From Issue 9, March 2002:

New Cinema Found

Paul Trijbits of the UK Film Council's New Cinema Fund interviewed by Nic Ransome

(Full Interview)

The New Cinema Fund of the Film Council was the only part to come through Alex Cox’s recent Sight & Sound polemic relatively unscathed. It must now spend 2003 being measured against last year’s extraordinary artistic, critical and competition successes: Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters won the Golden Lion outright at Venice while Paul Greengrass’ Bloody Sunday shared Berlin’s Golden Bear. The Fund has also recently put money into films as varied as Tomorrow La Scala!, This Is Not a Love Song, Anita and Me and Cox’s own A Revenger’s Tragedy. Paul Trijbits, the Fund’s director, talked to ScriptWriter’s Nic Ransome about the New Cinema Fund’s annus mirabilis and shared his thoughts on distribution, genre and the art of the low-budget script.

NR: Tell us about your own journey through the treacheries of the film business and how you ended up where you are now.

PT: I came to the UK [from the Netherlands, not South Africa as erroneously stated in ScriptWriter Issue 9] in the 80s and went to film school at the Polytechnic of Central London School of Communication – subsequently renamed the University of Westminster – where I did a three-year degree in film. I then spent a year at the National Film School, unofficially as a producer of graduation films. After that I threw myself into the film business, first as an assistant location manager, then location manager and quite rapidly ended up producing music videos.

I set up a music video production company with partners, ran it for five or six years, and produced our first feature film, Hardware (1990), by writer/director Richard Stanley, one of our music video directors. I ran the company with the writer Trix Worrell who was at the National Film School; he’d done For Queen and Country (1988) and the first pilot episodes of Desmond’s. We worked together for about seven or eight years and were involved as producers or executive producers on a variety of films.

After Hardware we did Dust Devil (1992), Young Americans (1993), and Roseanna’s Grave (1997). Then I was running my own company where I was producing or executive producing a number of pictures for Sky when it was just starting up. I’ve worked a good deal with first-time film-makers, partly because of my own experiences. Being from another country and not coming from a film or theatrical family background, I found myself with people who were also new entrants. It’s really challenging but also satisfying to work with people who are young and talented because if you get it right, you’ve created something new.

In our youthful exuberance we felt that the producers’ organisation wasn’t particularly reflective of younger producers so we set up the New Producers Alliance with a handful of colleagues, the ‘young Turks’ as we were called, or ‘the multiplex generation’, probably because some of the films we were trying to make were aimed at multiplexes rather than art-house cinemas.  In a ten-year period I produced about eleven or twelve films.

Partly because of my interest and involvement in the New Producers Alliance – and subsequently PACT – I was interested not only in producing films but was concerned with fighting for the structure and the world in which we were supposed to be working.

When the Film Council was established, I was approached and asked if I were willing to be a candidate for the post of Director of the New Cinema Fund. I realised – and it took me some time to work out what it could be and what I could do in it – that this was a role where you could, in addition to being involved in 25 feature films in the two and a half years we’ve been in existence, take on the responsibility to be concerned about and fight for the place in which people are able to make their first, second or third feature film. That is a unique combination. In addition to helping a certain number of films to happen, there is a larger picture: you’re not just doing it for yourself or your own company or company colleagues.

NR: What is ‘new cinema’ within the frame of reference of the New Cinema Fund?

PT: Before we were appointed, it was reported that there was going to be a Premiere Fund, a New Cinema Fund and a Development Fund. Fortunately they didn’t describe in great detail exactly what these would be. There were words that were used every now and again, like ‘innovative’, ‘ground-breaking’, ‘not your run of the mill films that could be funded without help’. I think what’s interesting is that there was a vision about what kind of films could be made here. If you look at what we’ve done, from Once Upon a Time in the Midlands and Anita and Me – slightly larger budget, mainstream films – to the £400,000 This Is Not a Love Song, there is clearly a huge variety of films.

