Oral evidence

Taken before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee on Tuesday 6 May 2003

Members present:

Mr Gerald Kaufman, in the Chair
Mr Chris Bryant
Mr Frank Doran
Michael Fabricant
Mr Adrian Flook
Alan Keen
Rosemary McKenna
Ms Debra Shipley
John Thurso
Derek Wyatt

In the absence of the Chairman, Alan Keen was called to the Chair

__________

Memorandum submitted by the Directors' Guild of Great Britain

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: MS PAT TRUEMAN, Chief Executive, MR JOHN HOUGH, Member, MR ANDI REISS, Member, Directors' Guild of Great Britain; MR JEFF ALLEN, Managing Director, and MR HUGH WHITTAKER, Director, Panavision UK, examined.

Q76  Alan Keen: Good afternoon, everyone. Can I, first of all, make the Chairman's apologies. He is in Foreign Office questions and will be along as soon as he can. Sometimes the people who come before us are delighted if Gerald is not here because he is a hard taskmaster, but we are certainly not happy when he is not and I am sure he will be along before you have finished. Is somebody wanting to make an opening statement?

Ms Trueman: I am the chief executive of the Directors' Guild of Great Britain. We have attempted to look at the questions you sent to us. One of the things we really want to highlight is obviously, because of who we are, the role of the director in film making process. We do have concerns that that role has been somewhat eroded and diminished over the last 15/20 years with the rise of the producer, and we are hoping to focus you a little more in our direction. Particularly we would like to see the director in the film business much more at the centre of things, much more the person that also can be partly controlling the budget. The director, after all, is the person that has the big idea more frequently than not. We would also like to highlight the role of training within this. We believe there has not been enough investment in training and we are very concerned that when our current crop of senior, well-established film directors moves aside, we simply do not have enough younger, well-trained film makers ready to leap in and take up the challenges. Obviously one of the other things we will be highlighting with our evidence this afternoon is the role of distribution and how that affects films in this country, and how we deal with the Goliath of Hollywood and America and American money.

Q77  Alan Keen: Could you explain the role of the director now? We know what directors do but you complained that the director is not at the top. Could you explain how it fits in now, and how you would like to see that change?

Ms Trueman: Yes. When a film is being planned the director is often not the first person to be brought in. They are often brought in after the producers and the money people have been doing their job for quite some time, and then the director is frequently hired to do a movie. Should a director want to get their own film off the ground, they encounter nothing but a series of problems and we have asked Andi Reiss to join us today because Andi is a young film maker and is currently encountering a whole series of problems, and I would like to hand over to him to take over this role as he is current practitioner.

Mr Reiss: Thank you, and thank you to the Committee for giving me the opportunity to speak this afternoon. As Pat said, it is very difficult when you want to try and do something that you have a passion for, and being in the creative arts no one goes into this to make a lot of money - they go into it to try and do what they feel they can provide creatively. Having done numerous things within multi-media and commercials for a while, I had a burning passion to do a film called "Cargo" which is about asylum seekers; it is not begging any argument either way but it presents a challenging debate, and I was very keen to make this film, and literally had a huge amount of enthusiasm and support from private contacts within the business, within the industry, for getting a low budget film off the ground. Jeff Allen and Panavision were very supportive initially and within the industry it was fine, but when it came to trying to find public money it became nigh-on impossible. I think the reason I found it impossible was that I am not dealing with a Spielberg movie, I am not dealing with an episode of East Enders and I am not dealing with a reality TV programme; I am dealing with something that is specifically relevant to a British audience at the moment. It is topical, political and challenging and good drama. I could not get any money for it because I was a first-time director and there was not, as far as public funding is concerned, anywhere to go, myself, individually, to go and get money. My producer could, etc, etc, but that was even thwarted at the first furlong as well because the BBC, for example, already have a certain amount of money put aside for a couple of films based around that topic, Stephen Frears' film Dirty British Things and Michael Winterbottom's film In this World, and so they said "No", but they did say, "Come back once you have made the film and we will have a look at it". And, indeed, we have made a rough cut and they have come back and said, "This is absolutely fantastic; come back to us when you have finished it", and I am now looking for an extra 30-40 peanuts type of money to finish this film, which is totally broadcastable if it was given that amount of money to get there. This is all grist to the mill and it happens all the time. Everything is very tough at this point in time but it is very disconcerting when you are trying to do something which you feel is relevant and poignant and then you get a letter back from the BBC or Channel 4 or Channel 5 and they give you a bland answer and they say, "Well, it is not within our remit to schedule these things", and you look down the listings and there are six gardening programmes, two chef programmes and a programme about baldness, and you just think there should be a reason for this film to be there, and the reason why it is not is because they have not put any money into it. Through bitter and volatile experience this has been a lot of work; it has been six months of continual hard slog; and I just wish that certainly the publically funded broadcasters, ie the BBC, should be obliged to have specific funds for directors and/or writers, not just producers, to come into. As far as the cinema is concerned and the Film Council, it is premature to judge anything about what they have done so far and there are two very important funds out there, but both of them, including the new Cinema Fund, are really aimed towards producers and producers inherently are there to make money and therefore to generate something else, and they only, as Pat said, very often bring in a director and/or a writer once they have decided upon what they want to do and how much money they have to spend, and it would be very nice to have a wing of a publically funded broadcaster who gives what happened 25/30 years ago to the likes of Michael Leigh, who would not be the director he is and the British export he is unless he had four or five years of good, ground BBC training.

Q78  Alan Keen: Thank you very much. It might be good if Jeff Allen filled in the gap that Andy left before I call on colleagues to ask questions.

Mr Allen: We represent a slightly different element of the industry. We represent the facilities companies that go to supply film makers with everything from cameras, lighting equipment, studio space, post production, etc. We also had some similar problems in that arena that Pat has already alluded to in terms of training; we think the Film Council have done a good job as far as they can go thus far but we think there are certain elements within the industry that are being neglected. There does not seem to be any kind of funding or remit for anybody beyond the age of 25 in terms of vocational training, for instance. The Skill Set say that they just do not have the funding for that and they are aware of the problem but cannot really do anything about it. We being an international company in terms of our reach, like some of the companies we compete against, see the contrast between the industry here in the United Kingdom and the industry as we see it developing in other countries such as Australia, Prague, South Africa and Canada, where they have either the benefit of lower salaries or lower currencies that help them, or in the case of Canada and Australia and Ireland, where they have much better tax incentives overall and a much more stable framework in attracting money into the country.

Q79  Derek Wyatt: How do you mean, "more stable"?

Mr Allen: One of the things that is important in terms of certainly framing tax incentives is that there is an element of continuity to them because already we are hearing that obviously one of the tax breaks is up for renewal or possible discussion for 2005. Now, that may seem like some time off but a film could take one or two years, maybe three sometimes in gestation to get to where they finally shoot, and people need to have some element of continuity when planning for that. Likewise us as companies invest a huge amount of money in capital equipment that we may take 5-7 years to get a payback on. If suddenly there is a tax incentive that we get indirectly that is now taken away, that could jeopardise that investment we make into capital infrastructure, and likewise the jobs of the people that we full-time employ. There is a big difference for the facilities companies by and large because they employ people full-time as PAYE and not as freelance people. So any shifts like that can fundamentally change the way we operate, and that is one of the things we are mindful of with these kind of changes. Also, as I said, we are acutely aware of the competition that is coming for the future as well from other territories. Right now there is a studio complex, for instance, being built in Spain just outside of Alicante to challenge London directly. Within that facility they are building a centre of excellence for training for their workforce, so they are thinking about it right from day one when they are building and designing the studio. We do not have anything comparable to that within the United Kingdom at present. There are plans possibly of doing something at Leavesden Studio, but nothing that currently exists so there is a big yawning gap if you compare us just to Spain, say.

Chairman: Thank you very much.

