Curtains open and the cameras roll on a new story for British cinema

Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman famously said that when it comes to the movie business “nobody knows anything”. Goldman’s supposition remains as true today as it was when he first explained it in his 1983 book Adventures in the Screen Trade and as true as it had seemed to be since the birth of Hollywood.

If the British Film Institute’s plans for the future of the country’s cinema industry bear fruit, then Goldman might have to finally rethink his pithy assessment of the movie business. In future, the country could be awash with bright young things, making movies, and quoting that “in the past, nobody used to know anything”.

The BFI launched its plans for the future of the country’s film industry yesterday and with education at the top of a list of priorities, the future could be very bright for films coming out of the UK.

The location chosen for the unveiling of the masterplan, which will see an investment of close to £500m over the next five years in the UK film industry, was significant.

The UK Film Council, the body responsible for distributing Lottery funds to the industry, was abolished in 2010 as part of a Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) cost-cutting exercise. The BFI took on the responsibilities of the UK Film Council and has spent the past 18 months consulting with more than 1,000 people from the industry about how it should move into the future.

The chairman of the BFI and former BBC director general, Greg Dyke and Yorkshire-born and raised BFI chief executive Amanda Nevill, chose to launch the new scheme, given the title Film Forever, in Sheffield.

The great and good of the UK film gathered in Steel City to hear the announcement from Dyke and Nevill and both paid warm tribute to the city, saying that launching such an important national scheme, which the Hollywood Reporter covered in detail, in Yorkshire, was the right thing to do.

Nevill says: “I’m a Yorkshire lass, so I consider this the centre of the universe anyway. The fact is that the BFI has a chief executive from Yorkshire, our chairman is the chancellor at York University, and attended the Yorkshire university as a student so there is a strong Yorkshire bias.

“But actually that’s not just a flippant comment. By coming to Sheffield to launch Film Forever we are making very clear, that the plan we are unveiling today is a plan for the UK film industry, not just for London.”

It is a charge that needs to be answered because the concerns were always that the BFI, based on London’s Southbank, would be myopically London-centric.

Not so, says Dyke, equally pro-Yorkshire in making the announcement.

“Sheffield is steeped in film history. It’s the home of The Full Monty, (film production company) Warp has done some great things in the city, which is why it is the perfect place to make today’s announcement,” he says.

“There is another reason I am glad we’re launching today’s plans in Yorkshire. When I applied for the job of chairman I said in my interview ‘you’re not really the British Film Institute, you’re the London Film Institute’ and I was told that was why I got the job. I have become more convinced of the imbalance towards the South East in particular and part of our five-year plan is to make sure the money in the UK film industry moves out of that area and around the country far more.”

The BFI bigwigs were in Yorkshire to do more than flatter the local audience, of course.

Back in 2010 when a whole raft of cuts to public funding were announced by the new coalition Government, one of the biggest was aimed at the UK Film Council which was all but abolished overnight.

The organisation, founded in 2000, had an annual budget of £15m to invest in British films and employed 75 people. The major funder of regional agencies like Screen Yorkshire, of film productions and talent schemes in the country, the UK Film Council disappeared and the responsibilities were vacuumed up by the BFI. The organisation then went into consultation about what it would do for the future of the UK film business and how it would achieve it. The announcement yesterday was the culmination of that consulting.

“I felt at one point a few weeks back, as though I had gone deaf,” says Keighley-born Nevill.

“We have spent the last 18 months doing so much listening to people in the industry about what the future of UK film should look like and how we are going to achieve it.”

The Film Forever BFI Plan for the next five years is split into three key areas: Education and Audiences, which will receive £44.2m per year, British film and film-making with an investment of £32.3m per year and Film Heritage, which will receive £9.9m annually. The heritage strand involves a number of initiatives, but the main one will see 10,000 films in the BFI’s collection digitised – turned from the film on which they currently exist to a digital format.

This will mean the films, in the vaults of the BFI, will be made available to far more people across the country. The BFI 10K, the name given to the initiative, will even see people involved in selecting which films in the collection should be digitised with a public vote.

Education, making the audiences and film-makers of the future, as film-literate as possible, is another key aim.

Nevill says: “We are going to offer every school in the country help with establishing an after-school film club.

“By doing that we are going to be growing the future audience for the British film industry, finding the film-makers of the future.”

One of the major concerns from the film-making community, when the UK Film Council was abolished, was that for all its faults, the organisation had, through its regional agencies, a way of connecting with people on the ground. Low budget features, productions on which a number of talented directors, actors and writers learned their trade, rarely got made in a region without the screen agency for the area knowing the details. Even though the BFI pays lipservice to the regions by coming to Sheffield to launch its bright new future, is it much more than tokenism?

“Absolutely not,” says Nevill.

“Talent isn’t just born in London. Film is a global industry and it is one of the few growth industries we have. British film industry is outstripping the economy and we truly can ‘watch our way out of the recession’. But the way we do that and keep the quality of our industry is to find the talent that there is across the UK and make sure it has the opportunity to thrive.”

Film Forever aims to do this by launching, among other things, a Talent Network initiative, which will see “scouting cultural hubs” established across the country to seek out the best young film-makers Britain has to offer.

Dyke, who explained that the vast majority of the UK film watching public see movies at home, announced partnerships with Samsung Smart TV, Pinewood Studios and the legendary Aardman, the Bristol-based animation studios behind Wallace and Gromit. The partnership will hope to find the new talent for the future of British animation.

The UK Film Council also had a production fund to make films.

It didn’t always do so successfully – for every The King’s Speech, there were considerably more Sex Lives of the Potato Men.

“You cannot guarantee that every film you fund will be as successful as The King’s Speech. If it was easy then every one would make a success and there just wouldn’t be any films like Sex Lives of the Potato Men,” says Nevill, of the infamous UK Film Council funded movie that was a major flop both critically and commercially.

“What you can do is make sure that the very best talent we have is at the centre of the industry and that we are finding that talent early, giving it an opportunity to learn about how to make film.”

A new future for UK film

EDUCATION AND AUDIENCES: £44.2m per year, for five years: 1,000 venues across the UK to be equipped for screenings, creation of a BFIplayer, featuring a selection of films, a new youth film Academy network for 16- to 19 year-olds, in partnership with Pinewood Studios.

FILM-MAKING: A new production fund for making films in the UK, with the pot rising annually to £24m by 2017, a New Talent Network, a new International Fund and a commitment to growing skills with a new BFI Film Skills Fund, with as one-off capital fund of £5m by 2017.

FILM HERITAGE: A total of 10,000 films owned by the BFI to be transferred to a digital medium, allowing them to be screened across the UK.