Aesthetica Film Festival: Film 4 – Film Production

Film 4 – Film Production

Tom Leggett

I am one of 3 development editors – work across the film 4 slate – in the region of 120/130 projects of development. Work very closely with writers and directors, always looking for new filmmakers we can work with. New writers, through novels, theatres, lots of different sources.

Takes risks

Justifying decisions for projects

Always looks for new short film makers, people that they can work with.

We want to be alive and working with new talent – but balances their relationships also with people like Danny Boyal

Part of channel 4

Part of our pressure is to finance films that will generate profit ie. They were apart from the Inbetweeners

Curious to know peoples thoughts on british indie films??

Internship  placements – around june / july – KEEP A LOOK OUT

Budget £15 mil a year on production – starts off with a filmmakers vision

Lots of film makers he comes across will say they can make a film for 200k 300k but its incredibly hard. Looking at a 100 page script its very difficult but Ben May(?) was very good at it

In terms of what we look for in each projects is distinctive stories, which is an incredibly broad and not very helpful idea because everyones is original, but what we are looking for is ideas that we can ask ourselves have I seen this film before? Sometimes theres a good reason if we haven’t seen that type of film before but we tend to get most excited about the ones we haven’t seen before but are exciting!

Best advice is to try get your work seen as much as possible, email me(him) or one of my colleges to get people in the industry engaged with you. An agent is always helpful. Starting that conversation, that dialogue is really helpful, because in a couple of years

While we are committed to taking risks, we are also looking for those films that do resonate with audiences. British social realism is a big part of cinema since the first world war.  We are looking for films that generally connect with people that have a relationship with an audience that would want to go and see on a Friday or sat night.

How did you get into the position of the comp

Went to national film television school in production – naturally led after there to work in a university and then worked for Harvey (Weinstein??)

Distribution:

Film 4.0 – getting people to tweet about our films, get blogs going, so theres awareness of a film before it goes into the cinema – people usually get aware of the cinema once reviews have come out.