I think what the New Cinema doesn’t do is just make films which without our money couldn’t be made, though that’s a function of what we do. It’s true that without our investment, the films probably wouldn’t be made but that’s not our criterion. What we are seeking and supporting are very strong, individualistic voices; stories that say something and, I suppose, touch people, but they’re not what I would call generic B-movies. Somebody said to us – it wasn’t meant to be a compliment but I’ve taken it as one – that the problem with the Film Council is that you have no idea whether your film will fit into their criteria and that the films all seem to be different. The fact that there isn’t one obvious through-line – ‘If I write a film like that, it will definitely win backing,’ is actually, I think, highly complimentary.

NR: So you’re looking for something that stands out, that has an individual style?

PT: Not all films will achieve their ambition but when we look at them, when we reach the point where we decide to back them, their ambition is clear.

NR: There’s a strong political, specifically left-wing tradition in British alternative cinema. Do you look for material with interesting and contemporary political or social themes?

PT: Both The Magdalene Sisters and Bloody Sunday are two extremely powerful, political movies. Blind Flight is another strong political story. In fact, if there is one through-line, it’s the kind of film with which I grew up in the late 70s/early 80s, films like The Battle of Algiers, really strong, powerful stories.

NR: It’s revealing that you should use The Battle of Algiers as an example rather than a more downbeat British kitchen-sink, social-issue drama because it strikes me that in the Fund’s output the themes tend to be deeply embedded in bold and well-crafted narratives rather than give the impression that somebody wanted to talk about a specific issue and simply grafted the story to it.

PT: I’m not the one who dreams up the story but I think that certain films in which we’ve been involved have definitely been driven by strong drama. On the other hand, Body Song, which is entirely made out of archive footage, has no real narrative drive so that is the complete opposite. I guess what we try not to do is the stuff in the middle: social-realist texts with not much of a narrative.

NR: Both The Magdalene Sisters and This Is Not a Love Song address complex social issues and are excellent examples of how to have difficult themes expressed by a strong narrative.

PT: First of all, they both stem from elements of truth. In the case of The Magdalene Sisters, it was based loosely on a documentary that Peter [Mullan] had seen. When he did his research he found many different stories and although he created his own story, it was underpinned by absolute, hard-core fact. He made it into a really strong story of what would have happened to those girls; it was a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. With This Is Not a Love Song, it’s a reversal of the Tony Martin story. Although it was an experiment in extreme low-budget film-making, the through-line was a very strong narrative: what would happen to two characters who found themselves in that situation by accident.

NR: This Is Not a Love Song seems to have had quite an interesting genesis. At what stage did you become involved?

PT: The film-makers, Bille Eltringham, Simon Beaufoy, Kate Ogborn and Martin Blaney, challenged us in a way. They said they would like to see if there were a way to make a film for very little money using a wonderful new invention, digital film-making, which allows things to be done very differently, first and foremost, to shed the basic minimum requirements of a feature film shoot. In the UK when you say ‘feature film’ it’s £2 million budget minimum. Why? Because it’s 90 minutes, a 70-man crew and you need 40 trucks. Before you know it, even if you haven’t shot a frame, it’s £2 million just for the bare bone basics.

What they wanted to do was break some of the traditional barriers. If we were going to do this, we had to create something that started with a treatment and carried us to a film at the other end – and all this for a cost of £412,000 in total. What we were asked to do was not only to buy into the story, but to buy into the process of making the film. They underpinned it with valid reasons for why they were going to do what they were going to do.

There was only one point at which we could get out. We were buying into a focused team and their specific plan. They said here’s the process by which we propose to make this film and you either buy into it or you don’t, that’s your choice. They had a treatment about two key characters. After the treatment there would be a four-week workshop rehearsal period with those two characters out of which would come a set of story notes that Simon would use to write a draft in three weeks. Once that draft was in, we had one weekend in which we could say yes, we are sticking with this, or no we’re not.

NR: So you were given a ‘get out’ clause?

PT: One weekend. But if we went with it, principal photography would start within three weeks. They would shoot no more than twelve days and post-production would take a specified period of time. That is the process we bought into, a sort of concertina version of making a film and I think it worked although we were slightly stymied by the foot & mouth outbreak. . I think it made the film unique for what it is. I don’t think it would have been any better if it had been developed for two and a half years.

NR: How did you become involved with The Magdalene Sisters?

