Film England

Culturally English Filmmaking Since the 1990s

Andrew Higson

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780857732194
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Film & Video

In a film business increasingly transnational in its production arrangements and global in its scope, what space is there for culturally English filmmaking? In this groundbreaking book, Andrew Higson demonstrates how a variety of Englishnesses have appeared on screen since 1990, and surveys the genres and production modes that have captured those representations. He looks at the industrial circumstances of the film business in the UK, government film policy and the emergence of the UK Film Council. He examines several contemporary 'English' dramas that embody the transnationalism of contemporary cinema, from 'Notting Hill' to 'The Constant Gardener'. He surveys the array of contemporary fiction that has been re-worked for the big screen, and the pervasive - and successful - Jane Austen adaptation business. Finally, he considers the period's diverse films about the English past, including big-budget, Hollywood-led action-adventure films about medieval heroes, intimate costume dramas of the modern past, such as 'Pride and Prejudice', and films about the very recent past, such as 'This is England'.

1 Film production in the UK in the 1990s and 2000s

This chapter provides an overview of film production in the UK in the 1990s and 2000s; wherever possible, I focus on what might reasonably be identified as English filmmaking, but the film business is at certain levels regulated across the UK as a whole, which makes it difficult to sustain a distinction between specifically English developments and those that apply to the UK as a whole. In the first two sections of the chapter, I explore the context in which films got made in England, and especially the financial, organisational and political arrangements that both made production possible and limited its scope. There were many different types of films produced, and one of the key things that distinguished films from one another was budget, which itself had an impact on marketing, box-office performance and cultural presence. The size of a production budget depended to a great extent on whether or not one of the Hollywood studio-distributors was involved – which inevitably had an impact on the ‘national’ status of the film thereby developed. Of course, there were occasionally low-budget films that performed much better than Hollywood-funded blockbusters and, in examining the market position of films, I will take this sort of performance into account.

In the first section of the chapter, I focus on film production in England in the 1990s; in the second section, I focus on the 2000s. Categorising historical developments by decades in this way inevitably oversimplifies the complex nature of things, but it also makes the process of categorisation manageable. In this case, there was in fact a key development in the year 2000, the establishment of the Film Council (later the UK Film Council), which played a key role in shaping the UK film business in subsequent years. The division of my account into a section on the 1990s and another on the 2000s does therefore have some substantive basis. In the final section of the chapter, I will look at some other ways of categorising English films besides budget and scale, focusing on genres or production trends, and the sorts of representations of the nation and national identity that they offer.¹

The UK film business in the 1990s

For a film to reach audiences, a funding package has to be in place to ensure the film can be made – and film funding is by any standards an extremely complex business. Most productions today are in some way or other transnational – which is to say that in order to establish a large enough budget, funding has to be sought from a variety of sources both domestic and foreign. Funding in the UK will come in the form of investment from a range of public and private organisations, companies and individuals, including American-based studios, broadcasting companies, large equity funds and smaller independent financiers, as well as the government-supported British Screen (in the 1990s); public subsidies and grants, notably the National Lottery scheme, which from 2000 was administered by the Film Council, but also various more modest European Union funds; tax breaks and other financial incentives; pre-sale deals with distributors, and so on. Although the National Lottery funding invested in film production has probably attracted the most media attention over the years since it was introduced in 1995, the most significant source of public financial support was, perhaps surprisingly, the various tax breaks, and the related loopholes exploited by film financiers.²

As Margaret Dickinson and Sylvia Harvey note, the central problem for UK film producers, the production business as a whole and the film policy that regulates that business has long been and remains ‘how to coexist with Hollywood’.³ A brand name for a series of large and extremely powerful corporations with a global reach and involvement in film financing, production and distribution, Hollywood is a presence that the UK film business cannot ignore. Many UK film productions are in some way dependent on Hollywood finance – and if they are not, they must still find a way of working within a distribution system and an exhibition market that is dominated by the Hollywood companies. Outright competition with Hollywood is not really feasible, although occasionally very large companies without ties to the Hollywood studios will attempt that; most forms of coexistence with Hollywood depend on collusion in some guise or other, however, rather than competition. Some ‘British’ films are made self-consciously to be different from ‘Hollywood’ films, a form of product differentiation that is generally designed to exploit niche markets – but many of the films that might be seen as distinctive in this sense are in fact funded by Hollywood companies keen to have a stake in those niche markets.

