The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex

by Mark Kermode

  Loach’s absence from the Oscars’ hall of fame (at the age of 74 he has yet to receive a single nomination) tells us something depressing about the transatlantic tunnel vision that ensures that the American Academy regularly overlooks our most potent home-grown fare. Everyone knows that Alfred Hitchcock never actually won an Oscar, but who remembers that Derek Jarman, that great rebellious artist of British cinema, went to his grave without even being nominated for an Academy Award? (Maybe Oscar took against him for directing the Smiths’ video for ‘The Queen Is Dead’.) My own list of post-war British classics would include Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, the Boulting brothers’ Brighton Rock, Ken Loach’s Kes, Ken Russell’s The Devils, Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, Alan Clarke’s Scum, Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher, Danny Boyle’s Shallow Grave, and Shane Meadows’s This is England. Take a wild guess at how many Oscar nominations that splendid group of very British pictures garnered between them. Answer: none. Pitiful.

  As for film production in the UK, there is actually very little evidence that the statuettes garnered by The King’s Speech have done anything to improve the lot of the struggling British film-maker. Instead, it has provided an opportunity for everyone to bemoan the demise of the UK Film Council, which for years administered the distribution of public money (from the National Lottery) amongst home-grown productions and which, of course, backed The King’s Speech. The UKFC was a fraught organisation which, at its best, supported British stalwarts like Ken Loach and Mike Leigh (along with Boyle, Meadows, Ramsay and Andrea Arnold) and put their weight behind a catalogue of great British movies of which we can rightly be proud. At its worst, it invested in Sex Lives of the Potato Men, an unforgiveable crime against our national culture for which the UKFC should have been burned to the ground forthwith. I once had an excitingly heated on-air altercation with one of the heads of the UKFC about the funding of Sex Lives, a film which, he assured me, had been ‘really good’ at script level. I assured him that this was horseshit; if one single word of the screenplay matched the dialogue of the finished film, there was no possibility that the script had ever been anything other than utterly vile and repugnant.

  Understandably, Sex Lives of the Potato Men was used as a stick with which to beat the still-warm corpse of the UKFC when its demise prompted headlines about the ‘end of British cinema’. Yet, as anyone who knows anything about UK film production understands, the real problem here in Britain is not so much funding as distribution. With or without the UKFC, loads of movies get made in the UK every year – some of them good, many of them terrible. Yet only a scant few secure the width of distribution that allows an extensive audience to judge the film’s relative merits for themselves. You can whinge all you like about how hard it is to raise the money needed to make movies in Blighty, but plenty of people still do it, and many of them do it without the assistance of the sort of public funding that causes MPs to ask embarrassing questions about how the hell we all ended up paying for grot like Sex Lives of the Potato Men.

  Personally, I think the greatest boon to young British film-makers would be the resurgence of a thriving exploitation market, producing bankable low-budget titles on which aspiring cineastes could learn both the artistic and the financial tools of the trade without recourse to the public purse. David Puttnam, who produced Chariots of Fire (‘the British are coming!’), once told me that the best advice he could give to a first-time film-maker would be to fund and film an inexpensive horror movie that made its money back – an exercise that teaches the film-maker both to understand the industry and to respect the habits and desires of their intended audience. This is, in fact, a formula which has been proven to work in the US, where exploitation maestros such as Roger Corman effectively nurtured new generations of American cinema throughout the sixties, seventies and eighties through just such a market paradigm. Directors as diverse as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Katt Shea and James Cameron all learned their trade working for Corman, whose ground rules were simple:

  1) No, you can’t have any more money.

  2) No, the movie doesn’t need to be that long.

  3) Yes, you do have to have either an exploding helicopter or at least one scene in a strip club.

  4) After that, you’re on your own – knock yourself out.

  Corman believed that the best way to encourage new film-making talent was to find people who loved avant garde international cinema and were desperate to be the next Ozu, Fellini or Antonioni, and then set them to work making Carnosaur 2. Jonathan Demme may have won the Best Director Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs, but he started out making the women-in-prisons exploiter Caged Heat for Corman (and getting dropped from the British sex comedy Naughty Wives, aka Secrets of a Door-to-Door Salesman, due to ‘artistic differences’).

