Examination of Witnesses (Questions 348
- 359)
TUESDAY 20 MAY 2003
MS JANE
CUSSONS, MS
SARAH CURTIS,
MS SALLY
HIBBIN, MS
BARBARA BENEDEK
AND MS
JOY CHAMBERLAIN
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed,
I will ask Frank Doran to start the questioning.
Q348 Mr Doran: I have read your submission
and there are a number of interesting points that you make, but
it does not seem to me that you distinguish women in film from
other parts of the industry. Can you say a little bit about what
makes film-making different and why there should be more influence
from women in film?
Ms Benedek: I would start by saying
that the limited research that exists and that we have done to
date shows that there are more women within the television industry
than there are within the film industry, possibly because television
has more employment, is less freelance. Many of my colleagues
who work in the film industry can contribute more. Secondly, we
feel that women particularly in the creative areas should be better
represented than they are.
Q349 Mr Doran: Let's move back a
bit. One of the areas that we have looked at is the way in which
training is done in the industry. Is that an area that you have
looked at?
Ms Cussons: Yes, it is. I know
that we have been in continual touch with Skillset and we work
quite closely with the Film Council because obviously there are
certain areas which we have identified where there are significant
gender imbalances, particularly in the technical grades in directing
and screen writing, and I know that they try and ensure that they
have a good proportion of gender balance within the courses, but
we believe that for the technical grades certainly girls need
more encouragement in schools. I recently did a schools careers
advisory day which I wanted to do to find out if this was true,
and it does seem to me that a lot could be done at school level
with careers advisory officers. A lot of them came up to me and
they had no idea that girls could do things like camera, sound,
lighting, they were not considered options. I think it would be
really helpful if this could be a focus, whether it is for government
or through the Film Council or Skillset, that they could focus
to encourage more women to come into that area. The second one
that concerns us is work returners, which is a big issue, women
stopping to have children and then wanting to come back. There
is a lot of advanced technology and they find it very difficult
to retrain. They find childcare a problem and I think they find
it very difficult to get back into the industry after stopping
to have a family, and if they do not come back you lose a huge
powerful part of the workforce, a great creative loss, with a
lack of a voice from the woman.
Q350 Mr Doran: Is that not something
to do with the nature of the industry? We have recently had introduced
new maternity rights, for example, which will affect every female
employee, but the industry is basically freelance, is it not?
Ms Benedek: Yes it is and that
is a problem. That is one which perhaps Sarah might like to answer.
Ms Curtis: My view about why there
is such an imbalance in the technical grades is two-fold but it
is partly related to the fact that there are no role models for
women working in technical grades in the industry. The statistics
on the number of female DPs, or any member of a camera team or
any member of the grip team, which is the support team for the
camera team, all of those more technical grades, sound recordists,
you simply do not find women there. I have been producing films
for 14 years and in that time I have had three children and done
10 films. In that time I have seen a lot of very good women. For
example, there is someone we call a boom swinger, who is the second
person on the sound team, and I was told by the sound recordist
who worked with her that she was the best boom swinger he had
ever worked with. She had a child and disappeared from the industry
because it is not just not possible as it stands at the moment
for most women to have children and carry on working on a film.
It is just not possible. In all the time I have been producing
the only person who has been able to have their children on location
is me and that is because I have got sufficient power to make
it work that way for me because I am the producer. What I would
like to see is a situation in which more women can have the opportunity
to have children and carry on working in the film industry. If
that can happen you will have more women making their way through
to the top grades because, for example, to be a Head of Department
it can take 12 to 15 years of apprenticeship. There are four separate
stages and for each stage it is accepted you are going to spend
three or four years. For men it is no problem and they are happy
to become a Head of Department when they are 35 because they have
then got 20 or 30 years of useful employment ahead of them. For
a women who does not get there until she is 35 it probably means
she has had to made some very tough decisions along the way. I
think that is a major contributing factor—the fact that
women cannot make the sacrifices that they are currently required
to make to rise to the top of their technical grades.
Q351 Mr Doran: You sound as though
you are a fairly good role model but as a producer you are not
in the grades you are mainly concerned about. In a freelance industry
how can you make it attractive for the employers? What proposals
have you put to them?
Ms Cussons: Sarah did a very useful
exercise this morning about the idea of perhaps having childcare
facilities available on films.
