Andrew Eaton-Lewis: ‘It is assumed David Cameron pre-empted the report to set an ideological agenda’

BRITAIN needs to make more “commercially successful” movies, David Cameron announced on Wednesday – like The Inbetweeners or The King’s Speech – and Lottery funding should be modified to help that happen.

Within minutes, the BBC were in touch with Ken Loach, who they figured was the most likely person to disagree on camera in time for the next news bulletin.

If I was a conspiracy theorist, I’d suggest Cameron’s people engineered Loach’s BBC appearance. Loach was, for the Tories, the ideal person to represent the opposition – an old leftie who makes worthy, depressing films which not many people want to see. Watching him fruitlessly trying to stand up to such shameless populism wasn’t pretty.

There were other voices of dissent last week, but most have avoided the trap Loach walked into. Since nobody will really know what the government is planning to do until its film policy committee’s report is published this week, hedging of bets was perhaps the wisest approach. But the general assumption is that Cameron pre-empted the report to set an ideological agenda. Regardless of the fine detail, the expectation is that funding will now go to film-makers who have already made box office hits, or to films thought to be likely box office hits, rather than being allocated on the basis of artistic merit.

This, as any artist knows but as right-wing philistines seem incapable of understanding, is idiotic. Nobody really knows why some films are hits and some aren’t, so as a funding criterion it’s useless. Christopher Young, producer of The Inbetweeners, was taken completely by surprise by its success (and he’d worked in the industry for over 20 years, mostly not making hits). Danny Boyle has had his biggest hits with uncommercial sounding projects that nobody wanted to make – like a genre-straddling fantasy about street kids in Mumbai (Slumdog Millionaire) or a story about a man who sawed his own arm off (127 Hours). His most conventionally “commercial” films (The Beach and A Life Less Ordinary) flopped. In other words, you can take creative risks and strike gold once in a while, or you can stick to a formula, hope for the best, and end up with just as many flops as you’d have had the old way. Plus a lot of mediocrity.

We should be particularly concerned in Scotland, where two of our most visionary filmmakers, Peter Mullan and Lynne Ramsay, spent years getting their latest films off the ground, even under the current system. Both were widely acclaimed, but were they commercially successful enough for David Cameron? I suspect not.