18th January 2012.

Twitter and the 'net in general exploded yesterday with reports of David Cameron's comments about the future direction of the British Film Industry while on a visit to Pinewood Studios. Much of the response was not complimentary; indeed, some of it was rather rude. But, disregarding my belief that anyone using the word "incentivising" out loud needs to be taken aside and spoken to with a chair leg, I'm not entirely sure where the real problems with it lie.

Why is the suggestion that the industry should have more of an eye on box-office potential such a bad thing? Granted it's true, as William Goldman pointed out, that Nobody Knows Anything, but you can still have a damned good guess, and we can be more than reasonably confident that drab tracts of social realism or such luminaries as Danny Dyer squawking idiocy and profanity at anything that moves will never make for a financially vibrant industry in this country - let alone the rest of the world.

What's been overlooked in the hair-tearing and teeth-gnashing is that Cameron's talking about international box-office rather than domestic. It's all very well achieving success at the UK cinemas but that's just shuffling around money which is already in this country. Making films that can play well in other markets will lead to money coming in to the UK industry and thus the UK economy. That's not to say that any enterprising British producers should focus exclusively on how it'll work in Des Moines - does any Hollywood mogul ever worry about whether the picture will play in Crouch End? - but it does suggest that we should think bigger, think globally.

Nor is it being suggested that the almighty dollar should be pursued at the expense of everything else. The likes of Ken Loach, Andrea Arnold or Mike Leigh are not going to be refused funding on the grounds they're not engaged on international blockbuster projects. But we need more than the small, the personal, the polemical. Culture and art obviously matter, but films cost money, and usually (though not always) it's someone else's money. If it's your own, fine. But when you're making a film on somebody else's dime, isn't that somebody else entitled to at least the chance of a reasonable return?

Producing these movies is only part of the problem - there's also the exhibition. There's no point in financing films if there's no way of actually getting them seen by paying audiences, and with all the chain multiplexes showing the same big studio behemoths for weeks on end there's no opportunity for smaller, independent British or foreign films to get a look-in, unless it's a slow week and there are 16 screens to fill. (JULIA'S EYES and 13 ASSASSINS did make it to Milton Keynes, but for one week only.) But why is that? Whatever you may think of them, Cineworld, Odeon and Vue aren't stupid. They know that the first week of a new Ken Loach movie will attract smaller audiences than for the fourth week of the new Will Ferrell movie. Mention has been made of introducing a quota system for independent British film, but can you force Cineworlds to take TWILIGHT off and put FISH TANK on instead? Probably not. Say what you like about their inability to get their customers to shut their flapping gobs and switch their phones off; the 'plexes know what the audiences want, and it ain't Ken Loach. They don't want empty screens; they want the sales of popcorn and nachos. Until there's a more substantial network of alternative cinemas to specialise in niche productions, multiplexes are all there is and it's not even as if the multiplex in the next town is showing anything different.

Obviously no-one with all their pegs in the right holes sets out to deliberately lose other people's investment. But why aren't we setting out to make money? Is huge financial success - not just respectable returns but a KING'S SPEECH goldmine - such a terrible thing? To judge from the response from Cameron's speech you'd think he was instructing the industry on precisely which films to make and which projects to abandon. He isn't. We shouldn't just be thinking about local audiences and we shouldn't just be concerned with covering the costs. We really should be thinking bigger. What's the problem here?

Richard Street.