FILM

Bristol’s never been renowned as a hotbed of movie-making, but all that’s about to change with three major features set to be filmed here over the next few months. Steve Wright explains the importance of iFeatures.

Think about this one for a minute. What are the major gaps in Bristol’s cultural reputation? Graffiti, as any fool knows, we do. Music is another bolted-on speciality. Animation (hello Morph, Gromit et al), TV (‘Skins’, ‘Casualty’, ‘Mistresses’, hours of lavish wildlife close-ups), comedy (we’re looking at you, messrs Bailey, Howard and Lee Collins): Bristol’s cultural calling-card is impressive.

But film? Not something with which, traditionally, we’ve been synonymous. Eighties-set student caper ‘Starter for Ten’; sub-Bridget Jones romcom ‘The Truth about Love’; another student romp, 2002’s ‘Living in Hope’: the list is, frankly, less than awesome. That could all have changed, though, by the end of next year, when a trio of boxfresh new films – a surreal office comedy, a suburban horror story and an erotic thriller, all set in Bristol and deeply rooted in the city’s geography, culture and character – hit UK cinema screens.

The story so far, then. Last year South West Screen asked film-making teams across the UK to submit ideas for a feature film set in Bristol. Backed by BBC Films and Bristol City Council, iFeatures aimed to act as a quick step-up to full-length film-making for Bristol’s creative talent, as well as attracting some of the best emerging film-makers from across the UK and Europe to town.

An impressive 550 treatments flooded in. Now, after months of rigorous sifting, script development, workshopping and mentoring, that pile has been whittled down to three, all of which will go into full production over the next few months (the first, ‘The Dark Half’, begins shooting in Bristol this week). Filming will finish next summer, and the hope is to premiere all three in Bristol next autumn.

Each film has received £300,000 to see it through to the end of production. Small beer in today’s film world, perhaps (‘Pirates of the Caribbean III’ notched up an estimated $300 million): but a valuable lesson in credit-crunch film-making for the winning teams.

After that, impressively, all three films have secured the same sales agent, UK’s ContentFilm International, to handle film, TV and DVD sales across the globe. No wonder, then, that Chris Moll, who has headed up the scheme for South West Screen, has robust hopes for all three. “Even though we are very confident with the teams and the stories, you never fully know what you have until you finish filming. But having Content on board means that the film industry has faith in these films. It’s very rare for films of this scale to attract an international sales agent before filming even begins. They tend to wait to see the finished product before deciding whether they can sell it. But we’ve managed it already: and not just for one of the films, but for all three.”

Chris pioneered a similar scheme in Liverpool in 2008, awarding three £250,000 budgets to scripts set in the city. That scheme’s standout success was Liverpool director Terence Davies’s elegiac portrait of his hometown, ‘Of Time and the City’. After that, Chris wanted to try something similar in his hometown.

“But whereas Liverpool was a more local scheme, this time around we said, ‘Let’s run it as a national scheme out of Bristol’. The problem a lot of cities fall into is in just wanting to tell their stories locally: but once you have a city of this scale, you need to start telling your stories internationally. Film gives you a canvas to do that.”

This time around, there was no geographical requirement for the teams – although many, including all three winners, included at least one Bristolian. “Regional film is about promoting your best, but also inviting the best to come to your city and make stuff with you,” Chris explains. “And doing it on your terms, rather than having a London company deciding to make something in the regions, spending three weeks here and then fucking off back to London. These films are rooted in Bristol, and the teams on them are a mix of the best talent from Bristol and from beyond. If you want to be a big, grown-up city, you have to be porous, to allow influences in. The key is to make things on your own terms.”

Crucially, though, the films had to be set in Bristol, and tell Bristol’s stories to the wider world. “Each story has to engage with the city in some way. More than just using the city as a location, it’s about reflecting the flavour of Bristol. So, of the three winners, ‘8 Minutes Idle’, while I wouldn’t call it a slacker film, plays on that idea of Bristol as a slightly laid-back place, while the milieu of ‘Flying Blind’ is Bristol’s world-famous aerospace industry. They each use the city in different ways, but the stories they tell aren’t parochial. They’re stories about Bristol, but with appeal to national and international audiences.”

The films are now recruiting trainees, cast and crew: visit www.ifeatures.co.uk ffi.
 

Copyright Steve Wright 2010

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