In conversation with Clare Binns, managing director of Picturehouse Cinemas, at the Edinburgh Film Festival’s inaugural UK Film Conference BFI CEO Ben Roberts was candid from the outset about the problems of working for a major public-funding body. Having previously worked for numerous UK distribution and sales outfits, Roberts admitted that he had been warned against taking the job as Director of the BFI Film Fund in 2012. “Various people said to me, ‘Everyone will hate you and you’ll never work again,’” he laughed. “So, there was definitely that sense going in — that these jobs are quite challenging, because you can make a lot of enemies. The fact is you turn most people down in that job. You just do, because the numbers are stacked against you.”
Roberts now has more than just the Film Fund at his disposal, dispensing sums in the region of £150 million in a three-year cycle, and, in his interview, he outlined a case for a future of British film that would include the whole process, from script to screen — which includes supporting exhibition, distribution, archival work, festivals and education. “The BFI does a unique job of having some money to support filmmakers,” he said, “which can be very easily [measured]: Yes or no. Yes, you got it. No, you didn’t get it. But there are so many other things that the BFI does to try to make the conditions for making and releasing films in the UK possible.”
Roberts conceded that the BFI system can seem like a bureaucracy but defended the amount of paperwork. “It’s lottery money,” he said, “so you have to run everything in a very open way. We’re different to the BBC or Film4 in the fact that we can’t have a conversation with one of you in this room, and when you tell me about your project — and we like the sound of it — say, ‘Come in for a meeting, let’s give you some money.’ We can’t work like that because we have to run an open process. And then, within that, we establish some goals about what we might be looking for.” (In a shorter version of this comment, Roberts quipped, “Look, everyone has to fill out a form. Get over it!”)
Another preconception about the BFI, he said, is that it favors worthy projects that tick politically correct boxes. “Principally, you’re looking for something that feels worthy of ‘good cause’ money, because national lottery money is ‘good cause’ money. So, you’re looking for something that really needs that money — something that the market is probably not going to obviously fund, but that’s still pretty broad. And then there’s obviously, as there should be, a qualitative assessment as well. Is it good? Does it read well? Is the team that’s making it — even if they’re early in their career — clear on what they want to achieve? Have they made anything that would suggest that raw talent is there? An old colleague of mine, when I first joined the film fund said, ‘It’s not social work.’ Which is really important, actually, because it’s not social work.”
On the subject of artistic quality, Roberts also suggested that the metric for success should not be limited to two of the most common, which tend to prioritize the role of the director and the importance of box-office. “You could have a film that might not make money, but an actor in that film might be identified. We often sometimes forget to talk about the actors that have been discovered, or platformed, through lottery funded or publicly funded films and gone on to be huge stars. Tom Holland’s second film was How I Live Now, directed by the great Kevin McDonald and was funded with lottery money. And that was putting him on a particular path. Olivia Colman’s first standout work that moved her from sketch comedy to dramatic feature film was Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur. So, I think there are many markers of success in a film.”
Warming to his theme, Roberts pushed back at the sometimes-combative relationship between artists and those dishing out public funds. “I do think I should be given a hard time,” he said. “But it’s a two-way street. We get quite frustrated by the quality of original thought sometimes, original ideas. And there is plenty of opportunity for filmmakers to start to demonstrate their original thoughts and their skills without needing to wait for the very highly prized and highly won lottery money… I think it can be a misconception that a lot of money needs to be spent in order to create something that’s got value.”
He did concede, however, that “there are some things I think we haven’t been great at in the UK as an independent sector. For instance, I don’t think we’re great at comedy. Obviously, the Edinburgh Film Festival opened with a really strong, lottery-backed comedy this year, The Incomer. I’m not saying we don’t do it, but I think it takes real skill to do it well. We know audiences love horror, and I think that we pull our punches sometimes in horror, as well as comedy, in independent film. Someone said to me recently, ‘I’ve got a horror project.’ I said, ‘Is it scary?’ He said, ‘It’s more of a mood.’ But we don’t want mood. Go for it. Go for it a little bit more. There are a few areas where sometimes we sort of polish off the edges of genres that punch through a bit harder.”
Both Binns and Roberts commented on the recent renaissance of cinemagoing among young people, as well as an uptick in attendances since Covid, but Roberts was particularly keen to get to potential audiences as soon as possible. “There are lots of ways that we try to open up pathways for young people,” he said. “But the missing piece — and it’s really, really important — is having film firmly in the classroom. I mean, teaching film as a storytelling medium, particularly a time when — on a sort of crude level — I would say that watching is the new reading for a lot of people. So, how you develop really good interpretation skills, literacy skills, how you can create your own communication channels healthily and creatively is really important right now.”