15/10/2013 - British producer David Parfitt spoke to Cineuropa about the new dynamics of film production and distribution

Former British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Chairman David Parfitt (55) has over 25 years of experience producing critically acclaimed films that have on occasion become commercial hits, even by mainstream Hollywood standards. Shakespeare in Love won seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Actress, and Best Supporting Actress; while other standout films such as Henry V, Peter's Friends, Swan Song, and Much Ado About Nothing are also among his producer credits. His recent work, Wipers Times, is showing on the independent film circuit. The film recently debuted in France at the British Film Festival in Dinard where he took the time to speak to Cineuropa about the new dynamics of film production and distribution.

Cineuropa: How have film production and distribution changed over the past five years and how will they continue to evolve? 
David Parfitt: The last film I made around three years ago, My Week with Marilyn [+see also:
trailer
film profile], was likely the last straightforward feature film that I will ever make. We did it in the time-honored way, with worldwide distribution and all of the usual things. But after the film was released, I later worked on a five-hour TV drama for HBO and BBC, called Parade’s End. It did very well and got great reviews. I really, really enjoyed the long-form filmmaking with four-day shoots, and having five hours to tell those stories is just fantastic. So, since then I have been developing TV and film in parallel and all of that development has sort of been moving along nicely.
So after 25 years of making movies, I have been moving into television and then into these hybrids. So certainly, my company’s attitude has changed over the last three years in that it is developing into TV drama and now we look at Amazon and NetFlix as distributors of our products, along with BBC, HBO, and theatrical distributors.
So it has absolutely changed, but we are still handing over productions to the sales agents, who are in effect deciding how they are going to push them. But we are delivering to them, in effect, product that fits a new model.

How does this change reflect audiences’ new tastes and how do you cater to these needs?
Audiences do consume in different ways. I see that at home and I assume that you do as well. The budgets that I have tended to work with for feature films have been at the lower end, which is now known as mid-budget, and that is the area that has been particularly hard hit. It is harder now to find your audience in the cinema for those lower-budget films. So we have to look at new distribution models. For Wipers Times, they took the decision that it was a low-budget British film, which was not necessarily an easy sell that was about war, and were bold enough to say that there was an audience for it, but that audience might only last a week in cinemas. But there is an audience that will want to see the film on a big screen and they took a decent amount of theatres for a film of that type, but they also sold a few thousand BluRays, and they got a lot of downloads, and they got a lot of audience on Channel 4 [in the UK].

How has making films that will appeal to audiences in the UK, continental Europe, and even the U.S. changed following the new distribution demands?
I really don’t think about European, UK, and American audiences differently. I just look at quality and I think people respond to quality however it is delivered. I know that might be an old-fashioned attitude, but I don’t make my movies cut faster because there is a generation that can only take three minutes, for example.
It comes down to good writing to start with. If I don’t have a script that is good, then I won’t take it to the next stage. Like all independents who live a fairly hand-to-mouth existence, there is the temptation to go for the fees and to just get something going, but I try to resist that because it never works.