Q80  Michael Fabricant: Michael Kuhn said last week that he thought we were a bit of a cottage industry. Would you agree with that?

Mr Allen: No, I do not agree.

Q81  Michael Fabricant: They are my words, not his, but that summarises it.

Mr Allen: No. A cottage industry to me implies an industry that does not employ very many people or is stagnating in terms of its employment potential. I think it is fair to say that the creative industries as a whole, of which the film industry is only part, are growing and are an ever more evident part of our everyday life. Also something you need to bear in mind is that somehow people think that our industry is in neat little boxes called the film industry, commercials, television, pop promos, computer interactive games. All of those genres mix and intertwine with one another and are interdependent on each other and we service more than one market place and all of them are relevant and important to us. The same is true for the whole of the infrastructure that is in the United Kingdom. They cannot survive on any one market place for their livelihood, so if we weaken our base in terms of our ability to compete on feature films we can jeopardise ourselves for TV or for commercials. The BBC get the benefit of cheap freelance package prices because we have a film industry.

Q82  Michael Fabricant: But do you have a film industry? The point that was being made and, in fact, was made to this Committee in 1996 when we last looked at it, is that there is no sustainable industry in the sense that individual films are made, individually financed and they are separate operations in themselves, whereas in the United States the film companies - well, I do not know have 100 different ideas, maybe 20 will get a green light, maybe 2 or 3 will be blockbusters but it is a continuing flow process, a bit like a factory, and there is no factory here.

Mr Reiss: 1996 was probably in the middle of quite an inspirational time, and through bitter and volatile experience there were five or six big very successful blockbuster movies that came out of this country, starting with Shallow Grave moving through Trainspotting and ending up with the Full Monty through to Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. All of those films were hugely successful, all of them totally British apart from their funding, and unfortunately a lot of the talent from those films has flown the nest to more prosperous climes.

Q83  Michael Fabricant: Why is that, do you think?

Mr Reiss: Because we have not encouraged - the only director who has made a point of coming back is Danny Boyle and he has come back for a number of reasons but one is to come back and try and use his status that he had within Hollywood after Trainspotting to do something, but that is just one person.

Q84  Michael Fabricant: But another big difference since 1996 was that in 1996 we made the recommendation for the changes in tax law which then took place in 1997 in Gordon Brown's first Budget, and I welcome that, but are you saying that has had a negligible effect?

Mr Allen: Yes and no.

Mr Reiss: It has not had an enormous effect to keep encouraging the talent to keep the momentum up. Because the industry has become more and more accessible to more and more film makers, less and less money is being spent but there is more opportunity to make these films. However, those tax breaks are negligible, in a sense, to people who are at the lower end of even the lower end of low budget film making.

Mr Allen: I would agree with that last point. However, we were also discussing prior to coming in here that we need the big budget American films, to name but a few - obviously French money has been important coming into the United Kingdom as well as German money recently as well - in order for us to be able to help as facilities companies the likes of my colleague here to get his film made. If we did not have that sort of biodiversity of funds coming in from different countries, whether they are attracted in because of different tax concessions that we give or not, then we could not help British film makers because we would not be here either. So there is this interdependency on each other for our mutual survival, if you like. But film making is completely international and has been for some time, and we are not a separate island from that. We are part of that and I think we are trying to protect two quite distinct things. We are trying to protect our culture and our ability to make indigenous films, on the one hand, and our ability to attract in foreign money to help sustain our own industry on the other, and you cannot dissociate the two because they are intrinsically linked to each other. The Americans come here because they can get some tax incentives but also they come here because they like to; it is a safe haven for them to work in by comparison to some other countries in the world. We had this told to us in those terms by Duncan Kenworthy, who basically said, "When we decide where we are going to make a film in Los Angeles, we first look at Los Angeles; then Canada because it is cheaper; and then the United Kingdom because you guys talk the same language", and because we have a past reputation in making films in the United Kingdom, and that is fundamentally important. We have a safe, reliable economy so that helps, but if we did not have that input and that money coming in from the US or France or Germany then we could not help or have the infrastructure to sustain our own film industry.

Q85  Michael Fabricant: Would you have a film industry without TV? Jeff Allen talked about dependence on television; Pat Trueman in her introduction talked about training, most of which appears to be in television - BBC television in particular. Would there be a film industry in this country if we did not have television too?

Mr Allen: Yes.

Ms Trueman: Yes. I do not think you should feel too complacent about the BBC equalling training either these days. That is not going on nearly as much as it used to. Unfortunately, as we outlined in our basic submission, training is not the thing you think it is. It was 10/15 years ago and it is one of our huge concerns, and we would like to see far more investment in emerging directors because we do have a real concern about that, and the BBC is not doing half what it wants to do.

Mr Reiss: Financial initiatives and commercially orientated projects are absolutely necessary to bring in what we need in order to expand and move on and help what we have as the next generation. Television and film to the industry are two completely different mediums. There are an equal number, if not ten times as many, film scripts that are coming through the European Film Production Fund, etc, than there are necessarily good television programmes. Television, unfortunately, is a little bit persuaded just to carry on cloning and British films are very different. Usually a British film is individual. If you think of a decent British film of last year, Bend it like Beckham, it is quite unique and there are a lot more there sitting on the shelf waiting to bring it out. The two things have to be very different. The BBC need to initiate training; the Directors' Guild I think should be given X amount of money per year to initiate their own training schemes relying specifically on that money to proactivate directors' enthusiasm, and then the new Producers' Alliance, Skill Set, PACT, etc, should also be given bits and pieces of money, but there should be a definitive realisation that TV and film are two different things.

Mr Allen: There used to be what we called the studio system in years gone by which diminished which had a training system attached to it ----

Q86  Michael Fabricant: In the United Kingdom as well as the US?

Mr Allen: Yes. That went away so that channel disappeared in terms of training, and then when the BBC and the commercial broadcasters divested themselves of large parts of their organisations they almost became content providers rather than programme makers per se in terms of every level of making the programme. A lot of the training remit went away that they performed before. Yes, the BBC does have certain departments and aspects of it that still deal with training, and they certainly are the best broadcaster in that respect, but even so it is tiny by comparison to what it used to be. They are not training the cameramen, for instance, of the future; that is entirely done in the private sector now. It is certainly not coming from the BBC or any other broadcaster for that matter, and I think our collective view is that we think that all of the broadcasters, the BBC included, are found wanting in terms of their support of British film. Yes, the BBC do put money still into British film; Channel 4 unfortunately as we all know have contracted in that area; but if you look at what the French broadcasters do by comparison with the British broadcasters, then it is by no means enough and comprehensive enough. They could certainly help in the area of distribution, for instance, which is a very key weakness in the United Kingdom. They certainly have the structure and the wherewithal to be able to do it. BBC Enterprises, for instance, can successfully sell and distribute its products to other countries, so why can it not distribute within the United Kingdom? They have the expertise there but it is basically not directed in all of the right ways.

Q87  Derek Wyatt: I wonder if I could just entice Mr Hough to say something? If you were asked and you were writing our report, what would be your top three recommendations to try and enable the film industry of the United Kingdom --

Mr Hough: -- To flourish? Just as a preamble, I was here before at the previous meeting and I thought it was earlier than 1996, but in my top three I would like to see the recommending committee do something quite dramatic. In the years that have gone by since I was last here the tax benefit has been a helpful source, the formation of the Film Council has also been a great help, but I think the film industry needs something quite dramatic to reshape from its current situation. I am based at Pinewood Studios and I have been there for 18 years, and I have not seen the dramatic change that I would like to see in the film industry and mainly it comes down to distribution. When we are making films, it is not that difficult for an experienced practitioner like me to raise the money; it is paying it back that is difficult and it is what I have to comply with to do that. There is very little speculative money or situations available for speculative money here in this country. I would like to see something really radical like a state-run distribution outfit. I would like to see a studio state run that makes films, and in this country we have the biggest film studio in the world which is the BBC. It employs more people than Warner Bros, Fox and anybody else in Hollywood, and it has the infrastructure, and I would like us to do something really dramatic and form a film unit within the BBC - I know they have one at moment but I do not consider it representative of what it could be - by experienced film practitioners and producers, and revolutionise the way the BBC makes films, using Lottery money. I would take the Lottery money away from the existing outlets, put it into this outfit, and I would make the BBC purchase a screen, one screen on every Multiplex in Great Britain, and show the British films they make in these Multiplexes, and in that situation train people but learn that you have to make films that have an audience and promote the culture. That is what I would like to see happening.