Ms Curtis: I am the employer so
essentially it rests with me, except I have to be forced to do
it, which sounds ridiculous but I am accountable for every single
penny that is spent on a film and every single penny is pre-allocated
and the people who are financing my films are not going to agree
to me having a 1% levy on their budget to provide childcare for
the women on the film that I know need it. I am not sure how it
is administered but I think the only way is a percentage of the
budget which is ring-fenced and made available to those women
that need it.
Q352 Mr Doran: Who would be responsible
for that? Would you expect government to introduce a regulation?
Ms Hibbin: When we do a film that
has Film Council money in it, we sign off on the equal opportunities
policy that we operate as an equal opportunities employer, and
in many ways we do actually. I think women probably do give preference
to other women and to people from ethnic minority backgrounds,
but in public bodies there are far more demands on equal opportunities
employers than there are in the film industry. For instance, there
is often a duty to have to publicly advertise a job. That would
be a non-starter. You could not possibly for 60 jobs of four weeks'
duration publicly advertise, you would get 2,000 replies, but
it seems to me there ought to be some sort of discussion in the
film industry, perhaps led by the Film Council, to look at working
conditions so that women with children do get to work, and that
would create our own equal opportunities policy which then the
Film Council is watchdog of in the way that they are at the moment,
if you see what I mean. It seems to me it needs to be much more
specifically tailored for the film industry.
Q353 Mr Doran: Appearing before the
Committee means that people in the industry will be able to hear
what you think and your views. Obviously it is important if you
can get on the record some positive ideas about the way forward.
You have mentioned one or two. Here is your opportunity.
Ms Benedek: I would like to add
that within the Film Council it is not at all clear that they
have done a needs audit for freelance women. It is a freelance
industry but the focus of the Film Council, quite rightly, has
been on creating a sustainable industry and there is a real focus
now on training and on diversity and there is a feeling within
the Film Council, and more generally, that gender has not been
or is not a focus. We feel that in all the auditing that is being
done and the monitoring that is being done and the research that
is being done, gender must also be a focus and out of the research
it is often possible to come up with strategies. There is some
very interesting American research that has been done both on
films and on television by Professor Martha Lauzen at San Diego
State University that shows that the more women creatives or executive
producers you have, the more women you have on screen and behind
the camera, so there is a snowballing effect. There are no good
figures on the British film industry, there are not very good
figures on the television industry either, so there is a number
of things the Film Council can do with the funding they get from
government and other bodies, like Pact and Skillset, and there
seems to be a willingness to do it.
Q354 Mr Doran: Have you spoken to
the Film Council about this?
Ms Cussons: Yes, we have. There
is a perception that gender is a ticked box, that we are on to
other areas of diversity now, which obviously need attention also,
but although you might walk into the offices and the administration
departments of film and media companies and see lots of women,
that is usually the secretarial/administration roles. There are
still significant problems out there and women are still hampered
in getting on in certain areas throughout the entire industry,
and it is not something that has been achieved. There is no assessment,
there are no records, there are no figures of where we are now.
We sent into you a report that we commissioned recently and obviously
we are a charity and we do not have great funds available for
this, but we were aware that there is very little research available
on where we are now. There is a small proportion done in the Skillset
Census every year but that is just about all and it would be really
helpful if the Film Council could continue to include gender in
their diversity programme so that it is monitored and we can see
where we need to help. We know there are areas like directing.
The bfi at the end of last year told us that 350 films
were made in the UK in the preceding two years, eight were directed
by women, which is not a very good figure. We have set up a scheme
to try and address this problem but we cannot do this on our own
and we do need help. We need this to be recognised throughout
the industry that there are huge problems and if you do not allow
the women through you will not get a diverse and interesting reflection
of the culture of British society in our films.
Q355 Mr Bryant: Incidentally, congratulations,
you represent quite a lot of really good things that many of us
will have seen—Land of Freedom, Mrs Brown,
A Very British Coup, a whole series of different things.
It is good, but I guess that is not known to the vast majority
of people in Britain that there are women involved in the film
industry at all because every time you see representatives of
the film industry it always seems to be men and that is what has
come before us for the most part in this Committee. I have been
trying to think through, and I may have this wrong, Britain has
probably had more women winning Oscars, if you leave out directors,
than men—from Wendy Hiller through to—
Ms Cussons: It is probably true
in acting.
