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Presents
Presents
Photos: Co-starring in An Ideal Husband: Minnie Driver (below); Cate Blanchett and Rupert Everett; Julianne Moore (top).
hit The Full Monty. It’s the story of a young girl’s determination to find a miracle to save her broth- er’s life with the resultant far-reaching effects on her family and their rural community.
Explains Calderwood: “Simon’s film, co-direct- ed by Billie Eltringham, has no relation to our pro- ducers but reflects our open-door policy which dic- tates that one-third of all projects in development and films in production will be made with produc- ers who are not participating in the franchise.”
As well as getting the most generous handout of the three Lottery-funded franchises - The Film Consortium copped £30.5m, while DNA Films was granted £29m - Pathé Pictures also earned some ini- tial eyebrow-raising because the outfit, with its strong French links, wasn’t deemed to be exactly pukka.
Not even managing director Alexis Lloyd’s plea that his consortium would try and redress the “alarming” shortage of British films that actually make it on to UK screens along with his trumpeting that “the fact that Pathé is an Anglo-French com- pany shows that we (the French) have faith in British talent and their long-term potential” seem to cut much ice with blinkered London-centric critics.
According to Calderwood, “there’s an odd xenophobia especially about the English film
industry when it comes to the French which we don’t seem to have about, say, the Americans. We seem to be comfortable doing business with Americans but are slightly suspicious dealing with the French. There’s just no logic to it.
“I think it’s a very positive thing that a European based company is keen to invest in British films. Also the reality is that Pathé has been established in the UK for several years as a distributor (from T2: Judgement Day and Richard III to Breaking The Waves and Love & Death On Long Island). It’s not just a company that has sud- denly decided to invest here for the purpose of the franchise. Our executive director Timothy Burrill had been working here for some three years before the award and produced The Woodlanders with C4.”
Calderwood and her team has been inundated with scripts. “We get about 100 scripts a month and a lot of those are projects from outside our own franchise boundaries which have been unsuccess- ful in getting funding elsewhere. I think that’s per- fectly understandable but hope that as time goes on we’ll get less of that and be dealing more with the projects we’ve developed with our own pro- ducers. But it is, after all, one of the responsibilities
of an organisation that has access to public money that it should be accessible to the whole industry.” She was also keen to tout a brave new initia- tive being principally sponsored by Pathé and the mobile phone network Orange. This is the Orange Prize for Screenwriting designed to unearth annu- ally the most outstanding scripts by undiscovered British writers. The three winning subjects, to be announced next January, will win £10,000 each as well as a Pathé development commission. The overall winner will then be produced and distrib-
uted by Calderwood’s company.
The principal ambition behind the award of
Lottery franchises was to try and move away from the desperate short-termism and lack of continu- ity which has so long dogged investment in British film production.
As Calderwood explains: “The idea was to help create British ‘mini-studios’ and the Lottery cash is really seed money over the course of six years to get studios like ours to the point where they’ve got enough of a turnover, with solid investment and solid slates, that they can stand alone. That’s how I see it.” ■ QUENTIN FALK
A profile of DNA Films will