 

Q88  Derek Wyatt: You have raised some interesting issues there which I am sure my colleagues will come back on but I have other things to ask. If you want to do that sort of radical thinking, how often does Directors' Guild meet the BBC?

Ms Trueman: That varies.

Q89  Derek Wyatt: Do you have a formal meeting where you see them once every quarter?

Ms Trueman: No, there is nothing quite like that set up, but we do have a variety of meetings with all the broadcasters where we will discuss any matters that have arisen, though to be honest we have not met them to discuss that kind of issue for quite some time.

Q90  Derek Wyatt: For instance, on the issues raised where you want greater access and so on, have you written to Greg Dyke? Submitted papers? What is the relationship?

Ms Trueman: The relationship is probably not as open as it should be. The Guild has avenues into the BBC and, indeed, all the broadcasters, as I say, but we have not discussed directly the role of the director and the things that John has just outlined with them -- not recently no.

Q91  Alan Keen: We have talked a little bit about training. If you are a 14 year-old in school and you are making one and a half minute films on video on your Mac Suite at home, where would you go? Where would your teachers start to recommend you go?

Mr Allen: It depends, I think --

Q92  Alan Keen: Where is the centre of excellence?

Mr Allen: -- On what discipline they want to go into basically.

Q93  Alan Keen: Where are the centres of excellence, then?

Mr Allen: In the United Kingdom. There is not one centre of excellence.

Q94  Alan Keen: Why not?

Mr Allen: Pass. I do not know.

Q95  Alan Keen: Why is there not one? You are in it. You are the lobbyists for this.

Mr Allen: Well, there are various universities and colleges that are set up specifically to deal with film that do certain tasks and, indeed, the industry itself takes people on directly, a bit like the old apprenticeship-type schemes in terms of people starting on the ground floor and working their way up. That still does happen but it is very ad hoc and, as I said, one of my other concerns in terms of training is that I think the Film Council and the Skill Set together have tried to put schemes in place to get new people into the industry but there is still this yawning gap of vocational training for people within the industry, particularly when you have this changing world into this overly used word "digital" now. The BBC have created this new platform for them to broadcast traditional programmes on, and it is the Government's intention for us all to go digital. That cannot happen without the private sector as well as the BBC. It is one of the things I have found most frustrating about the Communication Bill - that it did not seem to think about the infrastructure outside of the broadcasters that support broadcasters. We do have lots of debate with the BBC about training people, about new technology --

Q96  Alan Keen: Why is it the BBC's role to do that?

Mr Allen: I am just giving them as one example, I am not saying they are the only people. The British Society of Cinematographers, various bodies basically that represent various elements of the industry have training programmes, but they also have the limited resources to be able to do that. Most of it relies on the industry itself putting some money back into the industry. That, like any industry, works best when the industry is doing very well and at its worst when the industry is doing badly. People have less disposable income to put into training schemes so it flows like an ebb and tide, basically.

Ms Trueman: With your original question about the 14 year-old in the bedroom, if they have ambitions to be a film director it is extremely difficult because most of the courses are post graduate level.

Q97  Alan Keen: Why is that?

Ms Trueman: You tell me.

Q98  Alan Keen: But you are in the trade. Do not throw it at us. You should be lobbying and fighting.

Ms Trueman: Indeed, and that is one of the messages we want to give you today as well.

Mr Reiss: Also, the reason why further and higher education has to broaden itself out is that there is not enough money and kids are coming out with £15,000 and £20,000 worth of debt so they need to be trained much more broadly until they are 25, 26, where they have to go and find either another bank loan to be more specific to go to a school like the National Film School or the London International Film School, and then have another year or possibly two years of intense directing training. So the education system is not being specific enough because there is not the money within that system.

Mr Allen: Giving you another example at a slightly different level, and this is very individual to our particular company that we work for, but when we built our facility we built within it a theatre that we intended from day one to be able to use as a training centre for people, and we used that as our commitment to put some money back into the industry, and various bodies do use that facility for training on a weekly basis and we try to help them as much as we can to get people through, but we are not educators: we are a business trying to make money in a very competitive environment. We do not have people who teach; we rely on others to do that. So we can provide a facility for people to try and get hands on, but not necessarily for people to do the teaching itself. Likewise trying to get funding for additional equipment is impossible.

Ms Trueman: We run various mentoring and observer schemes as well through the Guild.

Q99  Alan Keen: I am not sure the Secretary of State for Culture would welcome the BBC putting up funding for filming that did not wash its face, as it were, because it is public money, it is our money, but let's just say there is a movement afoot that perhaps the BBC does not retain 100 per cent of the licence fee. There is certainly a feeling that community television and radio maybe has 5 per cent of the licence fee. In other words, if Ofcom were to take the money and only distribute 95 per cent over three years to the BBC, then 90 per cent, then 85 per cent or whatever, what is it you would be bidding for to improve your lot or the lot of the film industry in the United Kingdom?

Mr Allen: There already exist various training bodies on a regional basis that engage and attract young film makers. The biggest problem all of those regional training schemes have is funding. It is not the capacity to do more: it is the money to be able to do more - that is the stumbling block. They have people willing to give time and effort but they just do not have the funding to be able to do it.

Q100  Mr Doran: I listened carefully to Mr Reiss' tale of woe in trying to sell his film but it strikes me that is a tale that anybody could tell. Why should potential directors be different?

Mr Reiss: I am not suggesting that potential directors should be any different from any other artist; it just happens to be that the medium in which I have been working, which is specific to the question you have just asked about my film, is a film I passionately believe is topical, relevant and poignant for a broadcast and should be seen by a wider audience, so therefore I am not a painter or an abstract artist trying to pull off a stunt just because I want my own work to be put up there. Film as opposed to any other medium, or more than any other medium, is a collaborative business and process, so I am not talking as just an individual artist or director - I am talking for a collection of people who have put something very poignant and intense together which deserves to be screened.

Q101  Mr Doran: One of the points that is made to us is in other evidence that we have heard is that there are lots of film schools producing lots of graduates and various skills but there are not the jobs for them. Again, why should directors be any different?

Mr Reiss: They are not because a lot of student directors are finding exactly the same thing, but there is an argument I think that nothing beats hands-on experience, and I think the current state of the lack of money means that people have to borrow money in order to go through a post-graduate situation in order to then go and do exactly the same as everybody else who is trying to make low budget films. There is no special ticket once you come out of a film school. The Directors' Guild does have internships which are increasing year by year but that is really where we need to be able to train our people - not necessarily just in a film school, which is a very secular environment. We need to be able to show that we can train people on the job, and there is not the opportunity to do that.

Q102  Mr Doran: You used the word "collaborative" earlier and I understand the amount of collaboration and the breadth that is necessary to produce a film. One thing that seems obvious to me on the written evidence we have had so far is that there does not seem to be a lot of collaboration in the fundamentals like training. What particular efforts has your Guild made to try and improve that, because it is quite clear that there is a gap there and it is not being filled?

