Why There's No Such Thing As A British Film; With the Oscars on the

GIVE almost anybody an Oscar and they will believe, for one shining moment, that they are as righteous and miraculous as Jesus on a moonbeam. This flash-bulb psychosis obliterates all perspective, and accounts for the award-winners' infamous history of lunatic hubristic speechmaking. But none of these moments has echoed so long, loud and silly in the film industry as the visionary mis-statement Colin Welland made when collecting the golden idol for his Chariots Of Fire screenplay in 1982: "The British are coming!"

Scorning those words has become a reflex for his contemporaries. Last November the director Alan Parker, now chairman of the British Film Council, couldn't help but raise them again in a bleak address to the whole stressed domestic industry. "That phrase," he sighed, "has proved to be an albatross around our necks for 20 years." Because, as everybody knows, the British never came. Welland was speaking too soon in the middle of a temporary boom that produced Gandhi and Chariots Of Fire and not much else. By the 1990s fewer films were being made in the UK than ever before. And now nobody is even sure what a British film is.

You could take such Oscar-winning movies as The English Patient, Shakespeare In Love and Gosford Park as three big gongs of belated vindication for Welland's prophesy. But the US producers who conceived and paid for those projects would tell you that you were talking out of your kazoo.

This kind of transatlantic super-grouping of funds and talent is now a standard way to make a movie. And every time the method produces a film worth discussing, that film becomes worth fighting over. So the issue of who gets to stick their flag in it always comes up around Oscar time.

The Hours, the studiously classy new film about disparate women affected and reflected by the life and works of Virginia Woolf, is the latest case. Nominated for a rack of Academy Awards, it is pegged by the bookies as 5-2 second favourite to win best picture. And obviously it's a British film.

No it isn't.

Yes it is.

Screenwriter David Hare - adapting the script from Michael Cunningham's novel - and director Stephen Daldry, both English, have become increasingly territorial over the movie, out of exasperation that it is being regarded as a rare highbrow American triumph. "People keep asking me how it feels to be working in Hollywood," says Daldry, "and I keep telling them I don't know because I've never worked there."

Daldry's only condition when he signed on to direct the project was that it be made in Britain, and Hare insists that 95% of it was shot in the Home Counties by a domestic crew. But the counterclaim is that $20 million of studio money made that shoot possible. Woolf herself may be English biographical property, but here she is played by an Australian (Nicole Kidman) backed up by a cast of Americans (Julianne Moore, Meryl Streep, Ed Harris). It is an interesting issue of perspective, especially since the movie is about Woolf's words and insights resounding through empty American lives, but considered in terms of the basic criteria it's a non-starter.

"Hare and Daldry were hired hands," shrugs Alan Parker, who has already dismissed this debate many times over. "The American producer Scott Rudin instigated the project and put the whole thing together. And he did it with American money. End of story. I think putting any nationality on a film is a mistake when it's such a mixture of involvement."

In the film industry, nationality is a matter of economics. The technical definition of a "British" film was set down by parliament in the Films Act of 1985, with the aim of establishing once and for all which productions were eligible for tax relief. The fine print says that, in order to qualify, a film must be produced by a company based in the UK or European Economic Area (EEA). Seventy per cent of the labour costs must be paid to citizens of the UK or EEA; 92.5% of the film's running time must be "created in the UK" and the remainder "in a country of the commonwealth". The restriction on the use of a foreign studio was lifted in 1999, but by these parameters the Harry Potter films and the recent Bond movies - which are all placed at the top of the British Film Institute's list of the most profitable UK movies of all time - don't count as local produce. In fact, the only pure-blooded, English movie to be a big hit in the last 10 years is Four Weddings And A Funeral.

Alan Parker says that in order to develop a sustainable domestic industry, film-makers need to let go of all their nationality hang- ups. The tax breaks need to be extended to encourage US studios to shoot in the UK and US distributors to exhibit UK-based movies. "We need to boost investment, to keep our technicians working and get the next generation training, or indigenous production will die like a frog in a saucepan," he says.

The British Film Council was formed in 2000 to stabilise a malfunctioning system of funds and franchises. Limited resources were being spent on ostensibly commercial but shockingly cloddish British comedies and gangster movies. The council now receives about (pounds) 57m a year in government funding and National Lottery money to disperse to its various projects - practical, educational and technological. Parker says they have made "a good start", name- checking the First Light scheme - which teaches kids in deprived areas about film-making - and the quality movies the council has so far helped to produce, including Gosford Park and Peter Mullan's The Magdalene Sisters. "But," he adds, "we need to bear in mind that in the truest sense there is no British film industry, and there never will be."