The smallest films, with no apparent Hollywood involvement, still have to coexist with Hollywood, in the sense that they must jostle for space alongside films that clearly do have Hollywood support. And even the most self-consciously indigenous film will usually still operate in some way transnationally, by securing funding from a foreign source, for instance, or by being shown at film festivals and independent or art-house cinemas in various markets around the world. In this context, putting together a budget for a film production was always a very complex business, involving tapping into a variety of funding sources that often left little scope for profit that could be invested in subsequent productions. Most UK productions in the 1990s and 2000s were put together as one-off packages, therefore, rather than as part of a carefully planned production slate, and companies came into being simply for the purpose of that particular project.

Having established some broad parameters for the period as a whole, the rest of this section will focus on developments in the 1990s, up to the establishment of the Film Council. Taking into account all films produced in the UK and all others shot elsewhere but with a UK financial involvement, an average of 83 UK films was produced each year between 1990 and 1999 – with the average higher in the second half of the decade than the first half, reflecting the positive impact of both tax relief and Lottery funding as sources of production finance. It is also worth noting that more UK films were made in the 1990s than in either of the two previous decades, an impressive turnaround for the UK film business. But it is important to put these figures into perspective. For a start, the majority of funding for these films was inward investment from the USA. Most of the films funded in this way enjoyed a higher budget, and sometimes a significantly higher budget, than the average UK films without US funding. Thus the average budget for films where the majority of funding came from the UK was never more than £2.5m; while the average budget for American-financed or part-financed films made in the UK was never less than £10m – and went as high as £18.5m in 1997.⁴

It is also important to look at the box-office performance of these various films. Nearly half the UK films made in the 1990s were still unreleased a year after being completed, while only a quarter of them enjoyed a wide release, playing on 30 or more screens around the country. UK films where the majority of funding was from the UK rarely managed to secure more than 4 per cent of the total box-office revenue generated at UK cinemas. The figure of 8 per cent in 1997, for instance, was mainly due to the unexpectedly stellar performance of The Full Monty (1997). US/UK co-productions improved their box-office performance dramatically across the decade, reflecting the fact that inward investment in such productions was going up at the same time. This meant that the proportion of box-office revenue generated each year by Hollywood films with no UK involvement went down by a quarter across the decade – but even in 1999, such films were still taking a massive 60 per cent of the UK box-office revenue. In other words, across the decade as a whole the great majority of box-office revenue was generated by Hollywood films with no UK funding.⁵

The Full Monty: a major box-office hit in 1997.

There was a big gap between the low-budget UK-financed films destined for art-house-type distribution, and the crossover films designed to work in both the art houses and the new multiplexes, many of which benefited from funding from American companies, either the studios or mini-majors like Miramax. There was an even bigger gap between those mid-budget crossover films and those that were primarily about inward investment: big-budget, Hollywood-sponsored films that happened to be produced in the UK. Among films in production during 1997, for instance, Babymother, a musical about poor black youths in London, was a low-budget, £2m film funded by Channel 4 and the Arts Council. At the other end of the scale, Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace also counted as a British film because it was an inward investment film made in the UK, for a budget initially registered as £25m, though generally estimated to be closer to $115m. It went on to take £51m at the UK box office, where Babymother took just £62,000.⁶

Somewhere in between these two poles were rare productions like Notting Hill (1999), a film with strongly British (mainly English) subject matter, made by a prominent UK company, Working Title; at the time, Working Title enjoyed backing from a much larger European media corporation, PolyGram, which itself had strong links with an American studio, Universal. Notting Hill was made for £15m, which was a major budget for a UK film. It went on to take £31m at the UK box office, and an enormous £113m at the US box office, a figure that was well beyond the reach of the great majority of UK films. Such films ensured that the British film business and British filmmakers maintained a high profile, but also proved the worth of the companies involved in the production and the value of strong connections with the major American distributors, without which it was extremely difficult for UK films to make a mark in the global box-office stakes.⁷

Working Title had established a name for itself in the mid-1980s with risky, innovative projects like My Beautiful Laundrette (1985). It remained a vibrant and very successful company throughout the 1990s, with a keen eye for modestly budgeted, UK-focused films that might yet be major commercial successes; it also became the American Coen brothers’ production company. On the UK front, Working Title’s first major box-office success was Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), which was made for £2m and went on to take £28m at the UK box office alone, and $245m worldwide.⁸ Other important films included the Rowan Atkinson comedy vehicle Bean (1997), the East London gangster film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), and the lavish and thrilling costume drama Elizabeth (1998). Such films operated in the middle ground of the UK market, somewhere between the niche art-house film and the US-led blockbuster. It is unlikely that Working Title would have been able to notch up so many successes had it not been for the support of PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, which was part of the European group Phillips – but which at the end of the decade was sold to the Canadian giant Seagram’s, which also owned Universal.