Ms Trueman: We are working with a variety of different agencies to start doing that. It is fairly recent in that the Guild has identified this quite recently. It is easy to say that there are lots of people coming out of lots of schools all trained up, but you could say that of almost any graduate coming out of any course anywhere in the country. What is interesting is that we link up with the Writers' Guild and various organisations like that as well to work with director/writer attachments as well. If you look at a lot of the successful films over the last few years they have also had directors on them who have been theatre directors. The directors we talk about currently - Danny Boyle, Stephen Daldry, Sam Mendes, those famous directors now that we all relate to - have all come through theatre originally, and the Directors' Guild is working closely both with Equity, Writers' Guild, all the organisations like that, to link up in training programmes and we are really beginning to get our act together on all of that.

Q103  Mr Doran: How does that relate to the work the Film Council is doing?

Ms Trueman: We have worked with them closely on the Skill Set standards as well that they have been working on, which is training a whole new generation mainly of technicians not so much directors, but we have worked very closely with them and we expect to do even more. We have a very fluid relationship with the Film Council at officer level; it is a constant relationship and we are beginning to put together programmes of skills training.

Q104  Mr Doran: Finally, the BBC seems to play a big part in everybody's thinking about how things might change but most of that seems to be wishful thinking. The BBC has set its own course, and one thing the government could do is what it is doing on the Communications Bill, for example, in confirming quotas for independence. Do you see a role there for the Directors' Guild, and what contact will you have with the BBC to discuss this, or with the DCMS?

Ms Trueman: As far as quotas are concerned I think it would be interesting, yes.

Q105  Mr Doran: Have you got firm proposals?

Ms Trueman: Not as yet, no.

Q106  Mr Bryant: Can I ask about the money and how it gets through to a director, in other words how you get recompensed, because although I understand that this is one of the areas where you are also in dispute with all the broadcasters, I think you would like to see a greater share of the copyright, is that right?

Ms Trueman: Certainly there is a huge issue over ownership and copyright, yes, and intellectual ownership of the property.

Q107  Mr Bryant: So where would you like to see that going, Mr Hough? Do you get enough of the money, or do you think that could be changed - you as an individual rather than as an industry?

Mr Hough: In England, as against the States and other European countries, film directors do not get residuals from television showings or any other ancillary showings.

Q108  Mr Bryant: And on "The Avengers" that would be quite useful.

Mr Hough: Yes, and all the Irish shows that I have done, but that is beginning to change and we are beginning to get residuals now from Europe, so that is a better picture, but in terms of how a director makes money, he makes money with his initial negotiations for the film, the project he is about to do, he takes a percentage profit if he has the stature, and that profit can come at various points from the film's release and, hopefully, if the film is a success he will eventually see some money back. That has, however, been quite hard in the past because the film company are able to deduct all their expenses and the whole print and advertising and, at the end of the day, very few films can show a residual return at the box office. They do quite well over a number of years, however, and residuals from television, DVDs and other ancillaries can be quite good. That has not happened in the past but it is now, so I think that is going to help the directors' case.

Q109  Mr Bryant: We were told last week that one of the processes that the film companies go through is trying to make sure that those residuals are going to be as small as possible which is why they will put more of the earnings into the screening than into the --

Mr Hough: Yes. There is always a problem. That would be quite a good thing to change if there was any kind of investigation into the accounting situation in films, but it is quite an involved subject. In the States it is widespread. There are quite a few famous films that never made any money at all on the balance sheet at the end of their term. I personally cannot complain about that because the films I have made have shown a return and I have received it so I am not the person to complain about that.

Q110  Mr Bryant: If we want to ensure a lively British film industry, is it more important for us to get the money flow right or the talent flow?

Mr Hough: You can only get the money flow right if you can show the film. If you do not have an outlet for the film, no matter how good the film it is like building a car and not have a showroom. If you cannot show the film there is no way you can get money back - either on television, other ancillary ways or the cinema - so that has to be addressed because one builds from that and then builds the film. Over the last number of years there have been many films made that will never be distributed and therefore can never make any money back.

Q111  Mr Bryant: Some of our more famous directors recently are people who have transferred from the theatre rather than television. Do you think that is a likely growing trend? I am thinking of people like Sam Mendes, obviously.

Mr Hough: It will grow because there is room for it to grow because in the past most film directors came from television. I do not agree with something that was said earlier in that I do not think there could be a self-sufficient film industry without television. I think it is an integral part and they both rely on each other, and that television is a very useful training ground for film directors which is where they came from. Will they come from the theatre in future? Yes, there is room for that but then I think it will go back again to television and the film industry.

Q112  Mr Bryant: I suppose a keen example of somebody who went from making documentaries into films is Ken Russell, but the kind of programmes he was making then - the training programmes, the "Arena"s and so on - just do not exist on television any more, do they?

Mr Reiss: In the same way that "Play for Today" does not exist on TV at the moment, which is where Mike Leigh got his initial training.

Ms Trueman: Or someone like Jon Amiel who did "Singing Detective" and is now in Hollywood doing big budget films.

Mr Allen: The other area in terms of producing directors of international renown has been commercials. The two Scott brothers, for instance, came from commercials, and there is Hugh Hudson from commercials, so that has been a hot bed.

Q113  Mr Bryant: But somebody make the point year earlier about how these are not stand-alone industries any more in any sense at all. The gaming industry - and I do not mean gambling but the games that I cannot understand and use - seems to be an area of significant growth and United Kingdom talent; we have the advantage of both having the technology and speaking the language that has a currency around the world; but how do you foster that whole pool of talent, rather than just people thinking in their individual silos?

Mr Allen: Well, if I can answer it maybe in this way, we have a young cameraman doing his first film at the moment, Spivs, who a few weeks ago was doing a pop promo, then he has been doing commercials, he has done a bit of television in the past and now he is doing his first feature film, so he has gone across four creative disciplines using his crafts basically - and we see the same. We see people coming from music into the film industry or into television or vice versa; we have worked with directors in the past who started their life dealing with computer games and have now moved into moving image.

Q114  Mr Bryant: But if that is true, is not government intervention in all of these fields going down the silos? It is not across the field; it is not about the creative talent of the individuals; it is about either being supported through film or theatre or through - well, that is probably the end?

Mr Allen: The truth is that all of these are fudged at the lines and they all have overlap. Yes, you can specifically target certain things for certain parts of those industries like Section 42, Section 48, but there is talent brought in for Harry Potter, say, from commercials. The post production companies that have been involved in Harry Potter also do commercials and TV shows. They do not just exist to do Harry Potter but they are an indirect beneficiary of the tax incentives that enabled Harry Potter to be shot in the United Kingdom. That is why it is not an easy question because there is overlap between those creative industries.

Ms Trueman: We find, even in some of the seminars that we organise, we will get young film directors coming to us because they want to learn how to work with actors so they will work with our theatre section on that. There is a huge amount of crossover.

Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. We are hugely grateful and I apologise for missing the start.

Witnesses: MS GURINDER CHADHA, Film Director, examined.

Q115  Chairman: We would like to welcome you, and congratulations on reaching the Top Ten in the United States.

Ms Chadha: Thank you.

Q116  Chairman: Before I call Alan King, moving on from what Derek Wyatt and Chris Bryant were asking the Directors' Guild, you made, in Bend it like Beckham, a very good film, an extremely enjoyable film, a film that had something to say. Other British directors have also made films like that - not the same but films with those qualities - and they have not made it. What were the ingredients whereby what you did achieved the success that it merited, when others had done films which had achieved modest success, like Brassed Off and have not achieved the success you have achieved?