PT: Peter, as producer, came to us at an early stage. He had some interest from an Italian distributor and there was support from Scottish Screen. It was a passionate story and there was a passionate meeting where Peter made it clear what he wanted to make in a very uncompromising way. That’s probably the thing that pulled us in most: that he was not going to compromise; so we knew that the film would be as uncompromising as it could be and that he wouldn’t be waylaid during the process of doing the draft of the script. It was hard work to put the finance together but it was only the second film we were involved with after Bloody Sunday, on which we came in rather late. Here we really were architects of how the film was going to be made and we supported it through thick and thin.

NR: You had quite a good year at the festivals in 2002. What are your personal feelings about your successes?

PT: When we started, the key thing was just to bring in films. The fact that Bloody Sunday and The Magdalene Sisters were so successful is down to them being extremely powerful movies. The atmosphere was right for those movies to win recognition in the face of some pretty stiff competition. It was an extraordinary year for British films. The cry that everything was dead, that British film was dead and that we’d killed film-making and creativity because there was nothing in Cannes the previous year seems to have been something of a politically motivated war-cry. There are certain films we’ve made that, as a former producer, I don’t think I’d have wanted to produce, but I’m happy and proud to have supported them. It’s fantastic because it shows that even a system that was a rather sweeping change from what was there before can win recognition in the most competitive places.

NR: In a recent piece, Screen International mentioned the fact that The Magdalene Sisters and Bloody Sunday were films supported by the New Cinema Fund. The broadsheets still seem to be motivated by the anti-Lottery, anti-Film Council mentality. Do you think you will ever resolve the problem whereby a bad film, if it has Film Council money in it, is the Film Council's fault, but a good film is down to the film-makers?

PT: There are certain film critics who seem to forget that even in the films they love there is a substantial amount of Lottery money or Arts Council money or Film Council money, but the films they hated were also financed by Lottery money or Film Council money. I declare my interest. I’m not English. I think there’s a fundamental problem in the UK in that film and cinema isn’t really seen as a fully worthy partner of other art forms. We often have critical success and, more often than before, commercial success but we seem to be lambasted, I think unfairly. Not just us, but films per se, British film, and that’s a disease. If I started to worry about what critics and newspapers said, then we would be doing the wrong thing.

NR: Why do you think there is such a problem in Britain with this dichotomy between art and commerce, that something can only be one or the other? It seems to be a uniquely English problem. In the American entertainment industry they are quite happy to be both commercially and creatively motivated.

PT: It seems that in theatre and literature you do allow it, but cinema doesn’t seem to be the first medium that artists choose to express themselves, and maybe we’ve always been the poorer relation and have never been successful in saying that this is a recognised form of creativity, art and commerce.

NR: What’s your perspective on the distribution debate, especially in the light of Alan Parker’s recent speech?

PT: He didn’t just say there was a problem with distribution. He said there seems to be, if you go back over the last twenty years, a sense that because we’ve always said that cinema is not purely a cultural good but has to have commercial underpinning, that putting money into and supporting production in the hope that we build something that could stand on its own two feet, doesn’t seem to work.

In fact, it’s quite clear that for the past fifteen years or so, doing it like that doesn’t work at all. So the challenge, I think – which is why it was a rousing speech – is that we should become involved in distribution, not simply as a distributor providing the money and therefore choosing what films are made, but thinking around distribution and making it part of the process of deciding which films should receive what money. Nothing that we’ve done to date seems to have done that and just pumping money into production did very little. In fact, it was the worst of both worlds. It had very little commercial return and very little critical success. I would say our predecessors – British Screen etc. – were all trying to balance the cultural and creative side with the commercial side, with varying degrees of success.

NR: So in the past, distribution hasn’t been thought through at an early enough stage?

PT: All the films we’ve done to date have had distribution, but I would have been very happy if instead of the distributors being able to put up, because of the market conditions, between £100,000 and £150,000, they had been able to put up substantially more money because maybe Lottery money or other tax breaks had been available. All the tax break money was really about making as many movies at as high a budget as possible. That is not necessarily commensurate with building anything structurally sound or creatively challenging.

