucial lack of national and regional financial support for British films.
On the other hand, my Above-The-Line UK projects are very attractive to co-producing partners who have better funded national and regional bodies, and who see both the creative quality and the commercial potential of working on a British film.
I don’t see how shooting independent British films in the UK is sustainable in the long run. It is too expensive, too hard to find crews and there are too few funding incentives and support in the UK to make it a viable option.
There are no benefits in my mind for the British independent film sector, it’s been an accelerator of my not looking at the UK as a shooting hub.
I am constantly solicited by international financiers, sales agents and distributors for material – so there is a demand for the right kind of films. The issue with a lot of co-production opportunities is that bringing IP and a creative team to the table is not enough. Historically, the framework for co-production is that each co-producer’s share of the IP and the backend of a film is proportional to how much financing they bring to the table. With vastly depleted sources of financing in the UK, both public and private, we end up in situations where we have nurtured the talent, we have developed the project, often over many years, and we end up with a share of the project that does not reflect this because we are unable to bring the kind of national, regional and private funding that coproducers can.
There is not sufficient funding from the BFI considering the UK is the 6th economy in the world. It helps finance 11 projects a year, the vast majority of which are first features. Unless a talent is geared towards working within the US system (which means a loss for the UK cultural landscape), how does one make a second or third feature? Again, in comparison with our counterparts in Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, a tax credit alone is not sufficient to compete as an independent film environment, the UK becomes a production services economy. And as we’ve seen with the US strikes, this leaves us vulnerable to the whims of our American masters without a local vibrant independent film industry to pick up the pieces.
Not enough is done to help audiences appreciate and support more local fare.
Less reliance on the UK being a production services hub. It feels as though we’ve just given up on independent film, that we’re saying it’s a dying breed so why try? I made a first feature 7 years ago – it is still making money. It’s a success story. There ARE success stories. Film is not dead. People want to watch movies, people love good stories, that hasn’t changed. There’s a feeling of exhaustion from producers of my generation, of not having had the kind of production company success story that previous generations have had. I don’t believe it’s from a lack of talent, or hard work, or great taste, or tenacity, or ingenuity, or grit. A lot of producers have gone to be hired to produce HETV and films for other, “older”, more established production companies, because that’s the only way to make an actual living. Being a gun for hire, not owning the IP, not controlling it, not generating it. There is a crucial lack of support – in terms of development, production, business – for independent producers, so we’re going to end up in a situation where it’s not the best ones who make it, but rather the ones who are independently wealthy. So we can perpetuate the myth of the gentleman producer – which is a myth that exists only in the UK and not across the pond.