Ms Chadha: I think it comes down to two points. Firstly, what was interesting to me just now was you asking how people started. In terms of a potted history what happened with me was I had no idea what I was going to do when I was at university. I did Development Studies and thought I was going to end up working for Oxfam or something like that, but during the whole '80s there were the riots and everything up and down the country and that was my political awakening, and I decided what I really needed to do was get involved in the media politically, culturally and creatively. I therefore decided to become a news reporter and I trained on the radio and I worked for the BBC as a news reporter, and then I worked for LWT news but I found the newsroom terribly restricting and I decided I wanted to do other things. Around the same time the British Film Institute had started BFI New Directors and I was given the opportunity with them to make my first film. That was great for me because they did not require anyone to have any film background so I have never been to film school or ever studied film formally, and they were interested in what I had to say. I made a film called I'm British but ... which was the first film from a second generation Asian point of view. That film was very popular in Britain and around the world and I then went on to make Bhaji on the Beach straight after. Now, what happened with Bhaji on the Beach was - and it is a film that has a big cult following now in the States as well as here - that it was released in 1994 at a time when people, if they went to the cinema in Britain, would much rather go and see anything American rather than a British film, and the attitude was, "It is not worth spending our money on this, we can always wait for it to come on Channel 4, let's go and see whatever the Hollywood movie is". From then to now, with Bend it like Beckham, there has been a massive change in my working time in terms of the British film industry, and I would put films like Trainspotting, Notting Hill and Full Monty, down to the creation of an active British film-going audience. After Bhaji on the Beach I was encouraged in America to make a Hollywood film and I read lots of scripts out there, none of which appealed to me, and I decided what I would like to do is make a British film set in America and I made a film called What's Cooking which followed four families on Thanksgiving Day in LA but they were an African American family, a Vietnamese, Latino and Jewish. It was a very American film on the face of it because the characters were all American but it was very British, and if you ever get the chance to see it you will see that it deals with class and culture in a way that Americans do not agree that they have a class system. That film was released in America and really was very badly distributed, and in this country it was not really distributed, and it was at that point that I sat down and thought that I wanted to make another film in Britain. We had the Arts Council - the Lottery group before the Film Council - plus there was a lot of interest in Britain, there was a growing film culture, and I decided I wanted to be in Britain and make a British movie but I wanted to make one that was going to play Multiplexes. I had made two that played in arthouse cinemas, and both films that I knew would have appealed to a lot more people had they had the opportunity to see them. So for me it comes down to marketing and distribution. So before I even started writing one page, I thought Right, how am I going to make a British film that is going to build on the successes of East Is East and Full Monty and still deal with what I want to deal with, and I decided that it was about marketing, and I wanted to make a film about football because it had taken over British life in so many ways, and with the whole Euro thing and when Britain lost to Germany everyone was in tears, and I thought there was something very interesting about football here and I wanted to take that world - a world that most people did not think was my world, or a girl's world, or an Indian girl's world, and make it my world. Then I thought of the idea of making a film about an Indian girl but with David Beckham in the title, basically purely for marketing reasons - and I make no bones about that; I talk about that in the press all the time. I knew no one would want to go and see a film about an Indian girl or football on its own - well, people might but it would not get to as many people as I wanted, hence the David Beckham connection. We approached David Beckham very early on and said, "This is what we want to do", and his people came back and said, "David is a big supporter of women's football and he feels if more girls played it there would be less hooliganism and less violence at matches so he would support this. He does not necessarily want to be in it yet because it might turn out rubbish" - and also, because it was about girls and football, I also said that I would like him to support it because I knew he knew something about girl power with his missus, so that approach worked with him and that is what it came down to. Getting the film made then was very hard because I thought I had got myself a bit of a coup with Beckham in the title but the hard thing was raising the finance because everyone said, "Yeah, but girls? Football? I do not think so", because you cannot conceive of that as being a commercial idea for most people - it is just not conceivable. I knew it was and I kind of felt that the British public would because I was deeply impressed and moved by the fact that East is East was such a huge hit in Britain. I could not get over how that film could be so popular in all the nooks and crannies of little towns across the country, and I was just trying to fathom that, and I realised Britain had changed enormously and culturally and I knew this film would work. One of the down points for me was that we were at the cusp of going from the Arts Council to the Film Council. The Film Council was just beginning to happen and we had applied to the Arts Council. I knew that we were not going to get the money. It was all based on two readers' reports, as to whether we got it or not. One reader's report which I had managed to get hold of had said, "Girls cannot play football. No one is going to be interested in watching a film about girls and football. More to the point, how are they ever going to find an Indian girl that can bend a ball like Beckham? I do not think this is a viable project." I went and saw John Woodward, who I knew, and said, "I am furious about this. You will have to do something about this because you cannot say this. James Bond does not jump out of helicopters. This person should know that." That made me feel very proactive. As a black director and as Britain's only Indian woman director, which I was when I made Bhaji on the Beach in 1994 and still am in 2003, I thought I had the right to come to the government's film department and say, "This is not on." Whenever you have panels, discussions or whatever about race, culture and film, I get wheeled on to talk about it because I am the only person. Here I am trying desperately to make my third feature in Britain and this is what is happening. If I cannot make it, how on earth are you going to inspire other people to do it? To his credit, John Woodward really listened to what I had to say. I had to make a rewrite and address some other problems but within a few weeks we managed to get through it. It was because of that moment that this film happened. Once the Film Council came in, other people said, "Okay, they have a large chunk of the money. Maybe we should look at this." It was not easy getting the film financed. Once we started making the film, the real problem for me was how am I going to make it a multiplex film and not an art house movie? Luckily for me, the owner of Odeon Cinemas in this country, Richard Seagal, who is a very nice, Jewish man, loved What's Cooking? and he played it in his cinemas for four or five months, even though no one else knew anything about it. I called Richard Seagal and said, "I want you to come to my cutting room and see my film. I want your opinion on what I need to do to make this a multiplex movie. I think it is; what do you think?" People do not really do that but I felt I did not have anything to lose. Our distributor at that point was Helkon SK, an independent, British distributor. Everyone had passed on the film in terms of distribution. Helkon were very happy for me to do that. Richard came and watched the film. He brought all his team and at that point he said, "Yes. Odeon Cinemas will support you. This is a great British movie." There was a sea change with Odeon Cinemas because I had involved them in the process. Helkon used a Hollywood mode of releasing the film. We were an event movie. We were not released like, "Here is the big Hollywood movie over here this weekend and by the way there is this little British one over here." They decided to go for it in a big way and spend a lot of money, more money than perhaps Bridget Jones's Diary. Suddenly, for a few weeks, you had a British movie that was on buses all over the country, on billboards, on bus stops. Publicity for the film was everywhere. Obviously the Beckham thing helped. What I found happening was the British public sensing that here was something that was British, but it was being sold to them like a Hollywood product. It was really important when we opened that our opening weekend would cross that £1 million mark. When we did open, we opened on over two million, which was phenomenal for a British film about an Indian girl who plays football. It was a combination of things but it is about marketing and distribution. The sad side of that is that this film has gone on to be the most successful British financed, British distributed movie ever. The other movies are all Hollywood financed inadvertently through studios, like The Full Monty and some of the others. Before us, it was East is East and we just beat that a little. The reality is that from the £12 million that we made in the cinemas plus another couple in DVD sales and quite a lucrative BBC TV sale, there is not a penny in profit in that movie. I have not made a penny from the UK as a producer of the film. I was producer as well as director. That is galling me, because I am now thinking how the hell did that happen? I did not see that one coming at all. Whilst I started off pretty smug, by the end of it, everyone is putting me on millionaire lists in the papers, but that is the reality. The reason, I am told, is because cinemas take 75p of every pound of ticket sales so that went to UGC, Odeon and Warner Brothers. 25p went to Helkon SK, who deducted their 30 per cent distribution fee plus their £4.5 million they said they spent on advertising the film, which leaves us somewhere like £1 million in the red.

Chairman: Among many other things, I think you were very shrewd to go to a Jewish man because, after all, this is The Jazz Singer.

