The Bafta-winning producer behind Ken Loach’s acclaimed films has warned that the UK indie film sector will “die” without additional fiscal support.
Appearing in front of a session of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s inquiry into British film and high-end TV, Rebecca O’Brien – who runs the production company Sixteen Films with Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty – raised urgent concerns about the state of the industry.
“There’s market failure because the streamers came in, high-end TV got higher end, and Hollywood arrived, and they took a lot of our investors away,” O’Brien said. “Some additional fiscal support for the sector is essential. I think we could really die without it.”
O’Brien, who has produced Loach’s work for more than three decades, was asked how Sixteen Films managed to successfully produce and land distribution for its films.
She said: “When we made I, Daniel Blake, for instance, we didn’t know that it would be successful in Japan. We thought we were making a little film set in the north-east, which was telling stories about certain parts of the community at that time.
“We wanted to make it because we thought it was an important story to tell. So you never know what story might work. You don’t know until you’ve done it, which is why we need the research and development to get stories up and running.”
The producer, whose latest film with Loach, The Old Oak, was nominated for a Bafta, added that the films were highly dependent on European partners who helped finance and sell projects around the world.
“Every film I have done in the last 25 years has been a European co-production,” she said, before adding that it had become much harder to source funding from the continent.
She said she had to “scour Europe” to get funding for her latest production credit, Harvest (directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari and starring Caleb Landry Jones) – which is a “UK, French, German, Greek, and US co-production, with little bits of money patchworked together from all of those different countries from their public funds, pre-sales, and little tax credits here and there.”
She said the production also had private investors and cash from Creative Scotland and BBC Film. “It’s absolutely exhausting to put something like that together.”
O’Brien discussed the costs of developing new British talent, which she said was being “hoovered” up by streamers and inward investors who could pay actors and crew more. “We have to keep running behind and picking up new talent, inventing new talent to fill the gap, which we’re very happy to do,” she said.
“But a lower-budget film can’t afford to have big British stars because they’re all probably scheduled within an inch of their lives working on Hollywood films at Pinewood.”
She said the government could “show confidence” in the UK indie sector by supporting producers with an increased tax credit. “If I had an additional 15% going into the market, that would give me more confidence,” she said.
Also giving evidence was Eva Yates, the director of BBC Film. She said: “I think the tax credit could have a transformative effect, I think we’re at the point where we are at risk of losing a huge number of really talented people from the industry.
“And I think there’s both an immediacy to that as a possible solution but there’s also an opportunity to bring some confidence back into an industry which has really been battered in the last few years between the strikes, the effects of Covid and massive changes to the structure of the marketplace.”
Yates, whose publicly funded company was behind recent releases including Rye Lane, One Life, and Aftersun, said the “amount of resources” needed to make films was increasing. “I now go to film festivals and spend the whole time meeting other financiers so that I can try to bring those introductions into the British industry and to those independent producers. I don’t get to watch films any more.”
She added that the “very modest budget” for BBC Film at £11m had not increased in a decade, despite rising inflation. “We make about 15 films a year with that money, and we also make short films, but we do that always in partnership with other people – so we don’t have the ability to solely finance anything that we do.”
Film4 director Ollie Madden also said that his company, involved in Oscar-nominated films Poor Things and The Zone of Interest, was making “fewer” movies than they would like. “It has become harder, finding absolutely private money, commercial money to make first-time features because they are very risky.”
He added that there was a “huge demand for British films but there aren’t enough being made. We need to ensure there aren’t gaps in the supply.”
