Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140
- 159)
TUESDAY 6 MAY 2003
MR PETER
BLOORE, MR
CHARLES HARRIS
AND MR
DAVID CASTRO
Q140 Michael Fabricant: Using that
Coca Cola analogy, when Coca Cola first started before they produced
their massive bottling plants in Atlanta, Georgia and so on it
was not an industry but it is an industry now because it has a
flow process. You have heard me quote Michael Kuhn this afternoon
and Michael Kuhn feels very strongly that there is not a film
industry in this country because we are always selling that first
bottle of Coca Cola. What do you think could be done in order
to ensure that there really is a throughput of films, where there
really is an industry, where there is a constant flow of finance—I
am not asking about government finance or taxpayers' finance—but
a real industry like there is in Hollywood?
Mr Harris: I would like to think
that there is one answer but one of the points that I would like
to make is that it is a mistake to look for one answer. A good
industry should have a number of different places to look. We
do have a film making industry. The flow there works very well.
We are very good at making films. I am not so sure that we have
the infrastructure for training, development and distribution
and exhibition.
Mr Bloore: Because we support
new film makers, we are a registered charity and our specific
charitable aim is to do that, the thing about funding feature
films becomes even harder when you are a first time film maker
because you do not have anything that you can start to sell your
first can with. At least Gurinder had Bhaji on the Beach
and she could say, "Here is a feature film that I have already
made." For that first film maker, the reason that we are
arguing for improved terms for new film-makers is that unless
you can get that first short film and that first feature film
made your voice will never be heard.
Q141 Michael Fabricant: Gurinder
Chadha mentioned 75% of the box being kept by the multiplex. Is
that a problem you have encountered too?
Mr Castro: I think you would have
to ask the FC for their stance on some of those figures but I
do not think it is an unusual figure at all. For a first time
film maker, if you get a distributor, if you get a sales agent,
you will be jumping up and down with joy and selling the family
silver because you want to get a distributor. Unless people see
it, what is the point of you making it? This is the difficulty.
Sometimes it is the cart before the horse. Sometimes films get
made without distribution because the producer, director or financier
believes they can be made. Other times it is the other way round,
but it is not just one thing. It is more understanding of the
marketing and of everything else. We do deal with the younger
film makers. For instance, you have the astonishing First Light
scheme which is up to 18 and then you have people who go to university
or college or whatever and do whatever form of training that way.
From then on, where do they go? What do they do? In many ways,
what we do is support and nurture these film makers and encourage
them to encourage themselves and help themselves, which is why
most of the stuff we do is to do with networking so that they
can meet the industry or meet people they are going to be using
in the industry or they can talk amongst themselves and support
each other.
Q142 Michael Fabricant: Ken Russell
did not need your organisation and did not need training as such.
Ken Russell started years and years ago using comparatively expensive
8mm film stock to produce amateur films and from thereon got into
the BBC and so on. Do you not think that sometimes you can make
it so easy for young people, particularly when nowadays video
tape is virtually free, that you just do not get the sort of people
coming through who are motivated to be self-starters because they
have been pushed along all the time? They get their degrees in
media studies; they cannot get a job, surprise, surprise. Do we
not need to encourage people like the Ken Russells to be self-starters?
They are the ones who will succeed.
Mr Castro: Everyone in films is
a self-starter. It is such hard work. However, if you could somehow
wave a magic wand and make it as easy as you possibly could, it
is still going to be very hard. You had part of the answer from
the Directors' Guild. There were routes through television. There
were programmes like Omnibus and so on that he cut his
teeth on which do not exist any more. Far from being easier, it
is a lot harder.
Mr Bloore: Talent will win through
eventually but what our organisation is about is one word, which
is `opportunity'. If we can tell everybody how to fund films,
the people who have films worth funding can get them funded. If
we do not tell people how to get them funded in the first place,
they cannot get out there and do it. There will always be a few
people who are ballsy enough to get out there and raise the money
and get it made, but they might not necessarily be the best. Gurinder
said, "After Bhaji on the Beach I went through a very
lean period and I nearly left the industry." She is a film-maker
of enormous talent and she was nearly lost to the industry after
her first film so often the second or third film can be very difficult
but it means you still need to have those opportunities there
so that those individual voices can be heard. It is not always
the voice that shouts loudest that has the best message.
