British Film Institute CEO Ben Roberts and creative director of Picturehouse Clare Binns took to Edinburgh Film Festival’s Central Hall on Saturday for a keynote discussion on the future of British independent film.
Binns was asking Roberts about how the BFI spends its money — the organization has £150 million ($203m) to disburse over three years, much of it given to the organization via government grants and National Lottery revenue — and kicked off by discussing how difficult it is to get smaller projects off the ground and to a wide audience.
“We often 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,” Roberts began. “Tom Holland, his second film was called How I Live Now [released in 2013] with the great Kevin Macdonald and funded with lottery money, [and] that [put] 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 [2011 film] Tyrannosaur. So I think there are many markers of success in a film.”
The pair soon came onto genre, specifically when Roberts was explaining that there’s a “misconception that a lot of money needs to be spent in order to create something that’s got value.” He said there are things “we have to be greater [at] in the U.K. as an independent sector.” Binns probed: “Which are?”
