A British Film
In 1980s British cinema was thought to be “dead”, making less than only 50 films in a year. Today it has become more stable but still is nowhere near to the standard of Hollywood when it comes to budget, actors and directors. Hollywood is a high concept cinema that can put millions of dollars into its funding, with this they can get the best actors locations for its movies and distribution, this should allow Hollywood to get the maximum income for its movies. British Cinema is almost on a budget that an American film could spend on just one actor’s salary; this is limiting the films abilities to have special effects or the most famous actors that people buy films to watch. Anything that British Cinema can make such as an actor making success in Britain, Hollywood would in a sense steal them. With the lack of funding and its restraints for British Cinema it has developed its own style of making film by making 'social realism' films. Social realism is a style of film making where the film where the characters and location of the film set will have problems that reflect issues in society at the time that the movie was set in this can help the audience relate to it. Because social realist films are easy to make in England by using its strengths, it has almost a televisual look to it than a film and this helps to sell the films because the British audience can relate to it, this can also helps the producers by using real locations to save money on the budget. Watchmen (2009) a Hollywood movie had $130,000,000 budget and built a 1980’s style city that was used as the set for the film.
This shows how different British films can be compared to Hollywood. The majority of money earned by most UK films will come from Television broadcasts and from DVD sales, but poor distribution can limit the DVD's sales. In the UK television has always been a strong sector for the audiences, with the support of channel 4 and its film distribution it has kept the British cinema from coming to an end and with the British audience attending the cinema less time per year compared to other English speaking countries, this could be because of the undeveloped UK audience in terms of interests in a diversity of films.
Shifty is a typical British film about a drug dealer living in London, whose life is getting out of control and his friend returns home to see what has become of the place after he left 4 years ago. It has been made on a low budget but the production team and the actors believed in it to become a great film, because of the low budged it helped the director find out what kind of film maker he was going to be. He was inspired to make this film because of his real life experiences living in the Essex suburbs. This helped him to visualize the area that he wanted to film to be set in and have it look rundown and working class because it shows a typical England. The style of the film is very talky and raw; the footage is shot on location and has a very doc-u-style. This shows that British films have such low resources to make sets for the movies. Another film that is set on location is This Is England (2006); it was filmed in a town in the midlands. At one part of the film they where outside filming a scene on the road and everybody in the cast and crew had to be quite so they didn’t wake up any of the neighbors, this shows the production of British cinema and how they use locations compare to Hollywood where they would buy out the location and have it privately.
There are 3 types of British films, these are Domestic films that are funded by UK film council and broadcasters and are likely to have a British cultural style to the films. Inward features are films shot in the UK and are funded by companies outside the UK this will mostly be Hollywood who will fund them; an example of an Inward film is Harry Potter. Co-Productions are Funded by UK companies as well as companies in Ireland, France or Canada. Shifty is a Domestic film; you can tell this because the crew, cast, location and the funding are from the UK. The UK film council under the microwave scheme funds Shifty. The microwave scheme is a project that the UK film council do to help young film directors make it in the industry, by offering them money to fund the movie and get professionals who have been in the industry longer to help build the script and plan locations. Because of the recent change in government the new government have cut the funding that the UK film council will use to help out the director. Because of financial issues, they had to make the film using one camera. Once the film was finished it was shown in art house cinemas the film was instantly recognized by the distributor ‘Metrodome’ who had ideas already on how they were going to advertise the film to the public. They wanted to make the poster stand out but not give too much away about the plot so people didn’t think it was just another film like Kidulthood (2006). Metrodome was interested in Shifty because it was about the characters and how they interact with each other. This is playing to the strengths of British cinema because they didn’t have the money to make special effects.
The funding that Shift has would pay for the stars, this would take a lot of the budget if they wanted an A-list actor for Hollywood but it would bring in the audience the budget would also pay for script development, Hollywood would spend the whole British budget on just this alone. Shooting time, elaborate camera work, digital effects and music rights. British films with such a small budget would have to be careful with how they spend their money on the movie because other areas of the film could suffer if it is lacking the funding needed. They would find the balance by looking at what the most important parts of the film are and looking how they could spend less money on it when its not needed.
Hollywood is well funded and it is cheap for Directors to get location in Hollywood to build the set, but with filming in the UK being so expensive for producers and there isn't companies willing to spend £20 million on a film it shows in the movies that come out of Britain. There are new studios coming out in America this is also making it harder for British cinema to grow.
Should producers make films made at international audiences but get funding from partners in Europe or America? Make low budget film for a niche audience that will be shown in art house cinemas in the UK and abroad? Or make a low budget films that targets the mainstream British audience and anymore income from sales in Europe or America will be a bonus? I think that anyway that the British cinema can make a profit for its self it should go with it regardless of how it does it.
Because of Shifty’s low budget the Producers had to make a choice of what camera they where going to use, they decided that HD and 3D would take away from the type of film Shifty is.
In British cinema the comedy genre has always been the most important to make along with thriller. Movies such The Full Monty (1997) play a big role in British Cinema because it is 'Social comedy', it contains elements of British culture in the film and this made it more successful and popular to the British audiences. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) is also another good example of a 'Social Gangster/Comedy'. It is rare to see a British producer try and make a film that is like a Hollywood movie with all the effects and action, British films has found its style by having the films more based on characters and are more 'talky' and less about action, the acting is also a lot fluid than in Hollywood. An example of this is Dead Mans Shoes (2004).
Shifty has British actors that aren’t be well known but are up and coming, they would of started out acting in the theater or on television shows. That said, it also has Jason Flemyng who stars in not just British films but also in Hollywood movies and has been nominated for two awards. In an interview with Jason he said that he still enjoys doing small British films because it was where he started out and he doesn’t want to loose his roots of success. A common actor that stars in British films is Thomas Turgoose who has stared in films such as; This Is England (2006), Eden Lake (2008) and Somers Town (2008). Some stars are recognized by their roles they play in other movies and the audience wouldn't like it if there was and action star playing a drug dealer and its probably makes the film seem more realistic with actors who are not so famous in movies.
With the lack of distributors, resources and audience it is making it harder for the British cinema to grow, this shows Instability in British cinema. When an actor, director or a producer starts to make it big in British Films they would movie over to Hollywood because there is more money in there films, and once again this lowers the ability for British cinema to grow. I think that the British cinema will never become as big as Hollywood and for it to survive it is going to have to let Hollywood take the resources and continue to make domestic, inward and co-production features because its making a profit even though its not as big as Hollywood’s blockbusters but its still making a profit.