Q143 Mr Doran: Looking at your submission
and listening to you today, you operate almost like a trade union.
Why did you choose the charitable route as opposed to, for example,
the trade union route?
Mr Bloore: One of the main reasons
we chose to become a charity was to create differentiation between
us and other providers and associations in the industry. We really
do training most of all. We are an educational charity. Our lobbying
is very much subsidiary to our training role. We usually only
respond when asked to or on specific issues which have a direct
relationship to our beneficiaries. Otherwise, for the most part,
we just provide educational and training activities. That separates
us, say, from an organisation like PACT who do operate more like
a trade union. They negotiate with the unions about the terms
of various deals within film-making, with the actors' and directors'
unions. We do not do any of that. That is not our role. Our role
is to educate. PACT do a bit of education but they do a lot more
of the work that would be considered to be trade association work.
We cannot bind our members to follow a particular code of conduct
with a particular union in the way that PACT do aim to bind their
members. That shows a bit of a distinction between our educational
work, if you like, and some of the roles that a trade union specifically
would have.
Q144 Mr Doran: In the paper at least
you seem to offer a very high level of service to your members.
There is a whole range of advice services, training, which you
mentioned, and the lobbying as well. Tell me a little about how
you are funded. Is it purely through membership subscriptions?
Mr Bloore: Yes. Two thirds of
the money comes from membership subscriptions and one third of
the money in general terms comes from the Film Council support
that we receive. We do a series of initiatives, some of which
have individual sponsors, so we have sponsors for what we call
the nine point producer training scheme that trains people over
nine events from knowing nothing about how to fund a film to hopefully
having some clue about how to fund a film. Individual schemes
like that may well be funded by sponsors. Things like the advice
lines, the telephone lines, are provided by legal or accountancy
firms to members on our behalf, but we do not pay them. It is
work which they supply as goods in kind. Another reason we can
access that type of support is again because we are a charity.
They are giving that work to the organisation's members because
we have that charitable status. They may be more reluctant to
do it if we were not a charity.
Q145 Mr Doran: The people who come
to join your organisation are obviously people who are interested
in a career in film. Can you tell me how you link your training
in with other training providers, colleges, universities, etc?
Mr Castro: The training in the
last few years seems to have changed dramatically. This is one
of the areas that is quite difficult. Certain people do certain
types of training. There are a number of different ways you can
get trained or learn anything. Certain areas that we do do not
fit in with NVQs or any formal qualification. The word "entrepreneur"
was mentioned earlier. When you have people like Branson, who
do not have that many formal qualifications, they learn in a particular
way. We find a lot of film-makers find it very difficult to sit
down and learn by rote or by any other means. The training we
do is quite difficult to mould or meld but we are trying to do
that in order to try and further legitimise the things we do.
The things we do are of value to the film makers because film
makers go on to make good films, but they are not seen to be possibly
as legitimate as some other training. Somebody mentioned media
courses earlier. There is so much training out there at the moment.
Sometimes you cannot see why they are doing this type of training.
Q146 Mr Doran: The sort of training
that you are giving is the sort of training that the industry
should be providing but is failing to provide.
Mr Castro: The industry support
us. We get support from Richards Butler and those kind of industry
people anyway. When you say the industry should supply it, in
years past it would be a mentoring type thing or an apprenticeship.
Whether the industry should be doing it is another thing. Some
of the courses out there at the moment are very high end, very
expensive, very selective courses. Going back to football, that
means you just pluck ten good players and fast track them. What
about all the others that need to come through? How do you train
them? You need this core of people coming in in order that the
really good ones rise to the top. Otherwise, they will not get
a chance.
Q147 Mr Doran: That response begs
the question that I raised earlier with one of the other witnesses.
There are so many people who have been trained now and there just
are not jobs available for them, so are you not producing people
for a market which is not there?