Q117  Alan Keen: I can tell you from experience that Gurinder can tell good acting from bad at 200 metres. Bend it Like Beckham was made in my constituency, in the adjacent seat to mine which also includes the Punjabi community which is represented by my wife. We were there on the last day of filming. Gurinder directed Ann and I to walk 200 yards away from the camera while the heroine jumped towards the camera in the foreground. We were supposed to look lovingly into each other's eyes and I thought it was going to launch a career, but she can tell good acting from bad. It was on the cutting room floor in next to no time and we never appeared in the film. It used to be Doris Day; then Michelle Pfeiffer; now it is Gurinder, as far as I am concerned, in the film industry. Can I thank you, from the point of view of the community that I do not know quite as well as you? Everybody is so thrilled. Apart from helping the British film industry, you have helped the community tremendously. I chair the All Party Football Group in Parliament as well and I am still playing football so I understand it from the football point of view. It has done the world of good.

Ms Chadha: One of the interesting things that I did not know is that in India, in Delhi, as a result of the success of the film, there is now a football league for women called the Beckham League. Here it has given girls' soccer a big kick. When the film came out, the women's FA number was on the poster and they could not handle the calls that were coming in, there were so many. Basically, I have been to about 25 countries around the world promoting this film. It topped the charts in New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland and India and in loads of countries around the world. As we know, it is number nine in the US. The important thing is that I see myself as a cultural ambassador for Britain. It is a British film. One of the reasons for its success in America now is because it is not formulaic in the way Hollywood movies are. People are genuinely interested in seeing stories about family. I was in Detroit and I was thinking how are these people going to deal with people from Hounslow? As I came out of the cinema, people were coming up to me and saying, "This is a great film about families pulling together and making it through", a very mid-west, family ethic. That is what is going on in America. They see it as a film about a family that is a little different to them but is also English. They cannot get over the accents. It is culturally reflective of America. For me, it is an absolute privilege to live and work in Britain and to be inspired by Britain. When I travel the world so extensively, the country is such a rich environment for someone like me to flourish in. I take that abroad and to America. The fact that this film is number nine in the US and people in little towns across that country are seeing it is testament to the fact that they believe culturally in what is going on in Britain as being truthful in that film. It is a truth about contemporary Britain. Otherwise, it is anything that Hugh Grant is in.

Q118  Alan Keen: I was brought to tears when the father admitted the problem he had playing cricket when he first came and he was not made welcome. Unfortunately, I identify with his generation.

Ms Chadha: That was based on my dad who came to Southall and could not get a job. He had a turban; he had his hair cut and his beard shaved and the only job he could get was in the Post Office in Southall, where he was trained. He used to work for Barclays Bank in Kenya, so all that story line was very much based on his experiences in Southall.

Q119  Derek Wyatt: Well done. I am sure I speak for everyone. We are thrilled with what you have done. It is even more amazing in America where they do not understand soccer and have never heard of Beckham. Put us out of our misery. Surely, now you have such distribution across the world, you have made at least a penny?

Ms Chadha: I have now, yes, but not in the UK. Abroad, yes. Australia, yes. Other countries, yes, but not here.

Q120  Derek Wyatt: If it had not been commercially successful here and you still had distribution overseas, would they still have taken the 12 million?

Ms Chadha: The film was sold before it came out here except in America. America sold after the box office in this country because everyone was of the opinion that no one would understand soccer in America. It was only after we started getting the success here that in May at the Cannes Film Festival about four or five American distributors wanted to buy it.

Q121  Derek Wyatt: You keep mentioning distribution. In every session we have had with different people, it is distribution. Who settles the 75p in the pound? Is that not a matter for the Competition Commission or the OFT? When did anyone last look at the distribution pricing and so on?

Ms Chadha: That is the next project. That is what I have to look at. It is just a given. I am only entering into this myself now but I am sure the Hollywood studios do not pay that kind of money. I am sure that there are different deals going on with different people.

Q122  Derek Wyatt: Maybe we will ask. We are going to LA in a couple of weeks' time. Maybe you can give us a note as to what we could ask on your behalf without giving away that we are asking on your behalf.

Ms Chadha: It is a very simple question: what is the deal? I know from my investigations that the Bollywood films that are shown now in certain multiplexes in Feltham, Birmingham and so on -- the Indian producers go up with a print and say, "Okay, 50/50" and the cineplex managers want that 50 per cent because their cinemas are packed and the distributors get 50. That is done on a one to one basis so there are obviously some guidelines. That would be my main problem now: how to work that out.

Q123  Michael Fabricant: It strikes me you are not a producer; you are an entrepreneur and it seems pretty sad that after so much history of producing movies in the United Kingdom it still needs an entrepreneur's approach to get a film to be a success. Are there any lessons to be learned that you think could be a mechanism that people could adopt in future and not have to go to the bottom of the learning curve to see other films being a success?

Ms Chadha: We live at a time now where it is all about marketing and a distributor will want to look at a piece of work and say, "Am I prepared to spend £1 million marketing this or not?" That is the reality if you want to create a film industry that is about box office income. I do believe that there are also some films that should still be being made that are not necessarily going to be out there to be box office hits. That is really important because we all feed off those as well. Otherwise, we will end up with the situation you have in Hollywood where the only films that get made are like the one that made all that money a few months ago. It becomes very formulaic. What we have in Britain is a very distinct, cultural landscape. If audiences are invited in, they have a hook and will take most subjects on if they are given in a particular way. It is about looking at what your film poster is and can I see someone spending all this money marketing it.

Q124  Michael Fabricant: Michael Kuhn said last week that really we do not have an industry as such. Perhaps you were here when I was talking to the previous witnesses. Really, every individual movie is a jobbing issue and all the rest of it. Do you think there is not enough razzmatazz in the UK? Maybe we do not blow our own trumpets enough and maybe that is the whole problem. We do not actually know how to be exciting when we promote a movie.

Ms Chadha: My film was a success because I saw what happened in East is East. Hopefully, Beckham will spawn another five or ten movies. It is quite individual but we live and work in the shadow of Hollywood. It is easy for a film maker to make a development deal with a Hollywood company here because they know they are automatically going to get distribution in the US and perhaps in so many other territories, which means their films are going to get seen. These people have the marketing budgets to put behind their movies.

Q125  Michael Fabricant: Is it just because of population? Is that the only reason?

Ms Chadha: Yes, most people want their films to be seen in America because the revenues are more. I am sure Michael Kuhn explained that part of the problem is that we do not generally have the amount of cinema going audiences to sustain an industry in the way that Hollywood does. X Men opened this weekend and it is 80-something million. The economies are much smaller. However, we have to think internationally. That is where our strength is. People want to see films from Britain. We have a advantage because it is in English. People identify with the British film culture, whether it is a period Jane Austen or whether it is contemporary. I genuinely believe all of Europe looks to British films around race and culture because they see them as a reflection of what is happening in their own countries in the years to come. One of the things I am going to discuss next week in Cannes is a French producer who wants to buy the rights of Bend it Like Beckham and make a film about a young Muslim girl in Paris who idolises Saddam, as a way of dealing with Parisian, Muslim, French stuff. Australia is a great territory for British films, as is Europe. The lesson for me with Beckham is that culturally, in the way Hollywood markets a particular culture, we have a culture too that travels internationally.

Q126  Mr Flook: What is next? Is the funding coming forward more easily and when?

Ms Chadha: I have been offered two projects by Fox and Paramount studios. I am going to do a project that I have been wanting to do for a while with Pathè in Britain, doing a musical version of Pride and Prejudice, a sort of British, Bollywood version. It is a big budget of £10 million or $18 million. The finance for that is coming from Pathè, a tax equity fund and a presell to the US. I cannot say who it is yet. I am able to do that because of the tax fund here. I want it to qualify as a British film but it is set in India, England and America. I am building a lot of the interior of the houses of India here in Britain at Ealing Studios. Number one, it is a nightmare to shoot in India anyway and, number two, it is easily done. It is convenient for me. It works for me here in Britain. I live in Britain and Ealing is a great place, so we are building two of the main, big houses here. Most of our shooting takes place here in England, with a little in India and it is basically songs in India and America. The idea of someone taking a risk on an $18 million a sort of Bollywood, British musical, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, is sweeter because of the tax equity fund.

Q127  Mr Flook: When do you think general release will be?