  One of my great heroes is the American cinematographer Wally Pfister, who won an Oscar for lensing Inception in 2011 and who is living proof of the artistic validity of the ‘trickle up’ theory. Pfister, who has become Christopher Nolan’s right-hand man, is regarded as one the best DPs working in cinema today, and has a reputation for achieving extraordinary results with the minimum of fuss. Crucially, although he now shoots movies budgeted at over $150 million, he learned his trade on exploitation fare such as Body Chemistry and The Unborn, which were both made for peanuts for Corman’s Concorde-New Horizons stable. In the early nineties, Pfister shot a string of straight-to-video erotic thrillers for former porn king Gregory Dark (aka Gregory Alexander Hippolyte, aka Gregory H. Brown) which were notable for looking fantastically classy, coming to define the ‘suspense in suspenders’ genre that melded thriller plots with soft-core sex in a surprisingly successful bid to crack the home-viewing market for couples. Back then I used to write the video column for the British Film Institute’s esteemed Sight & Sound magazine (which prided itself on covering everything that was released on VHS) and I remember clocking Pfister’s name, knowing that if he featured in the credits then there was going to be something worth watching – no matter how trashy a particular title seemed to be. Take Night Rhythms, in many ways the ne plus ultra of the straight-to-video erotic thriller genre. The plot goes something like this: when late-night disc jockey Martin Hewitt is apparently heard murdering one of his listeners live on air, he hides out and has sex with an assortment of glamorously attired women until eventually Delia Sheppard gives up and admits that she did it because she is a lesbian. The End. Sounds awful? Well, whatever else you want to say about it, it looks brilliant – because it was shot by the man who would go on to shoot Memento, Inception, The Prestige, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and, of course, The Dark Knight Rises. How’s that for a career trajectory? From lensing soft-core murder-mystery cheapies (with added lingerie) to shooting massive productions about a man with a role-playing fetish who wanders the streets dressed from head to foot in rubber!

  The point is that, despite its sneering critics, self-financing exploitation cinema has a proven track record of providing entry to the industry for genuinely talented film-makers who have then gone on to excel in the more ‘upmarket’ arena. But this is not the kind of thing people want to hear when they talk about the ‘British film industry’ – because this is not the kind of material that attracts Oscar attention. Everyone conveniently forgets that back in the sixties and seventies, when Hammer won the Queen’s Award for Industry, the two genres of movies for which the UK had become internationally known were comedies and horror flicks. In terms of our export market we were world beaters with these brands, and our ‘national cinema’ thrived upon their crowd-pleasing success. But then in the eighties the concept of British cinema was somehow hijacked by the Laura Ashley school of film-making, which was epitomised by the Merchant Ivory stable – a fantastically successful film-making partnership that produced such Oscar-bait as A Room with a View and Howards End. Many of these productions are fine movies indeed (and, as Kim Newman points out, as ‘British’ as only films produced by an Indian, directed by an Am
erican, and written by a Pole can be). I am particularly fond of The Remains of the Day, which is a surprisingly forthright adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel. But, like The Queen and The King’s Speech, Merchant Ivory movies represented only a tiny fragment of UK film production, and one that was not necessarily any more valid or authentically ‘British’ than its ‘downmarket’ counterparts. Yes, these were the kinds of movies that won Oscars, cut from the same tourist-friendly cloth that Harvey Weinstein would later make his own. But were they really the very best of Britain? And, in the end, does it really matter what the membership of American Academy think of the output of ‘British Cinema’?

  In 1997, Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies, a terrific ‘Brit pic’ worthy of the home-grown seal of approval (despite technically being a UK/France co-production) achieved the staggering feat of getting nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture – a real coup for a low-key gem which focused on recognisable English working-class characters with nary a crown in sight. Had Weinstein been involved the film might actually have won something, but Harvey was backing The English Patient that year (which Miramax had cannily picked up after funding failed just before shooting started) and nothing was going to come between him and a fistful of Oscars.

  In the UK, there was plenty of ‘The British are coming!’ brouhaha that year, with Leigh and Anthony Minghella going head-to-head in the Best Director category, both praising the other’s work in very gentlemanly (and very ‘British’) fashion. Yet while The English Patient wound up taking $78 million in the US, Secrets & Lies struggled to hit $14 million despite its multiple Oscar nods. And the reason given by the US media for its comparative failure to set the American box office alight was simply that it was ‘too British’ – whatever that meant.

  I remember being sent to Hollywood to cover the Oscars for Radio 1 that year, and being told to walk down Sunset Boulevard with a microphone in order to find out ‘what the average American really thinks of Secrets & Lies’. Thus the BBC’s Hollywood reporter Peter Bowes and I headed out on to the street, where we singularly failed to find: a) any ‘average’ Americans; or b) anyone who had seen Secrets & Lies. Eventually, after much unbroadcastable trudging, we spied a cosmopolitan young man lounging photogenically outside an upmarket burger bar, wearing an ostentatious pair of Ray-Bans and looking for all the world like someone who really wanted to be interviewed by the BBC.

  So we interviewed him.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I wonder if you’d mind talking to us. We’re from the BBC and we’re trying to find some Americans who’ve seen the British movie Secrets & Lies, which, as you may know, is up for a Best Picture Oscar. Have you seen Secrets & Lies?’

  The man hesitated, then smiled a big showbizzy smile, and replied, ‘Well, as you know, I’m English.’

  I didn’t know this.

  ‘Erm, sorry,’ I replied. ‘I didn’t know you were English. I thought you were American. Are you English?’ His accent was somewhat non-specific.

  ‘Oh, you know I am,’ he laughed again, to the bemusement of both Peter and me. ‘You know who I am.’

  Did I?

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ I said, somewhat sheepishly, ‘but … have we met before?’

  ‘Nah!’ said the man, who clearly thought I was just playing out some elaborate charade. ‘We haven’t met before. But it’s me …’

  As he said this, he raised his hand theatrically to his face, and then very slowly pulled off his huge black Ray-Bans to reveal a pair of fabulously twinkly eyes glittering away in his fantastically famous face.