I would say that it’s proven that if you make challenging, interesting, quirky, off-the-beaten-track films – all the ones in which we’ve been involved – then all of them will obtain a decent UK release. We’ve done three feature documentaries and they’ve all been picked up for UK distribution.

NR: Do you think that difficult and complex subject matter won’t generally play to a wide mainstream audience, or is it simply a question of marketing?

PT: Difficult, complex subject matter will have problems playing to a wider audience but at the moment we’re suffering from the fact that difficult subject matter won’t play to any audience. So first we need to put distribution support in place and plan to make distribution more a part of the process of getting the films out to an audience. I think that this is absolutely necessary and we are not doing it at the moment.

A good example is that the number of properly released foreign-language films has dwindled to almost nothing for the simple reason that most of the broadcasters – BBC, Channel 4 – ceased to buy them. This meant the distributors couldn’t risk putting those films out and now, as a result, in the last ten years we have had such a paucity of films available that we’ve probably lost half a generation of people who’ve never even seen a subtitled film. It now costs twice as much, back-pedalling all the way, to win them back.

NR: Something that came up at one of the recent Script Factory events was a very particular beef, for right or wrong, that people have with the Film Council. Before the Film Council there were multiple funding bodies from where you could receive an increment here and there. This has been replaced by what is seen by some people as a monolithic body. From what you’re saying, it doesn’t seem that you think this is affecting the range and scope of work that’s now being funded.

PT: It’s true, but we cannot be, never will be and were never intended to be the funder for everybody, for everything. Towards the end of last year there was a moratorium at Film Four and that basically left just BBC Films and ourselves. It was a bit scary because that was never the intention for the Film Council, which was supposed to have more of a supporting function than a purely driving function.

NR: So do you feel that your role has had to change since Film Four, Sky and Granada have all gone to the wall?

PT: The fewer doors you can knock on, the worse it is for a producer.

NR: Does it put more pressure on you?

PT: Yes. But I’m delighted that there’s recently been an appointment to run Film Four as this gives us great scope in the area in which we operate most. We’ve found many other people with whom we can work: tax partnership companies, foreign sales companies, distributors etc. I think that one of the ways to increase the number of doors would be if some of the distribution were supported and had more money available to it; you would then be able to have the UK distributors as ports of entry.

NR: In North America, companies like Lions Gate and Alliance Atlantis put big money into projects right at the beginning. It’s a very different business model.

PT: I think that was what Alan Parker’s speech was all about.

NR: What kind of emphasis do you put on shorts or work that people have done already when you’re looking at a project?

PT: Firm emphasis. The New Cinema Fund spends about 20% of its annual budget on short film-making: £1 million every year. We’ve redesigned the funding and re-divvied up the money because there was already money in previous incarnations through the Lottery, British Screen, and the BFI, going into shorts and we thought it would make sense to have a more cohesive plan.

We spend half that money on having a hundred extremely low-budget digital shorts made every year, together with thirteen regional and national partners who put up the other half, so we have another £1 million pot to make a hundred shorts. That is completely grass roots, open access, as wide, as mad, as off-the-wall as it’s humanly possible to be, with three golden rules: under ten minutes, under £10,000 and digital.

Then we have slightly more sophisticated, more specialised schemes where we’ve been looking at certain genres or a completion fund in cases of short film-making. We do this mostly with Film Four Lab, though we’re about to do some with the BBC, and this yields another thirty short films a year. For me shorts are first and foremost not so much a calling-card for the film-makers but an area in which they can really research and develop without any kind of commercial agenda. Of course it’s great if the films are seen and we’re doing all sorts of exciting things to enable this such as on websites and on DVDs; there’s a whole range of things that can be done.

NR: Do you think there’s any difference between the position that a writer has in a low-budget script and a Premiere Fund script? There is a perception that low-budget cinema, particularly art-house cinema, is often the vision of the director or writer/director.

PT: Our first film, Hardware, was made for under £1 million at a time when average budgets were £2 to £3 million. It was really low-budget but it was absolutely a genre film. That’s why it worked and made money. What’s interesting is that the advent of digital film-making and all the philosophy that goes with it has allowed people to be liberated and think of low-budget film-making in a different way.

