Eric
Fellner: Bridget Jones’s Diary producer says
Gordon Brown helped revitalise the UK film industry
Jonathan
Owen | The Independent –
October 31, 2015
Exclusive: ‘Gordon Brown changed the way in which films could be funded
through tax credits’
He is one of the most powerful figures in British film, and Hollywood too,
for that matter. Yet the low-key Eric Fellner is the polar opposite of the
stereotype of the sharp-suited, fast-talking movie mogul.
Working Title Films, which he has co-chaired with Tim Bevan since
1992, has produced more than 100 movies, ranging from Four Weddings and
a Funeral and Les Misérables to Bridget
Jones’s Diary and The Theory of Everything.
The company’s productions have garnered almost 50 Oscars and Baftas but
it’s not critical acclaim that drives Fellner, 56. “If you make films
to try and get awards it’s a one-way ticket to misery because you just
can’t guarantee it,” he says.
“What motivates me is business, I am a businessman. Beyond that the only
films I want to make are films that I am really excited about.”
We turn to the reason he is giving the interview, for Fellner generally
prefers to stay in the background. Sitting in a conference room next to
his London office, the stubble-faced producer locks eyes and talks about
one of his big passions, “to encourage people to go back to seeing films
the way they were designed to be viewed... on the big screen” and to
“bring film into the classroom”.
He chairs the Into Film charity and this week is the start of its annual
festival, which will involve 400,000 five- to 19-year-olds at 2,700
screenings and events across Britain. Movies can be “a very powerful
tool to open doors for teachers to find ways of engaging their pupils”,
says Fellner. “You show them The Bridge on the River Kwai,
and suddenly they will be interested in the Second World War – why was
Japan in Burma? Where is Burma? What were we doing there? What was
colonisation all about? What was the British Empire? All from just
watching a movie.”
The father of five, who lives with his partner, Laura Bailey, in London,
recently gave a talk to children in Tower Hamlets. “I could tell that
the young people thought I came from another planet.” He was privately
educated at Cranleigh School in Surrey but, while he had a “decent
education”, he insists: “I didn’t have any ‘ins’, I didn’t
have any contacts, so that’s what I try to explain to young people. If
you really want it, even though it feels like a million miles from Tower
Hamlets to the West End, it is do-able.”
He did not spend his childhood dreaming of making films, but enjoyed
working on school plays. “I wanted to be in music, film or theatre. I
didn’t know how to get into any of them. I knew I couldn’t be a
performer, I knew I had no aptitude in front of an audience, but I wanted
to be engaged in something that was creative.”
Fellner studied stage management at the Guildhall School of Music and
Drama but dropped out after a year. It was the early 1980s, when there was
a “closed shop” in film and theatre, but “music wasn’t unionised
... So I sent thousands of letters, banged on doors, and one day managed
to get a job at a music video company right in the early days of music
videos, as a runner”. He graduated from pop videos to film, and in 1992
joined Working Title Films.
British film is in good shape, for which the former Prime Minister Gordon
Brown deserves some credit, according to the producer. “Every year when
the awards calendar comes around, you will always see British talent.
Given that we are such a small piece of the global entertainment pie I
think that says a lot about how the industry is going. Ten years ago,
Gordon Brown changed the way in which films could be funded through tax
credits.... This is the first time that one programme has been properly
supported by consecutive governments and it is proving to be an amazing
thing. It’s encouraging external investment from Hollywood studios and
many other foreign companies that are coming here.”
Producing films is not easy. “It’s a very, very, very tough job
because it’s straddling so many different things, from creative to
business to psychological, to emotional.” And once shooting starts “it
is quite tiring but also stressful, because you are spending two or three
hundred thousand dollars a day”.
He cites a recent problem on the set of Bridget Jones’s Baby with
Renée Zellweger and Colin Firth. “The ceiling fell down on a location
we were in and suddenly you lose two or three hours, and then what are you
going to do? You’ve got to get out of that location that night and you
still have to get those shots.”
But he would not have it any other way. “We are incredibly privileged to
have the ability to be able to tell stories and get them out there.”
Asked about the film he’s proudest of, Fellner picks Sid and
Nancy, a biopic of Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious and his girlfriend
Nancy Spungeon, and the first film he produced. He grins as he recalls the
film being screened at the Cannes film festival in 1986. Hundreds of punks
had turned up. “There was just this almighty fight as the front doors
got smashed and the police got into a fight with the punks and it was
like, ‘OK, I love the film industry’, and that was a great moment.”