Examination of Witnesses (Questions 400
- 403)
TUESDAY 10 JUNE 2003
MR FRANÇOIS
IVERNEL, MR
CAMERON MCCRACKEN,
MR CHRIS
AUTY, MR
ALLON REICH
AND MR
ANDREW MACDONALD
Q400 John Thurso: Would you accept
those three criteria as well?
Mr Auty: The three being?
Q401 John Thurso: The three being
international finance, distribution and box office appeal.
Mr Auty: I think there is no question
that the situation is improving but I think there is an awfully
long way to go. One of the most frustrating paradoxes of the movie
business—and this is not just in Britain—is that success
and size of budget tend to correlate with each other, and this
has been demonstrated several times by statisticians trawling
through the last 40 years of cinema history. Clearly, the British
film economy is not in a position to be financing slates of films
with budgets of over £100 million. It raises a very interesting
and perplexing issue, on which I have a completely open mind,
as to whether in fact (and this would be a very radical and, perhaps,
self-defeating thing to do) only low-budget films for new entrants
should be funded, using any form of public finance and viewed
purely as a cultural R&D activity. Then occasionally you might
have a success but you would certainly not bank on it. At the
present time it seems to me there are two concerns running in
parallel: one is that public funding should be demonstrably, in
some sense, commercial, and the other is that it should deliver
cultural benefit including reflecting the multiculturalism of
Britain today, for example. Those two intentions do not always
sit easily with each other. We have, for example, made two films,
because we had an obligation under the franchise agreement, specifically
for children; one was A Christmas Carol and one was an
Imax movie called Bugs, which has just opened. What we
found, and I should have known this before, is that that is a
marketplace which is enormously dominated by, particularly, Disney
and it is an extremely difficult market in which to deliver both
the cultural result and the commercial result. I am sorry, this
is a rather loose answer to your question but I think the answer
is it depends which measure you want to use. If there is a cultural
argument as well as a commercial argument then I think there has
been very significant progress.
Q402 John Thurso: If you like, there
are two ways in which the public purse can support something.
One is by giving a tax break such as Section 48, Section 42, which
can be given over a long time period but is open to anybody who
fills the criteria. That, clearly, works to a commercial side
and could be seen as part of an inward investment approach that
the DTI might be doing for any industry. The other is the specific
granting of public funds via the Lottery to achieve a specific
purpose. Would it be fair to say that one of the purposes of the
money granted to the three of you was pump-priming in the sense
that that is money that has gone in to enable you to get over
the difficult period of establishing yourselves, and that one
can therefore look forward to a time when your companies would
be self-sufficient and not receive money—which, of course,
would mean you had to be commercial to a pretty great degree—or
are we really saying that if we actually want to have that cultural
benefit we are going to have to accept that year in, year out
for ever more companies like yours will need financial support?
Mr Auty: Whether they are companies
like ours or individual film projects, my personal view is that
at the lower end of the budget range (by which I mean films under,
let us say, £4 or £5 million, such as Bend it Like
Beckham which has been a runaway success, by the way) they
will need on-going and continuous cultural support, otherwise
market forces will not drive that activity. One hit, a Bend
it Like Beckham, does not of itself mean that four or five
low-budget films that are truly set in what I would call a recognisably
modern Britain will be made as a result.
Q403 John Thurso: Are you saying
that the British film industry, as opposed to the British facilities,
the commercial side, is actually, without continuous public finance,
a bit of a chimera? It is just a dream?
Mr Auty: Probably yes, but the
interesting issue would be the quantum of support that is required.
Mr McCracken: Also, to expand
it slightly, it is not simply the British film industry, I think
the European film industry without national intervention would
disappear, just because the market forces of Hollywood and the
American system would carry it away.
Chairman: Thank you very much, gentlemen.
Very much appreciated.
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