Q356 Mr Bryant: Yes, that is partly
what made me think. Glenda Jackson, Vanessa Redgrave, Judy Dench,
Emma Thompson (but not for acting, for writing) and also I think
the designer of Elizabeth who has designed quite a lot
of other films won an Oscar for costumes.
Ms Hibbin: And the girls on costume
and make up for the Mike Lee film recently.
Q357 Mr Bryant: I just wonder what
we could do to build on that because that is quite a body of enormously
successful people.
Ms Hibbin: But they are all in
these grades that women take, they are all in acting, et cetera.
There a joke that goes round the film industry which says that
if a job involves sitting down women do it, if it involves standing
up, men do it. It is very clearly that divide. All those fantastic
awards that you have said are about people who largely sit down
in jobs, they are in costume, design, the areas that women get
into. It is not at the level of directing or of writing or of
camera or of sound or of gripping, even gaffing, electrical, whatever,
it is just not in those territories.
Q358 Mr Bryant: And special effects?
Ms Cussons: Just about the same—none.
Q359 Mr Bryant: Is that because it
is a boys thing to do?
Ms Cussons: Yes, I think it is
looked on as a boys thing. The one thing that really concerns
us is the directing and the writing because Sarah and Sally are
both hugely experienced and successful producers and they are
right at the top of their field, but the director is the one that
is out there and the director is the one that is reflecting it
onto the screen and it will be essentially the director's vision.
If it is always a male vision then you will not have a film that
can speak with a woman's voice.
Ms Benedek: There are some statistics
from America which show that when there is at least one woman
in the senior creative positions the films do better at the box
office, aside from the big weapons films, but they do speak to
an audience which is a cinema going audience.
Ms Chamberlain: I would like to
say something further about training because you were asking what
positive things we could suggest. I am in the business of training
the next generation of directors and cinematographers and at the
National Film and Television School we are very concerned to try
and promote diversity as much as possible. I went back over the
last ten years to look at our figures and we are actually doing
much better than the industry as a whole but it is still not that
great. Basically the number of applications from women applying
to do directing over the last ten years has remained fairly steady,
it is about 30% of the applications to the directing department
come from women and we take in between 40 and 50%. With cinematography
it is about 21 to 25% of the applications came from women ten
years ago and that is now up to 30%, so that has been a growth
area. In terms of the intake, that has gone from 30 to 35%. I
do not know how much you know about the film school, but we take
people after they have already made a start, so they have to have
made a film directly or worked on films before they come to the
school and they are usually in their mid-20s by the time they
come and when they graduate they do go straight into the industry
and we have a very good record. All those women who have graduated
in the last six years are all working at the moment. Most of them
are working in television, they tend to work on things like Hollyoaks,
but we have had two who have had funding, one from the Film Council
to make a feature film and she only graduated three years ago.
There are the women out there and they are all extremely talented
and once they get out into the industry and start work they get
hired again and again. What we are finding is that we have hit
a level now where we are not really getting more women applying
and my feeling about this is that we are struggling to find education
and training for the people before they come to our school. A
lot of the courses that people go on are media studies courses
which are pretty useless, but a lot of the women have got their
start by going on regional training schemes, working as assistants
to other people, doing short courses here and there. What I have
found when tracking through the applicants is that the ones that
have been successful are the ones who have had the most technical
training before they come and that includes the directors as well.
I think that gives them more of an all round experience and it
also gives them much more confidence in terms of working with
their careers and things. I think it is important to start way
back at secondary school and encourage women to do computer courses
and to do photography courses. I am getting women students who
know much more about computers than I do although that seems to
be changing a little bit at the moment, so they are coming in
and they already now how to edit their films on computers and
some of them are interested in doing special effects. There is
that level before they come, but then there is also that level
afterwards because they can go in and they can work on Hollyoaks
and Casualty and things like that, but to make that leap
up to directing feature films is the real problem and it is something
that is really across the industry, not just women, but since
the industry has become virtually freelance we have lost those
benefits that we used to have from the great days of the BBC and
Play for Today. Most of the great British film directors
did their apprenticeship with the BBC doing Play for Today
and one-off dramas and we need to find more of those slots to
give women experience. The feeling seems to be that the industry
is willing to take a chance with men based on what they think
their potential is, but women actually have to have proved themselves,
you are taken on what you have done, there is less willingness
to take risks.
Ms Curtis: The female director
is a relatively rare species. The majority of male executives
do not come across one very often and that is the problem. Part
of the problem with female directors is they do not see other
female directors out there doing it.
|