Ms Chadha: I am working on it now so we start shooting in July. It will be ready next year.

Q128  Mr Bryant: You come across as just about the least cynical person I have ever met in my life. I suppose it could be said that putting "Beckham" in the title, even though you are being very open and funny about it, is slightly cynical. Do you think, in the process of getting a British film into multiplexes around the world, you have to develop some skills in cynicism?

Ms Chadha: I was going to be cynical with Alan when he was banging the drum about Southall, where I grew up. They are all very proud but they are all selling bootlegs on their stalls in Southall Broadway. I am forever going down Southall Broadway saying, "You know that is illegal" and they say, "It is okay. You made a lot of money. Let us make some too." It costs a lot of money to go to the cinema. What is it? £7, £8, £9? £10 in Leicester Square. People have to want to go. You have to give them something that they want to see at the cinema, that they are not going to see on television. One of the great benefits for British film making right now is the fact that our television is slowly going down the pan. We do not have all the great dramas that we used to have. We do not have must see TV. We have one-offs here and there but the time when we had fantastic drama series every Sunday night and you did not want to go out and also on Wednesday night has changed. That is why America has such a strong cinema going public because they have crap TV. In terms of this country, if you want the multiplex audience, you have to give them something that is going to make people go out and spend £10.

Q129  Mr Bryant: I agree with you. To be cynical myself, I suspect we are going to see lots of must see television over the next year because we are starting a licence fee renewal consideration process. I wonder sometimes whether the whole process whereby somebody decides this plot will not work with multiplexes because you cannot have Asian girls playing football, or it has to fit into some set of stereotypes to get the young mums or the old grannies or whatever, is not a bit too cynical for a profoundly creative process.

Ms Chadha: It can be, yes. It is that constant balance between whether you go for the formula or the creativity. With Beckham, it was a struggle because there are some parts of the film where it is a bit formulaic. You need the happy ending for that kind of film, for that audience. On the other hand, it is a film about a young, Indian girl with no Hollywood stars in it. It is set in Hounslow, following her life which you would not think was immediately commercial. It is quite a subversive film about race and culture in Britain today.

Q130  Mr Bryant: That is not what you put on the marketing.

Ms Chadha: Of course not but that was my choice in balancing. If I wanted to go the whole way, I could have made it about two English girls and cast one of the actresses from Dawson's Creek to put on an English accent, setting it in Tunbridge Wells, but that was not the film I wanted to make. I wanted to make a film about my own adolescence and about the nature of contemporary British society now, the way I see it in west London. One has to marry creative choices with marketing choices.

Chairman: Two English girls, in my view, would not have worked because that does not evoke the universal feeling which will sell your film in Japan as much as it will in the United States. I do not believe that you are a cynic at all; I believe that you are a businesswoman.

Q131  Mr Bryant: I was not saying you were a cynic.

Ms Chadha: Hopefully now I do not feel this problem because now I have made some money, but I had a very lean period after Bhaji on the Beach. I did not make a film for five years, not for want of trying. I tried everything. Bhaji was perceived as a successful British movie and it was because it was one of the few Channel 4 films that made its money back. I could not get a film made and I almost gave up. What I want to make a film about, what I perceive as being interesting and the cultural nuances of what I think works and does not work and the truth, is all about what is truthful. If something is truthful, it does not matter if it is not your experience. If it is truthful, people will appreciate that and buy that. That truth that I have is not necessarily always seen as valid to warrant spending £1 million on from a financier. Most financiers are people who do not share the same experiences as me and the same background as me. Part of it is about risk and looking at something thinking: yes, that film will make it. I do not know if that will work or not but it is trying to focus on something that is going on in Britain now and we should push that. I said to John Woodward in that meeting, "I am a British director. You have to support me. Otherwise I cannot function. Say this script is crap. I know it is not crap but there comes a point where you have to support me as a director. Otherwise I cannot function." I think it was that which rang true. It is the directors that make the films. Of course the scripts have to be good but the directors create the experience and make it an enjoyable experience for the cinema. It is about vision. One has to support directors that have vision, opinions and a voice and something to say. I think that is the missing link.

Q132  Mr Doran: It strikes me that your films are in a fairly long British tradition, very similar to Ealing Films and the Bill Forsyth films in the seventies and eighties and even Danny Boyle's early films. Particularly Bill Forsyth and Danny Boyle went off to America and they were not very successful so be careful. I was interested in what you said about the finance and knocking on every door. Obviously the gestation period for your film was a very long one. Do you feel that you have any real muscle now?

Ms Chadha: Yes.

Q133  Mr Doran: Or are you still in the hands of the money men?

Ms Chadha: No. Once you make a film that makes money, you have muscle. I have learned what works so hopefully I will put that into practice with my next film.

Q134  Mr Doran: One of the things we have been told about British film makers, particularly breaking into America, is that you virtually have to sell all of your rights, the follow-on rights, the DVD and television rights as well, to get the distribution rights. A lot of films may make it big but they are totally undersold. Was that your experience and is it likely to be your experience in the future?

Ms Chadha: Fox Searchlight did not pay a lot of money for the film but I knew that they would be a good home for the film. I knew they would know how to market this film. They did The Full Monty. If the film was going to work, I knew that they would have the expertise to make it work. What we managed to do was negotiate some box office bonuses. All of us, meaning me, the Film Council, all the financial investors, gained from that. We were able to negotiate that because we were a hot project. Unfortunately for most British films it is very hard getting an American deal. Then it is very hard to get your film out there and get someone to spend money on it, but again the success of Beckham should open the way for more, if you are hot on it. You need other people to think like me: okay; that worked there. How can we make something that is going to work there as well, which follows on from the same thing?

Q135  Chairman: Thank you. We have learned a large number of lessons. How we can absorb them and turn them into recommendations is our job but, if I may say so, in very many ways, you have done your job and we are most grateful to you.

Ms Chadha: Thank you. My pleasure. I should say that I have also been given one of the Film Council development slates. The purpose of that is to encourage new talent, new voices, and I am commissioning other writers now. I have commissioned one already. The idea for me is taking these people and fast tracking them to think commercially, like me, but still holding on culturally to what they are trying to do.

Chairman: It is a very remarkable thing that a film maker has to do because a film maker has to sell, as it were, the first can of Coca Cola over and over again with every product that he or she makes. Thank you very much.

Memorandum submitted by the New Producers' Alliance

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: MR PETER BLOORE, MR CHARLES HARRIS and MR DAVID CASTRO, New Producers' Alliance, examined.

Q136  Chairman: Gentlemen, thank you very much indeed for coming to see us. You were sitting through that. What lessons are there in it for you?

Mr Castro: Not to make a film and not to make money out of it.

Mr Harris: We have prepared an oral statement as you do not have a written statement from us. It is in three parts. Peter Bloore is a founder member of the New Producers' Alliance and chair of trustees, as well as a freelance writer and director. David Castro worked in business outside the film industry before becoming an award winning feature producer and also chief executive of the NPA. I am co-chair of the NPA, an experienced trainer and an award winning feature film director. I should add that the NPA is supported in part by the Film Council but our opinions are independent and we would say the same if they paid us less or more. We believe the British film industry makes a crucial, direct and indirect contribution to our culture and economy. At the same time, cinema is an art form, the most influential art form today and a vital way for the British to talk to themselves and to the world. In the NPA, we represent the new life blood of this industry. Each new film maker is individual with individual needs. It is important that these film makers should be able to develop their careers and be nurtured by a rich and thriving industry, one which offers many different options for progress. However, we detect certain very recent trends which cause us deep concern. What we see is an apparent narrowing of choice across the board from training through production to exhibition. There seems to be a belief in some quarters that you can somehow find the best method, somehow develop only the best people and the best projects, if only we knew which they were. However, we do not believe the world works like that. Lack of choice means narrowness, narrow people, narrow training, a narrow range of films. Choice means variety. Choice means that some projects should be driven by market forces, some should be subsidised and some benefit from automatic support such as tax incentives. We believe this applies in all areas that affect new film makers from exhibition right the way back to training.