Mr Harris: We are producing the
people who produce the jobs. That is the difference. The NPA fundamentally
is film-makers, producers and directors with some writers. They
are the ones who make the jobs happen. I am not sure there is
a fixed level for all the films that have been made in this country.
I do not think there is. Your question is a good one fundamentally.
By training better people to make films, you are going to raise
the bar to the number of films being made unsuccessfully and therefore
you are going to get more jobs.
Q148 Mr Doran: The other area I am
interested in is how all this is co-ordinated. We see a very collaborative
industry for one particular project, the film which is under development,
in production or whatever, but when it comes to the future of
the industry, the direction of the industry, we see very little
in the way of strategy, very little in the way of coordinated
activity. Is that something you would agree with and is it something
you have any proposals for?
Mr Bloore: In terms of training,
yes, that is something that I would say I agree with, which is
one reason that we were arguing that there should be a broadening
of the funding for training within the Film Council and that some
of the income from the IPTF levy on film production should come
down to the training of film producers and film makers. In a strategic
sense, I think it is the Film Council's job to do that over here.
They have just produced one report on training within the film
industry. It is a report that we believe has several holes. It
touched very little on our own work and the work of training film
producers and talked more about other areas of training. It is
something that we would like to try and talk to the Film Council
about and try and raise up the agenda the whole question of how
that training should lock together. For instance, the nine point
producer training plan that we do for our members has now been
franchised to an M.B.A on screen writing so that the M.B.A screenwriters
have also now been taught a bit about film production. If we could
take that a bit further and integrate so that producers know more
about what writers do and directors know more about what producers
do and so on, then the chances of getting good projects developed
I believe will go up.
Mr Castro: Can I just jump in
there. Just further on that, at the same time that all of this
training is going on, and lots and lots of other people are starting
to do it, I feel it needs to be a more cohesive training. People
need to know where they are going in the industry. The industry
needs to know where it wants the training to go and the training
providers need to know, all of them, which way it is going as
well. I hope that there will be a collective perception of where
the training should go and an open forum in order for everyone
to be included in that.
Mr Bloore: There should be a ladder
of opportunity in effect and at the moment the hole in that ladder,
the gap in the ladder, is after people have left the film schools
and universities and before they get that first film made. To
me that seems to be where the hole is and that is the bit that
we try to fill, but we are only a very small organisation and
we do not have the resources or the money to be able to fill it
in a bigger way. I think the Film Council should be looking harder
at how to fill that particular gap.
Q149 Derek Wyatt: In another life
I was a board director at William Heinemann and a publishing director
of one of the divisions. For our young writers who could not get
their first book published, who might have written two, three
or four novels but still could not get them published, we went
to our main distributor, who was WH Smith, and in the end with
them we got the first Novels Week and then in that week only there
were six that were put out and, of those six, four of them then
became best sellers, which was curious, it does not happen, although
by and large most of them do go on. So if the Odeon and UPI are
the killers here, if it is the distributors who have the films,
as it were, by the balls, who has been to see them to say "Why
don't you do that? Why don't you do a best 10-minute shorts or
help us create a talent showcase for six directors first time
round"? It seems to me that no-one is actually looking at
the marketing of the talent.
Mr Bloore: There is a little bit
of work being done by a charity called the First Film Foundation.
Q150 Derek Wyatt: That is a charity.
Mr Bloore: Yes, exactly, but they
do showcasing of films, short films and some features, mainly
short films, and they have a deal with UCI to be able to show
them in a few of their cinemas. It is nowhere as deep in the industry
or as wide across the country as it could be. I think it is a
very good idea. As you say, it is a charity that is having to
do this work. The First Film Foundation is taking it on their
shoulders to do it because the industry is not doing it.
Mr Castro: For instance, Curzon
in Soho are extremely good at supporting short films, as are BAFTA,
as are Kodak. Kodak do two short film showcases a year. There
are very limited places to show those short films. Occasionally
you will get—
Q151 Derek Wyatt: That is not much
help if you are in Glasgow or Truro.