Just for the record, what we do see and almost immediately pass on, are those projects which are conceived as fairly normal, run-of-the-mill, £2.5 to £3.5 million films that can’t raise that money so they suggest doing it digitally, as if this were some kind of magic that would make the project better and easier to finance. I don’t believe in that.

I think that in the UK the ability to write to budget is very much lacking whatever the chosen subject. The beauty of Hardware was that it was all set in one place within twenty-four hours. Although we did go out and have a three-day shoot in Morocco to do the desert stuff, that was a kind of little add-on. Such add-ons were not fundamental. If the film had been set in the middle of the desert and shot on location, I don’t know how we could have made it for under £5 million.

NR: Do you think there is a lack of discipline and a lack of scope in scripts?

PT: I just think people have not been trained enough. Unfortunately, film-making is an expensive medium and the larger the budget, the more things you need to add to it for it to work. New York indie film-making is much smarter in achieving this and is able to make films for far less money that ultimately still play out to a relatively wide audience. [Think of Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan; Ed Burns’ The Brothers McMullen; Darren Aronofsky’s Pi].

NR: Do you have any specific thoughts about whether it’s easier to work with writer/director teams or someone who is both writer and director?

PT: We’re not prescriptive about it. Coming from a producer background, I strongly believe in the creative role of the producer in stimulating certain kinds of projects and stimulating writer/directors. I think half the films we’ve done are writer/director films. In a way this issue of writing to budget is not just about writers, in a way it is also the producer’s role. Maybe they too aren’t skilled or skilled enough or think enough about writing to budget or creating material that might fit. I think it has much to do with the fact that UK films have very little tradition in genre film-making but what we have had, we’ve done rather well if you think of Ealing or Hammer. They seemed to be able to write a series of stories within a certain set of parameters and audiences liked them.

NR: Where do you stand on the genre debate because some people, especially critics of the Film Council, have very strong ideas about genre being a negative thing?

PT: I’ve done a Thriller. I’ve done a Romantic Comedy and I think genre is very interesting. We are in a scheme that we’re running with the BBC from which came Tomorrow La Scala! and Sarah Gavron’s His Little Wife, the Dennis Potter award-winner. There is an element that this is Play for Today; low-budget films with a strong authorial voice, but they still have to fit within boundaries that are automatically going to focus on the kind of film it’s going to be. We’ve set up a Sci-Fi scheme in which of 120 people who entered with one-line pitches, we’ve selected at least twenty strong treatments and it does seem to have focused people and stimulated creativity rather than numbed it.

NR: Do you have any personal thoughts about the direction in which the New Cinema Fund is going to move?

PT: I think the number of films and shorts that we are able to support is pretty much going to stay as it is. I’d like to think that every year we’ll come up with another scheme like the Sci-Fi one and find other routes that can stimulate the undernourished areas. I’m obviously hoping that with centres of creativity like BBC Films, Film Four and Film Four Lab, we’ll be able to support a wide range of films.

I also hope that people are stimulated by the success of films like Bloody Sunday and Blind Flight and that more people will think of those kind of things as sources for material. The role of New Cinema is very much that of a supporting fund. Of course we have that ability because we have an amount of money and the infrastructure to be able to work with it but we are also able, for instance, to go out on a limb with feature documentaries. We’ve done four of these in two years and I want us to continue playing that role as well as being there in pursuit of excellence and the best possible projects that we can support.

NR: How do the funds interlock with regard to the way they can feed from the Development Fund into the Premiere Fund and into New Cinema?

PT: We have a pilot scheme that runs across all three funds but is managed from here. The Premiere Fund and the Development Fund have made use of that. When we have chosen to support a project and it needs further development, we will most likely work with the Development Fund to produce another draft or do some early pre-production casting or whatever. There have been a couple of projects – one of them was made – that came to us from the Premiere Fund and we’ve passed some projects through to the Premiere Fund because of the kind of material and the kind of budget involved. We all started at the same time and we all know each other extremely well. We are in constant touch with each other. It’s a cohesive way of working, together with the Training Fund, which is another integral part of what we do.