  A face which I had never seen before.

  Ever.

  Honestly.

  I looked to Peter (who’d done his fair share of celebrity reportage) for support. He stared back at me, blankly, and shrugged. We both turned back toward the ‘famous person’ who had, as yet, failed to register on either of our celebrity radars.

  ‘Um, sorry,’ I said again. ‘I really don’t know who you are.’

  ‘Yes, you do,’ he said assertively, turning up the smile to maximum, angling his head a little as if to give us a better view.

  Still nothing.

  ‘Nope,’ I said. ‘I really don’t …’

  ‘Oh, come on!’ he said with a hint of irritation. ‘It’s me. Me.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘I can see that it’s you. And the fault is surely mine. I’m terrible with faces. But I still don’t know who you are. Maybe if you told me your name …’

  ‘You’re kidding?’ he said, taken aback. ‘You really don’t know my name?’

  ‘No,’ I replied with a hint of desperation.

  ‘But you recognise my face, right?’

  ‘Well, not really, but …’

  ‘From the telly? From EastEnders?’

  ‘Ah,’ I said with a sigh of relief. ‘You’re from EastEnders.’

  ‘NO!’ he shot back, now actually angry. ‘I am not from EastEnders. I’m working here in Hollywood.’

  ‘But you just said you were from EastEnders …’

  ‘I said I was from EastEnders. I used to be from EastEnders. But now I’ve quit all that and I’ve come here to America. To work in Hollywood.’

  ‘Oh, that’s great,’ I said, trying to make amends for my previous ignorance of his undoubtedly stellar work in Albert Square.

  ‘Yeah, because in Britain I was getting typecast,’ he explained. ‘Because, of course, everyone knew me from EastEnders.’

  ‘Oh, right, I see.’

  ‘Which is why I came here. To Hollywood. You know, to escape the typecasting. Of EastEnders.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Escape the typecasting. Good for you. And how’s that working out?’

  ‘Oh great, really great,’ he beamed, replacing his sunglasses to hide his famous eyes once more. ‘Cos here, no one knows me …’

  ‘No, I see.’

  ‘… you know, from EastEnders …’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘… so there’s none of that “typecasting” trouble.’

  ‘No, of course not. Well, that’s terrific. And what sort of parts are you being offered here in Hollywood? Presumably nothing like EastEnders … a ha ha ha …’

  ‘A ha ha ha.’

  ‘So …?’

  There was an awkward silence.

  ‘Well … nothing right now. Not as yet. I’m just, you know, waiting for things to happen. Early days.’

  ‘Oh right, of course, “early days”. So how long have you been here?’

  Another awkward silence.

  ‘About a year.’

  ‘About a year? Right. So, not that early days really …’

  ‘Well, you know, comparatively early …’

  ‘Oh, sure, “comparatively early”. But …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, you know … nothing’s actually come up yet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘OK. Anything on the horizon?’

  ‘Not just now.’

  ‘OK, I see.’

  There was yet another awkward pause.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen Secrets & Lies …?’ I ventured.

  ‘No.’

  ‘OK, never mind. Well, must be going. Thanks for your time. Good luck with everything. In Hollywood.’

  As we walked away, I turned to Peter Bowes, a man who makes his living knowing who famous people are and what they are doing, and said, ‘Sorry, who the fuck was that?’

  ‘No idea,’ replied Peter. ‘But whoever he was, he hadn’t seen Secrets & Lies either …’

  Chapter Six

  AMERICAN WITHOUT TEARS

  ‘You say the darndest things, Marina …’

  Local Hero

  ‘AND THE BAFTA goes to … The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.’

  There has been much heated discussion on the internet about the exact meaning of the expression that flitted across my face during that ‘…’ when I presented the 2011 British Academy Award for ‘Film Not in the English Language’. According to some viewers and
Twitterers, I was ‘making no attempt to conceal my annoyance’ at the way the votes had fallen. This was an easy assumption to make – apparently my face looks annoyed most of the time, an unfortunate truth which keeps getting me into trouble. No matter how happy I may be with any given situation, my features naturally fall into a jowly scowl which makes everyone think that I’m: a) angry; b) smug; or c) both. Face it, no matter how much I try to look like James Dean the sad fact is that the person I most resemble is Richard Nixon. And Nixon always looked cross. And smug. It didn’t matter whether he was smiling or raving, opening a hospital or sending in planes to napalm women and children in Vietnam – something about his face just never looked happy. As his opponents famously asked: ‘Would you buy a used car from this man?’ The same could be asked of me. Apparently.

  So, as I stood there on stage doing my best impression of Tricky Dicky reading the front page of the Washington Post in June 1971, it’s easy to see why someone could have imagined that I was less than thrilled at the outcome of the award I was about to present. In fact I was delighted, not only because I really like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (a tough adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s novel, boasting a stand-out performance from Best Actress nominee Noomi Rapace), but also because the film’s BAFTA win tied in nicely with an ever-so-slightly embittered joke I had made onstage only a couple of moments earlier. Want to hear it? No? Well, never mind, because I’m going to tell you anyway …