His vision is of an international system that can produce all kinds of films through the UK - mass-market movies and smaller projects about "themes specific to our own country and issues", films that are British in a cultural rather than financial sense, such as immigrant thriller Dirty Pretty Things or football comedy Bend it Like Beckham. Money has no real nationality these days anyway, and the cash that flows to Britain through the US studios originally stems from the profits of the Japanese corporations that own them (Sony runs MGM/UA, Columbia and Tri-Star Pictures, and Universal was run by Matsushita Electrical Industrial until they were recently bought out by Canadian booze giants Seagram.

Anthony Minghella, director of such global-flavoured epics as The English Patient and The Talented Mr Ripley, was possibly selected as the newest chairman of the British Film Institute because he shares Parker's internationalist spirit. He admitted recently that he hadn't been moved by a single English-language film in the last 10 years. And muddle-headed, tough-talking culture minister Kim Howells seems confusedly to concur - he says he wants to see a film about the foot- and-mouth crisis but hates both "arty-farty" British films and "cliche-ridden" stuff like The Full Monty. The last "British" movie he liked was Parker's The Commitments which was made and set entirely in the Republic of Ireland.

Parker, in fact, has never made a film in or about Britain. Domestic directors are divided and ambivalent about their responsibility to stay at home - Mike Leigh insists that we need to ignore the lucrative American formulas and tell our own stories; Ken Loach makes films about social realities everywhere from Greenock to Nicaragua; others, such as Tony and Ridley Scott, make expensive action films fetishising US military hardware - but many find it mirthlessly ironic that Parker is now regulating national and regional film-making funds (though not in Scotland, which redirects its lottery money with autonomy).

"I always get criticised for that," says Parker. "But I go wherever there's a good story. If I could find a good story here, I'd obviously prefer to make that. Sleep in my own bed at night."

So Parker is admitting there are no good subjects for movies in Britain? "Well, none that are right for me." His own latest film, incidentally, is the upcoming The Life Of David Gale, an unashamedly "American" thriller starring Kevin Spacey.

Fellow director Alex Cox, whose latest film, Revengers Tragedy, was released this weekend, finds this "a bit rich". Although Revengers Tragedy is authentically British, Cox is a man who chases the stories that interest him without Parker's confessed concern "for what the studios are likely to finance". He has made spaghetti westerns in Spain, psychodramas in Mexico and cop shows in Japan. He lives in Spain, Oregon and Liverpool. He is not too bothered about making British-specific stories, but he is concerned that Parker's Film Council does not extend much beyond London or the mainstream international market- instinct. Revengers Tragedy was the first film to be given some council funding, but Cox had to make up the rest through pre-sales of the movie to Japan, Korea and South China.

He believes a functioning, self-sustaining British film industry is possible, no matter what anyone says - but that some restructuring anarchy would be required. "The current funding franchises should all be closed down," he suggests, "and all that money put into the general fund for films. The government could administer a national film fund, divide it up into regions, with London as just one region. Places like Liverpool have enough writers and technicians to be almost on a par. We could all make more films, and cheaper. Some will do well, some badly, some will break even on video and TV. Sorted. Paradise" His own ideal project, he admits, is a $100m adaptation of Harry Harrison's book Bill The Galactic Hero. "But nobody would ever give me the money to make that."

If someone did, would he call it a British film?

"That movie, my friend, would belong to the whole world."

The Hours is on general release; Revengers Tragedy is on selected release. The Life Of David Gale is out next month No, they're not British either Trainspotting(1996) Written, produced and directed by Brits; filmed in Scotland; starred Ewan McGregor. But despite the Cool Britannia hype, this Irvine Welsh adaptation relied on US funding.

Bridget Jones's Diary (2001) Renee Zellweger might have put on a convincing Home Counties accent, but she's still an American. And the movie's British production company, Working Title, is owned by major American studio Polygram.

Shakespeare In Love (1998) Yes, it was all about the Bard but cigar-chomping Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein was the driving force behind this particular Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle.

Gosford Park (2001) Peopled by a stellar Brit cast, this murder romp seemed as English as the Queen. But it was directed by Robert Altman and paid for in US dollars.

Braveheart (1995) The Hollywood version of William Wallace's life starred Aussie Mel Gibson (left) and was filmed in Ireland because it offered better breaks. UK: nul points.

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