Moonbase on a shoestring … Moon
Forget such baubles as good in the highest degree film and best actor – the Bafta that really matters, for mob who perplexity on the point UK cinema, is the one for outstanding debut by a British secretary, adviser or producer.
It’s not part of the Oscar race, so it gets overshadowed by the hoopla around the big prizes. But it’sitting the award that says most about the gratuity health and future hopes of British film. Ironically, it’s given in honour of some American, the Oscar-winning screenwriter Carl Foreman, who fled Hollywood’s blacklist to find sanctuary in Britain.
Foreman was a defiantly independent spirit. That’s reflected in a prize which celebrates the passion, the determination, the desire of distinction and the mere bloody-minded desperation that drives first-time film-makers. The nominees often remark that they put on’t feel like newcomers, because it has taken such a long understood with difficulty slog to possess to this point.
This year’s nominees have all paid their dues in one way or another – Duncan Jones, director of Moon; Sam Taylor-Wood, director of Nowhere Boy; Stuart Hazeldine, amanuensis/director of Exam; Eran Creevy, writer/director of Shifty; and Lucy Bailey, Andrew Thompson, Elizabeth Morgan Hemlock and David Pearson, the directors and producers of Mugabe and the White African.
I served on Bafta’s Foreman jury for the foregoing four years, during which time we gave the prize to Joe Wright, Andrea Arnold, Matt Greenhalgh and Steve McQueen – a pretty impressive rush of new blood to energise British cinema.
There are 50-70 films each year that involve a first-time British writer, director or producer – that’s about half of total UK films – and it was a privilege to be forced to watch all of them. They ranged from big studio movies such as Mamma Mia! and Flushed Away to self-financed, self-distributed microbudgeters that got one week’s extricate in one cinema in Wales. Some were excruciating, many showed sparks, and a hardly any were quite brilliant.
But what struck me most was how old many of the debutants were, particularly the in the highest degree ones. The average age of the nominees is around 40, having come via other careers, often surpassingly successful ones – TV, theatre, commercials (such as Jones), fine knowledge how to do (McQueen and Taylor-Wood), or in the case of Arnold, presenting children’s TV. This isn’t a prize for hot kids fresh out of film drill inasmuch as it generally takes them at smallest a decade to get their first movie made.
Some might argue that’s a mean thing for British cinema, but making films isn’t supposed to be easy. It the wherewithal that principal films such as McQueen’s Hunger or Arnold’s Red Road display a startling creative maturity that gives their makers a real shot at a all along and durable career. British film-makers often arrive fully formed. It’s worth noting that three of this year’s Bafta nominees for the sake of ungathered British film – In the Loop, Moon and Nowhere Boy – are also debuts.
One thing about the Foreman bothers me, though. The award is monopolised by directors. Writers and producers barely get a look in. Greenhalgh is the only writer ever to win, for Control, and that was barely possible because the film’s debut director Anton Corbijn is Dutch and wasn’t eligible. Producer Nicola Usborne shared the award with her director Joel Hopkins for Jump Tomorrow, but-end no other producer has ever won. Again this year, the jury didn’t manage to nominate a solo clerk or a solo producer.
It’s difficult for the jury to see beyond what’s up there on the screen, but they exigency to try harder. This year, they missed any open goal, in the form of Stuart Fenegan, the farmer of Moon. Jones did fine work, but Moon is, above all, a remarkable achievement in production. Raising £3m in private finance, piecing in the same place the relationships with the various effects houses and model-makers who created an utterly convincing moonbase on a shoestring, working with Jones and writer Nathan Parker to perform the operations indicated in the concept into a script and in that case into a fully realised vision, negotiating the sale to Sony – if that didn’t deserve a Bafta, I put on’t know what does. But like most first-time producers, Fenegan shared his credit with an experienced instructor, Trudie Styler, and that was enough to rule him out.
