David Puttnam calls on UK film industry to urgently invest in training; confirms he is standing down as FDA president | News

In his final keynote speech as president of the Film Distributors’ Association (FDA), industry stalwart David Puttnam has issued an impassioned rallying cry for further investment in UK film skills and training.

Puttnam was speaking this morning at Bafta at the launch of the 2023 FDA Yearbook. He confirmed at the end of his speech that he would be standing down shortly from his position as FDA president.

Puttnam warned that a lack of investment in this area is undermining the UK industry’s ability to be “internationally competitive”. According to his own calculations, a committed annual investment of £40m in skills could result in production savings of well over £100m.  

New data commissioned by Puttnam himself from Saffery Champness shows that underinvestment, leading to scarcity of talent, has resulted in significant wage inflation.

“We are pissing money down the drain at the moment in wage inflation as a direct result of having scarcity of production personnel,” Puttnam told Screen in an interview immediately after his speech.

He cited the challenges entailed in hiring top technicians. “A good cinematographer now gets a car and driver. The wages are colossal… so what you need are 15 good cinematographers because then, as a producer, you are in some sort of negotiating position.”

Puttnam decried the current situation in UK film and TV production where crew “scarcity” has become “a fact of life” and where productions are stealing crew members from each other.

The veteran producer expressed his hope that Georgia Brown, chair of the UK Production Skills Task Force for the Screen Sector, will pick up on the data and ideas he has provided.

Puttnam was striking a familiar theme. As he pointed out in his speech in 1990, when then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher held her Downing Street seminar with a working party of leading figures in the UK film industry, he was already talking about the need for substantial investment in film production.

Around that period, inward investment was worth £358m to the UK film and TV industry. By 2022, Puttnam pointed out, that figure had risen to £6.27bn, a “staggering” 1651% increase.

“Surprise, surprise, in order to keep that going, you are going to need a shitload of people,” Puttnam observed of the ongoing production boom in the UK and the urgent need to address skills shortages. 

Contemplating the current UK cinemagoing figures, Puttnam noted that “the frequency of cinema visits post-pandemic is beginning to move in the right direction, this can only be good news, but as yet it’s nowhere near where any of us would like, or in some cases need it to be. Audience numbers had already stubbornly plateaued even before the pandemic.”

Stronger together 

Puttnam also made a plea for industry unity. “Together we have to unify our ambitions if we’re to put film back at the heart of the nation’s cultural conversation. The greatest unifier for the industry is the commitment to provide entertaining and engaging films, irrespective of platform,” he commented. 

If there are divisions between production, distribution and exhibition when the industry is trying to negotiate with government, that means, Puttnam warned, “you are immediately buggered…one absolutely consistent thing from over 30 years of lobbying is being defeated by the Civil Service when you’re not unified.”

The veteran producer, educator and environmentalist has also called for further industry-wide promotion activities similar to 1985’s British Film Year. In the wake of British Film Year, “confidence was restored, new cinemas in the form of multiplexes were constructed and a number of successful film franchises were re-invigorated or launched.” 

Now, Puttnam said, he “would like to see whatever it takes to get the industry to see that when one succeeds, they all succeed. You don’t have a successful production sector and a failing distribution sector. You don’t have a successful distribution sector and a failing exhibition sector. They all have to work.”

In his speech, Puttnam pointed out that key decisions regarding film policy, from “that catastrophic scrapping of the Eady Levy to the Downing Street Seminar; from the decision to allow film to be included as an allowable expense within the National Lottery Act to the successful introduction of Tax Reliefs; and following all of that effort, the ignorant and vindictive decision to scrap an entirely coherent UK Film Council – were all made without anyone from the screen industries in the room. That was the cost of a fractured industry.”

Lobbying and windows

Looking back on his many decades interacting with UK governments, Puttnam told Screen that he and Richard Attenborough may have “cast too large a shadow over the lobbying bit. Because we were very close to the [Tony] Blair government, we had access [during] things like negotiating the first tax treaties with [then chancellor] Gordon Brown. We had amazing access.

“I think we paid insufficient attention to making sure that the next group through had similar access and got similarly engaged. Maybe Dickie and I hung around, ironically, a bit too long… I think a lot of people said, We’ll leave that [industry lobbying] to Puttnam and Attenborough, instead of getting their hands dirty and getting more involved.”

On the distribution front, Puttnam welcomed the fact that both Amazon and Apple are “making serious commitments to releasing their works on the big screen and that all the major studios have reaffirmed their commitment to theatrical release. The window debate has been addressed.”

The goal now is to encourage “far more people right across the UK to engage or re-engage with the joy of cinema-going. And that means making it easier, most particularly for women and older folk of my generation, to rediscover, re-populate and feel ‘at home’ in their local screens.”

Puttnam also used his speech to trumpet the importance of independent UK filmmaking. “We need to find new means of supporting our independent film sector. This is industrially important, as it helps develop the astonishing array of creative and technical talents which act as a magnet for inward investment.”

Regarding his own departure from the FDA, Puttnam, who became president in 2007, said, “It has been a wonderful 16 years. I’ve really enjoyed it but I think the time has come genuinely to step down.”