Another key production company and source of funding in the 1990s was the public service broadcaster Channel 4, and its various subsidiaries, including Channel Four Films, Film Four International and Film Four Ltd. Channel Four was able to operate variously as a funder, a production company, a distributor and a broadcaster of films in which it had invested. At the end of the decade, in 1998, it combined its production, sales and distribution activities under the umbrella of Film Four Ltd, whose launch signalled a new departure in their production and funding policy, away from the innovative and often risky low-budget fare with which they had made their name and towards more expensive international co-productions.

For the bulk of the 1990s, however, it was their support of some of the key English auteur filmmakers of the period that is telling. Thus they funded films by Mike Leigh (Life Is Sweet, 1991, Career Girls, 1997), Ken Loach (Raining Stones, 1993, My Name is Joe, 1998), Terence Davies (The Long Day Closes, 1992, The House of Mirth, 2000) and Peter Greenaway (The Baby of Mâcon, 1993, The Pillow Book, 1996). They also helped launch the careers of a new generation of filmmakers such as Gurinder Chadha (Bhaji on the Beach, 1993), Danny Boyle (Shallow Grave, 1994) and Michael Winterbottom (Welcome to Sarajevo, 1997). They had a hand in some of the most commercially successful UK films of the period too, in Four Weddings and a Funeral, Trainspotting (1996) and East Is East (1999).

The UK Film Council and the film business in the 2000s

In 2000, the UK government created the Film Council as a body tasked with the maintenance, development and promotion of the UK film industry, including production activity. I discuss the Council in more detail in the next chapter. Suffice it to say here that by the late 2000s, in order to achieve its purposes, the Council was distributing around £27m of National Lottery funding and a further £27m grant-in-aid from the government to film-related activities each year.⁹ On the production front, the two key schemes were the Premiere Fund, which provided £8 million a year ‘to finance production of popular, mainstream films’, and the New Cinema Fund, which provided £5 million a year ‘to innovative film- makers’.¹⁰ The Premiere Fund has been used over the years to award grants of up to £2.5m per project, with its largest grant – £2.58m – awarded to the animated film Valiant in 2002. In fact, there have only been six other awards of £2m or above: Mike Bassett: England Manager (2001), Gosford Park (2001), Sylvia (2003), Five Children and It (2004), Stormbreaker (2006) and Closing the Ring (2007). Other films supported by the Premiere Fund in the latter part of the 2000s included Miss Potter (2006), Becoming Jane (2007), St Trinian’s (2007) and Happy-Go-Lucky (2008).¹¹

At the other end of the scale is the New Cinema Fund, used to support riskier and more experimental low-budget work, such as Once Upon a Time in the Midlands (2002), Touching the Void (2003), Bullet Boy (2004), This Is England (2006), Brick Lane (2007) and London to Brighton (2006), which all received between £185,000 and £750,000. Somewhere in between the extremes of the Premiere Fund and the New Cinema Fund was Bend It Like Beckham (2002), which received just under £1m, and went on to record a box-office gross 35 times the size of its Lottery grant, which makes it in this sense the most successful Lottery-funded film to date.¹²

For all the work of the UK Film Council, the film business in the UK in the 2000s, as in the 1990s, was dominated by large companies that were either foreign-owned or had little involvement in film production. The large distributors and exhibitors were thus much larger and more powerful than any of the UK-based production companies. The production business in the UK remained, in the words of the Film Council, ‘corporately-dispersed’, with numerous companies still set up simply for the purpose of making one film.¹³ In 2008, for instance, the Film Council recorded 202 companies as being involved with UK film production activity, of which 185 were associated with single projects.¹⁴ Among UK-based production companies, the most successful in the 2000s included Working Title again; Pathé Productions, the UK arm of a French multinational producer and distributor; Aardman, the makers of the Wallace and Gromit animated films, Chicken Run (2000) and Flushed Away (2006); two television company spin-offs, BBC Films and Film Four; and various other companies such as Future Films, Vertigo, Revolution, Ingenious and He...