The Major issues facing the British Film makers
Read the article below and create a blog post summarising the key points Tom Hooper makes about Film making today. Re watch what the Director of Kick Ass said and compare their views on the future of the industry
The Kings Speech
What do you think is the biggest challenge that the British film industry faces today?
Tom Hooper: Well, it’s interesting, I’ve lived through a really fascinating revolution. So I started marking films when I was 13 and when I was 13 there was no digital, you couldn’t shoot anything digitally because it didn’t exist yet so I had to shoot on film and I could only make films silently because I couldn’t afford to do sound and from four minutes of film I could maybe make a film that was two minutes log. And now what is extraordinary is that my i-phone has an HD camera on it with sync sound so all of us have the opportunity to make some kind of film for almost nothing if not nothing. The interesting thing is that I thought seeing this revolution happen there was going to be this big revolution where there would be a lot more films being made and being made a lot more cheaply. But the sad thing is that what hasn’t changed is the cost of marketing a film to the public. I’ll give you an example of the King’s Speech is being released in the US. The budget of our film was about 15 million dollars – at the very least they’ll probably spend 25 to 30 million marketing it America so they are going to spend almost double the cost of production on the cost of selling it and that is just in one country. So the sad thing about it is that there is still a kind of lock down on who gets to make films that reach everyone because even if you do effectively make your film for nothing, for a distributor they’ve still got to look at a huge amount of money to get the film out to everyone. So the revolution that I expected when the digital age came when I thought filmmaking would be very democratic hasn’t quite taken off. And the other thing that stopped that happening is unfortunately the star system, which still hasn’t gone away. In the end one of the ways to get the bandwidth to get people to pay attention to your films is to get a big star and that remains expensive.
Colin Firth: I think its very interesting listening to what Tom is saying and I think doing things does unlock the imagination and advance creativity, it doesn’t come from nothing. You can’t sit and wait for inspiration – it doesn’t work. It’s certainly true that you can make a film cheaply; I keep finding films that my nine-year old made on my flip phone. He’s at it, he’s doing it and he’s developing something that while is certainly entertaining for him could also be a skill, a story telling skill. I was thinking while Tom was talking about how now anyone can make a film for almost nothing but its not happening because you also have to be rather good at it, there has to be a skill in place for it to work. But you achieve that by doing exactly what Tom has just said and what you now have which is a gift that my generation didn’t have quite so much access to is stuff that you can do it on. We’ve always had pencil and paper but now we have filmmaking materials at our fingertips.
Tom Hooper: The other thing that is extraordinary is that you can make a film and you have the right to post it on YouTube.
Colin Firth: Yes you can release it yourself.
Tom Hooper: You can put it out in public and get some people seeing it and that’s an unbelievable revolution. Again, in the old days I made my films but no one saw them apart from my family them because how would anyone see them.
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