Mr Castro: No, but occasionally
there are one-offs where a film producer or director has actually
pummelled on someone's door for so long that they basically give
in and say "Okay, you can show it in front of X, Y and Z
feature", but that really is down as a one-off and there
is no strategy there.
Mr Bloore: I managed to persuade
Warner Brothers to show my short film in front of Perfect Murder,
a Michael Douglas movie, in six or seven cinemas as it went around
the country and my short film would go on just in front of that
feature. That does happen but, unfortunately, that is about as
far as exhibitors and distributors will actually go towards the
model that you are talking about.
Q152 Derek Wyatt: You had to give
it away?
Mr Bloore: Yes. I received not
a penny of income for it. In fact, I had to produce all of the
prints and, indeed, I even took the prints to the cinemas myself
in the back of the car.
Mr Harris: There is one other
initiative, again not very joined-up, a very sporadic initiative.
For example, I think both Warner and Odeon at various times have
been persuaded by someone in the bfi to have one screen
that is maybe on a Tuesday evening used for slightly different
films.
Q153 Derek Wyatt: Let me come to
that idea. We have got these regional film councils and we have
got you lot, no disrespect, but there are lots of you's it seems
to me. The film industry seems to have too much of you's and me's.
As far as I can understand it, the regional film councils have
never asked the local authorities to put in their planning legislation
that when a multiplex arrives, one of the screens should be dedicated
to European film only. It seems to me such a small initiative
like that would compel the distributor and then they are stuffed.
Unless we change the way film is distributed, which I do not think
we can politically, we do not own the cinemas—We could ask
the planning legislation to change. It seems to me that no-one
is really thinking of how to get British films or European films
in front of British audiences.
Mr Bloore: Certainly we would
not stand in your way if you did try and do that.
Q154 Derek Wyatt: In a sense if we
were not having this investigation none of these things would
come out. We are paying public money for these film councils out
of taxpayers' money, so why are they not running and shouting
and kicking?
Mr Castro: The other thing on
top of that is films being broadcast on TV, British films. We
were talking earlier about marketing and distribution and you
have got to engender that people want it. In the same way when
Amelie broke over here or Crouching Tiger or any
of those things, there was not an appetite but now there is. You
might see a foreign film and go, "I was okay on two out of
three, I will go to this one as well", but that will not
happen unless the appetite is there, and you are only going to
stimulate the appetite through the box in the corner and alternatives,
like you were saying before, and you can then go to cinemas and
see them. I think people need to see more indigenous films on
TV.
Q155 Derek Wyatt: You do not think
it is because culturally we can accept subsidising the swimming
pool or subsidising a theatre but we cannot contemplate subsidising
film. It is a cultural thing in our communities that it is impossible
to get local authorities to do that because they think film is
commercial.
Mr Bloore: I think it is because
whether people like or dislike a film is ultimately subjective.
The problem is that if a film gets distributed and the papers
or even maybe the local MP does not like the particular film then
he will complain that the local authority is in some way subsidising
or aiding the release of that particular film. The big difference
between the swimming pools and the films analogy is that whilst
we agree that films in general are worthy of support, it becomes
a lot harder when you are talking about individual films. A wider
initiative, like making a screen available, is a better one because
it is diluting away from backing an individual project and goes
towards backing cinemas as a whole.
Q156 Derek Wyatt: I was not thinking
that local authorities should sponsor film but what they could
do is maybe subsidise the actual theatrical experience of going
to the cinema. If you look at lots of towns, those under 40,000
do not have a cinema, they do not have a theatre, they do not
have a museum, there is a cultural deficit. We all think film
is a very good thing, and theatre and museums. How do you decrease
that deficit? Who is doing that thinking, that is what I am struggling
to understand really?
Mr Harris: The word "marketing"
has been mentioned a few times here and it is important. In distribution
we talk about P&A spend, the prints and advertising, and the
`A' bit is extremely important. We are hoping we can reduce the
`P' bit through digital distribution. It starts at the beginning,
as Gurinder was saying, you have to start thinking in terms of
something you know there is an audience for. I have just finished
a film and we have the problem that we know there is an audience,
every time we show it in London it sells out, but persuading distributors
to do that and to put their muscle into actually getting that
to the audience through advertising is a whole other ball game.
