A brighter picture for booming indie film industry

Duncan Jones was previously most famous as his father’s child.

With the release of his second movie, Source Code, he has not quite relegated his old man to status of “Duncan Jones’s dad”, but he has clearly earned the right no longer to be known as “David Bowie’s son”.

Jake Gyllenhaal stars in Jones’s second movie, which is playing at UK cinemas and achieving the feat that few movies manage – winning five star reviews, being hailed as an intelligent piece of film-making and making money at the box office. Think Inception on a smaller budget.

Before there was Source Code, there was Moon, Jones’s debut film that won title of Best Film at the British Independent Film Awards. Jones describes Moon as a labour of love for which he slashed the budgets in order to get it made.

This is a story with which a surprisingly large number of Yorkshire film-makers are familiar.

The independent film scene of the region is a vibrant, creative, impressive place – and there are more people involved in it than you might imagine.

The world of Yorkshire indie films came together last week for a rare visit by two of the icons of the genre, Christine Vachon and Ted Hope.

Bradford City of Film and Screen Yorkshire brought Vachon and Hope to Leeds so they could share some of their know-how in movie-making independent of a film studio. That means raising the budgets, finding the stars, drawing up the contracts – all the many tasks that independent producers around Yorkshire are working through right now, in order to get their films made.

If you take only a passing interest in the film industry, you might not recognise the names Vachon and Hope but you almost certainly know their films, especially given that between them they have produced more than 130.

Hope holds a record at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival – three of his 23 festival entries (American Splendor, The Brothers McMullen, and What Happened Was) have won the Grand Jury Prize, more than any other producer. Two of his films have won the Critics’ Prize at Cannes. He also produced The Ice Storm with Kevin Kline and 21 Grams. Vachon is an Academy award winner, producing films such as One Hour Photo, Far from Heaven, and Boys Don’t Cry.

The pair have produced movies together and have their own production companies based in their beloved New York from which they resolutely refuse to relocate, despite the fact that in America the only place to be if you want to be in the movies is Los Angeles.

“It makes no sense, the movie business is in LA and we are absolutely stuck out on the East Coast. But that’s one of the key messages we’re bringing to Yorkshire today – that if you want to make movies, you can do it anywhere you want,” says Hope.

Vachon adds: “LA is such a one business town. If you’re out there it’s so hard to keep a perspective. Most of my friends in New York are nothing to do with the movie business, but if we have shown one thing, with around 68 films we have each made, is that it can be done.”

It may seem difficult to us to imagine that New York is not a hub of the movie business equal to Los Angeles, when so many of our images of the city that never sleeps come to us via the big screen, but when Vachon and Hope started out it seemed as difficult to imagine New York and movies together as Los Angeles and sincerity.

In this respect, at least, the independent film makers in Yorkshire have a head start. With a proud history of film making in the region, the up-and-comers in the industry have something to fall back on – or indeed, from which to propel themselves forward.

Hugo Heppel, head of production at Screen Yorkshire, has also produced or executive produced a host of indie films. His CV boasts This is England, The Damned United, Brideshead Revisited and TV’s Red Riding Trilogy.

He says: “In Yorkshire there is definitely an increasing number of people who are taking movie making more seriously.

“The fascinating thing about what’s happening at the moment is that the landscape is changing so that people can make movies so cheaply and use so many different means to get them out to an audience that I fully expect that someone is making a movie right now somewhere in Yorkshire that we know nothing about and could be the next big thing.

“When I arrived at Screen Yorkshire, Mark Herbert was working out of a shed in a back garden and now Warp (the Sheffield-based film production company that Herbert heads) is a big player.

“I see the possibility of other similar companies breaking through in the future.”

The people who might be behind those companies and who came out to hear the stories of role models Vachon and Hope included Rob Speranza, head of the South Yorkshire Filmmakers Network and Nicola Bowen, an independent producer based in Leeds.

Speranza, who recently produced the directorial debut of The Full Monty actor Hugo Speer and also Threads by Matt Taabu, says: “I set up the network in 2004 and it just blossomed. It started with people meeting on a regular basis to see if we could all help each other to make films and just share a passion. Now we have over 1,000 members across South Yorkshire.

“What’s so inspiring is that Christine and Ted started in exactly the same way, as a coalition of film makers in the Eighties and they almost inadvertently launched themselves into the industry.”

Nicola Bowen, who produced Screen Yorkshire’s short film Me Head’s A Shed, said: “It’s really hard to work as an independent producer in the region, but it makes a huge difference to have the kinds of networks that are springing up around Yorkshire. It feels like at the minute there are a lot of people in Yorkshire with a lot of passion for making independent movies.”

It could well be that the next big thing coming to a cinema screen near you – could be being made somewhere very near you.

South Yorkshire Film Makers Network: www.syfn.org

Leeds Film Makers Coalition meets weekly in Leeds: [email protected]

INDEPENDENTS’ DAY... THE SUCCESS STORIES

Following: This was the debut movie that Christopher Nolan made, shooting it with actor friends in his spare time over a year. His next movie was Memento.

Monster: Gareth Edwards’s Monster movie was made for a fraction of what monster blockbuster movies are supposed to be made cost. Released in cinemas last year, all the special effects were created on the director’s home computer. He is rumoured to now be directing the new Godzilla movie.

The Full Monty: Made on a shoestring, it launched the career of Yorkshire writer Simon Beaufoy, who went on to work with Danny Boyle on Slumdog Millionaire – picking up an Oscar along the way.

This is England: Shane Meadows had already shown enormous promise with Dead Man’s Shoes and A Room for Romeo Brass. With funding from Screen Yorkshire, this is the sort of movie that would not have been touched by a big studio. Independent money got the movie made which made Meadows’ name worldwide.

Bronson: A movie about the violent prisoner helped to launch the enormous talent of Tom Hardy on to the big screen.

Billy Elliot: A dancing miner’s son? Indie funding was the only way for this film to get made.