Mr Bloore: As an organisation, we believe that it is culturally valuable and indeed vital for the British public to have access to a diverse range of films that reflect their personal experiences and beliefs. The last speaker is a fine example of that. We believe that new film makers with distinctive, individual voices improve this diversity. Our particular organisation, the New Producers' Alliance, plays its role in developing new talent by training new producers, writers and directors mainly in the business of film so that whatever their vision or story they will understand how best to finance it and bring it to the screen. We are the only open access, nationwide training organisation to do this. We are now in the third year of receiving Film Council support for our core activities. Without that support we would have to double our membership subscriptions and thereby exclude some people from training on grounds of cost alone. Their support has therefore been vital to us in being able to carry out our charitable training work. We welcome Alan Parker's emphasis on training in his recent keynote speech. However, we believe that recent Film Council policy has begun to focus too far on support for top end films and training of experienced producers to the detriment of lower budget films and the training of new producers. They should be of equal importance and be both part of a coherent training and production strategy. To this end we would like to see, firstly, a broadening of the Film Council's training funds to ensure that more schemes targeted at new talent can be supported. Secondly, some of the income of the current IPTF levy on film production should be made available for training entry level producers and film makers via the work of organisations like our own, the Directors' Guild, Screenwriters' Workshop, First Film Foundation and other similar organisations. It is fundamentally wrong, we believe, that so little of this money raised by a levy on film production should be failing to reach the new film makers.

Mr Castro: On production, in order to encourage new film makers, we believe that their needs must be supported for short films and low budget feature productions as the first step on a sustainable, long term programme. To this end, we broadly welcome the Ralph Report on low budget working practices. Also, many first time film makers have managed to get their films made through tax break deals for production so we strongly support tax recommendations to the House regarding maintaining these deals or similar deals in 2005. We also welcome the support of the Film Council's campaign to oblige the UK TV companies to support more British features and back the amendments in the Communications Bill to that effect. However, this is not enough. Firstly, an expansion of the new cinema fund by increasing its overall budget, targeting the extra money at new film makers and short films and reducing or even removing entirely its need to obtain match funding from other sources. Secondly, increased support for the regional funds to fund low budget first and second features as well as shorts. We are also aware that the Film Council has a very large task ahead of them and have for the last few years. They as well as others need sufficient and appropriate time in terms of make a significant and long lasting impact on the film industry.

Mr Bloore: Regarding distribution, we welcome the Film Council's proposals regarding digital distribution of films and believe that it should play its role in securing exhibition for new film makers as well. We would like to thank the select committee for this opportunity to present our perspective on the industry. We are not talking about the golden past of the British film industry here; we are talking about the future. The average age of our members is 26. If we support these new film makers, then we are supporting the future.

Chairman: Thank you. We very much appreciate the trouble you have gone to.

Q137  Michael Fabricant: Production, as I see it, is not only working out the cost of a production and how you are going to make the movie but also getting the money. As we heard from the last witness, there are ways to do it and ways not to do it. You provide training for producers. How much training do you give in how to raise money in this rather difficult environment?

Mr Bloore: All of our training to one degree or another is based on fund raising.

Mr Castro: And how to do it, why to do it and where to do it, the people you need to talk to and the pitfalls to look out for when you are searching for money. Yes, you can go to A or B but that might be hard or soft money. We try to deal as much as we can with the business of film. To that end, we do an inordinate amount of networking with financiers so that our members can meet the financiers so they get to know each other, because the basis of any relationship has to start somewhere. After that, so that film makers of any kind, whether it is producers, directors or whatever, understand what they are getting themselves into at any stage because they do not want to sell everything.

Q138  Michael Fabricant: I was interested to hear that you said it is important that we keep the current tax breaks. I do not like calling them "tax breaks"; I just think of them in terms of being a similar tax regime to that currently being enjoyed by television. I do not know whether you were here for the Directors' Guild earlier on this afternoon. They did not seem to think that the tax breaks made much difference at all.

Mr Harris: I missed that little bit of what they said. My personal feeling is, as was said very clearly and cogently, you are selling the first Coca Cola each time.

Q139  Michael Fabricant: Our Chairman is always cogent.

Mr Harris: The problem is who you go to. That is why we made the point that we need a multiple route of raising money, whether for development, distribution or production. There need to be a number of different places to go to. If you have market forces, that will take you in one direction. Some films are not necessarily appropriate for market forces. Subsidy works but there is a limit to how many people you can go to for subsidy. A film cannot have 200 gate keepers. The advantage of tax breaks is not just for production. It can be from training right through to distribution and then you can have two million people you can go to. If you fall at the first hurdle, you always have other hurdles to try. I know of award winning films that have had to go through quite a few hoops until they finally found the hoop that was right for them. The danger is, if you only have two types of hoop, you will only get two types of film.

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 per cent 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 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 element 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 coordinated. 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 ITPF 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 ten 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?

Q160  Ms Shipley: To make a cinema happen. If you want these outlets for the particular films that you are promoting ----

Mr Harris: I would look and see how the existing ones, the Everyman's, the Clapham picture house, how they came about.

Mr Bloore: They are all quite old cinemas unfortunately.

Q161  Ms Shipley: Quite. You see what I am getting at. I would have hoped you would have a really clear answer. You need a network of small cinemas, specialist cinemas, backed by whom? Who would you see backing them?

Mr Harris: The Film Council are looking into it at the moment. The BFI used to have that remit and it seems to have moved away from them.

Q162  Ms Shipley: I know nothing about this, apart from the fact I do not have a cinema in my town.

Mr Bloore: In the past there was the national film network that the British Film Network used to run. They would send films around the network of cinemas. Where my parents live in Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast they have an award winning cinema that gets and shows all of the major releases and a lot of the minor releases and all of the art house releases. That is a very good model of a small cinema that is still functioning and keeping its head financially above water.

Q163  Ms Shipley: Finally, Chairman, Stourbridge is doing a good thing at the moment. It has got lots of things, like the car showroom is going to sponsor a film evening and a local thing called the Bonded Warehouse is putting on one and various other rather strange locations are putting on well-known films. This is really exciting, there is a definite market for it there, but I do not know how often that sort of initiative happens. Does it happen often?

Mr Bloore: Not to my knowledge. Again, I have to say you are slightly beyond our remit of the training, so that is probably why we are trying to evade the questions. To pick up on your earlier point about the fact that in order to get the book published, do I understand that in the end you paid for the book?

Q164  Ms Shipley: Good God, no. I got a major publisher to publish it, and by giving them a very good marketing plan.

Mr Bloore: I suppose the point I was going to make is one big change that has happened in the last few years is with digital cameras, video cameras, coming on-line it is now possible for a film maker to make their film comparatively cheaply. Even then, a feature length film shot with a digital camcorder is likely to cost in the region of £100,000 to £200,000 and, of course, it will suffer difficulty in getting exhibition, so the things that you have just been citing about getting better exhibition and the Film Council's suggestions for digital exhibition of films would all be very valuable in getting those films out to a wider audience. It would also be very valuable to see the new Cinema Fund at the Film Council be able to fund more of these very, very low budget films because the risk is comparatively low, they are putting in relatively small sums of money. At the moment, off the top of my head I believe that they can do four or five a year, maybe it is a bit more. If they were able to make many more of those low budget digital films as a first film it would give film makers an opportunity to cut their teeth and learn their trade in the same way that Ken Loach, who I work with, originally cut his teeth on BBC productions before going on to make films like Kes. Unless you have that opportunity to practise your craft you will not have the opportunity to grow as a director and film maker.

Ms Shipley: Interesting, thank you.

Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. We are grateful for the trouble you have taken, you have really thought this through and it will be a great help to us. Thank you.