It is a new process of creation and it is as hard as making the
film in the first place.
Q157 Ms Shipley: I am interested
in what my colleague, Derek Wyatt, was saying. My Stourbridge
constituency has no cinema. It used to have but now it has been
converted into things like supermarkets. It has no theatre. Yet,
as a West Midlands town it has the highest number of artists living
there receiving grants than anywhere else in the West Midlands.
It would be described, according to my colleague's criteria, as
a cultural desert, and it certainly is in terms of theatre and
cinema. I am quite interested in this idea of planning as a way
forward and I think it is an innovative idea. I support you, Derek.
I am not sure the case has been made so I am the devil's advocate
here. Desirable, yes, but you used the word "vital".
Why is it vital? You kind of just said it. You made the statement
it is vital but you did not really back it up.
Mr Bloore: Yes, because it is
part of our mission as a charity that that is part of our belief,
that was why I put it in front of you in such bald terms. It is
really a question of access to that diverse range of films because
all the people all over the country with different cultural and
racial backgrounds have different experiences of life, the way
they see life. At the moment the vast majority of experiences
they receive in the cinema come from American films. The control
of American films over the distribution and exhibition system
is so powerful that a film that is not taking very much at various
screens will stay on them for a long period of time and will prevent
other smaller films getting on. What I am talking about is that
if we only see American films then in the end we may end up becoming,
to some degree, American. What I am promoting and what I believe
is that it is valuable for our culture that all of the different
strands of the people and the races that make up our British culture
be reflected in the films they have the opportunity to see in
the cinema.
Q158 Ms Shipley: That is a good response.
Just a bit of confession time, like my colleague. In a previous
existence I used to be a writer. I decided to make a book happen
and when publishers turned me down I still decided to make a book
happen and, indeed, the book happened and 17 more followed. If
it had not happened, because I had a particular idea I wanted
to convey, I would have decided "Well, maybe I am approaching
the wrong market for this particular idea, I will find another
way of getting this idea out to the public". Given the fact
that we have a very large number of degree level training initiatives
producing large numbers of people who are not getting jobs, is
not the whole thing skewed and if you are a good person with good
ideas and enough oomph to make a multi-million pound project,
you are going to make it happen anyway?
Mr Harris: For me the problem
is you might make it happen but will the effort of having to fight
through all the miasma of the problems and all of that actually
make it happen in the best possible way. Yes, you could do but
you could spend 15 years and have made so many backtrackings and
changes that the whole heart of the project goes out of it. It
is true probably—it may or may not even be true—that
just because you have got enough oomph you will get it to happen.
American movies tend to push that idea that you can always have
your dream, and I am not sure it is necessarily true you can,
but even if you can it will not necessarily be in the best possible
form by the time it has got there and it will not necessarily
have the support. I see a lot of people who are pushing very hard
to make their film but if you are doing it in the mainstream you
have got an enormous amount of infrastructure support, you have
got people looking at your script, all sorts of other things going
on that are enriching the mix because it is a collaborative process,
unlike a book maybe. It needs a lot of other things in that pie
to make it work.
Mr Castro: If you do have this
entrepreneur, or whatever you want to call them, gifted film-maker
or something, they have still got to go and play with other people,
they have got to know where to go and how to get there. It is
just a question of how difficult you want to make it for them.
We are not looking for hand-outs, we are not looking for a nanny
culture, all we are doing is supporting people who, for the most
part, are those people but they just need to be pointed in certain
directions at certain times.
Q159 Ms Shipley: Stourbridge is absolutely
right for a little cinema, "little" being the word,
along the lines of Clapham picture house, the big names will go
there, the Harry Potters and everything else, but will
make space for other things. I am going to be writing to Dudley
Council saying "What about these multi-screen big ones that
you have got, can you do something about the planning initiative?"
Where would someone like me go who wants to see a little cinema
in my town, which I think my constituents would love?
Mr Castro: Where would you go?
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