Agent Provocateur

Conor Dignam, in last week’s editorial in Screen International, recounts a meeting with a UK film executive who was lobbying for films like Harry Potter and The Dark Knight to be described as British.
While I applaud her sentiments, that is what they are, sentiments. Dignam makes the point that locations and financing may not be the same thing and that the tax legislation ultimately determines definitions not where the film was shot.



There seems to me a wider problem, namely why do films from countries other than America not travel better internationally? For a film the world is and should be the market and American films travel more successfully than most others.

 There are many reasons for this, including language, stars, production budgets and P&A budgets. The same issue of Screen is filled with detail about the nervous conservatism of sales agents and distributors in the current recession.

Statistics suggest our films are doing better than they were, both in export and domestically. There is creeping evidence that European films are clawing back audiences in domestic territories from the Americans. But add up the subsidies from all the EU countries that go into the film industry and you may be forgiven for thinking that we should be doing better than we are.

There are other less-well established explanations for the global dominance of American movies, like the fact that American movies generally have less dialogue than European movies and their scenes are shorter than scenes in most EU movies.

 This has the psychological effect of giving the movie greater impact on the audience (visual storytelling plays into the nature of ’seeing’ – we believe what we see) and also by leaving gaps (cutting beginning and end off scenes, which does wonders to improve the pacing of the film). We, the audience, fill in those gaps and that makes us feel good about watching the movie.



Add to that the prevalence of happy endings in American movies and you do have some sort of formula for successfully communicating in cinemas to the largest potential population available for film.

 So whether a film is British or not is less important than whether it works across many countries (and platforms).

 Rather than claiming credit for successful films, let’s just make sure we make our films appeal more widely to audiences.

How often do writers ask of themselves: can I make this script have wider appeal? It is often said that no one deliberately sets out to make a bad film, but you could be excused for thinking that this was not always true.

Any story can be told in many ways. Let us learn from the successful techniques used by Hollywood to tell our own stories so that it will not matter the British government, in their haste to make money for the Treasury by enticing foreign films to be shot here, have alienate smaller and medium-sized British producers by making the tax credits for filming abroad punitive.

We should concentrate on those areas where we do have some control, starting with the script. A client of mine has written a very funny script – a British Porky’s – a teenage sex comedy. It is charming and provocative, it has masses of appeal to teenagers. When he discussed it with a regional film agency the answer was that it was too commercial for them to support. Does it need to be a guaranteed failure, a cultural artifact that too few people will pay to go and see before it gets soft money?

Perhaps that was their way of politely rejecting it because they didn’t like it. But I suspect that there is some truth in their comment. The British do fear attempts to be commercially successful.