UK films urged to be more 'mainstream'?! Frankly insulting to filmmakers

David Cameron set out a new direction in a vague hope of reviving our flagging UK film industry yesterday by urging the industry to “...support "commercially successful pictures". It’s that simple apparently. Buy into something which is going to be a huge hit. I literally don’t know why anyone hasn’t thought of it before and why it hasn’t been tried.

How do you identify the commercial success of anything before it's been made?! If we knew that, there would be no problems with this industry as pointed out by Ken Loach. For the PM to urge people to make more “mainstream films” is frankly an insult to filmmakers and generally all in creative communities. How do you classify what is going to be mainstream? Leaving aside the fact that most mainstream stuff today is total shite, it's subjective and market driven. Are we expected to produce rubbish based on what the current trends demand? Of reality shows, watered down nonsense and over- budgeted brainless guff. Well, yes apparently. Im not against commercial films, nor are they beneath me, I love blockbuster films and would love to see British Film industry get back on it's feet and be as good as any Hollywood output.

I’m not going to pretend that the arts industries are any more important than health, manufacturing, education, welfare or defence and rightly so. I am simply standing up for the industry which I care about, work in and want to continue to work in for many many years without seeing it disintegrate. It's easy to get a bit arty farty about it, but I accept that it is an industry and for an industry to thrive it has to make money, but this is a artistic creative industry first, that has to be able to express itself as is the nature, if it's sole purpose is to make money it might as well be the banking industry. At last count, the creative sector contributes 7% of the UK's GDP, raising £4.5 billion and is responsible for employing 6% of the workforce in an already oversubscribed industry which will see this number rise. As a comparison, Finance is 11% and Agriculture is about 0.9%. [as a very rough estimate].

In his speech on Tuesday about something or other, Ed Miliband responded to a question on funding for the arts with the breathtaking revelation that “yes... we need to find new ways of funding the arts industry”. Brilliant. Glad we cleared that up. This industry has never been funded properly and in this austerity generation, it looks doubtful that it will be for a while to come. I'm glad that the chorus of the creative community all responded at the start of last year with a collective cry of "screw it, we've got work to do and we're going to get on with it", getting projects off the ground using crowd funding sites like Indie GoGo.

I love films, and the process of filmmaking, I believe it’s the only complete art form (hold your rock throwing!) My longstanding view that films should have the ability to entertain and educate, ideally at the same time without you realising. It should be able to inspire people’s thoughts, ideas and aspirations and should have the freedom to allow for more intelligent and original storytelling. It's a reflection of our world as it is now, capturing and documenting the times we live in in whatever format the story is being told in. We cannot stifle voices even in the smallest of ways, by urging people to make more mainstream films in order to gain funding. We have to develop and nurture this country's talents across the board, allow a diversity of voices for better narratives to shine through, get a brighter cross section of better storytelling to bridge cultural divides, challenge people, and maybe, just maybe inspire some peace in this Jubilee and Olympic year!