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Thank you
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Ramsay, Pawel Pawlikowski (Last Resort), Dominic Savage (Out Of Control) and Francesca Joseph (Tomorrow, La Scala!).
‘With the movie business you have to operate on the edge all the time because if you end up only doing what’s safe that’ll be disastrous. However, if you do operate on the edge, the truth is you must accept that sometimes you’ll fall off that edge and will do things that don’t work at all.”
With Thompson at the helm, the “real focus on films” has, he says, only really been in the last couple of years. And with the demise of other network TV filmmaking oper- ations during that same period, BBC Films has become an ever- more crucial ‘player’ in a cash- strapped industry.
“FilmFour is, hopefully, starting up again and I know that we will flourish much better with competi- tion. Being the only game in town isn’t great because what you want is a flourishing industry full of strong confident people. If it’s only us and the Film Council backing things, that’s not a healthy indus- try and everybody’s weaker.
“Yes, I’m looking forward to FilmFour getting going again. I notice, though, they’ve talked about using our ‘model’, but I think they might have got the wrong end of the stick about just what our ‘model’ is.
“We’re not just going to do low budget British films. Take, for
example, a film we’ve just devel- oped with Beryl Vertue’s compa- ny which has attracted Bruce Willis to it. That’s a much bigger budget film. Then there’s another project with Traffic producer Laura Bickford about the interna- tional world of pharmaceuticals , how drugs are tested, the shenanigans and the politics of it. Very complex, very interesting.”
Thompson agrees that, given such limited financial resources, BBC Films is probably “trying to punch above its weight. Having an effective TV operation con- nected to the filming is part of that. The Gathering Storm was a great success for us on TV and Hugh Whitemore is currently writ- ing a sequel which, all being well, will be theatrical.
“Look, it’s getting harder and harder to make the right choices in this current market place because the audience is so fickle about what they go for. One of the guidelines I’ve adopted is not to have too many rules about what you’re going to do as the rules are there to be broken.
“But if, at the end of the day, we’re not backing talent, taking risks or giving artists a chance to express themselves on film, then we’re not doing our job properly.”
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