As the 40th edition of the London Film Festival gets under way, Geoffrey Macnab talks to the woman who has made it the UK's premier film event - the outgoing director, Sheila Whitaker
Not so long ago, the London Film Festival seemed like the personal fiefdom of National Film Theatre members. Every year, around 90% of the tickets sold went to this select group while the rest of London's cinemagoers - those, at least, who were aware that the city actually had a film festival - scrambled for the remainder. 'By the time the public got a look in, there was very little left to buy because of the small auditoria,' recalls festival director, Sheila Whitaker. 'Now it's 60% public, 40% members.' She sees the turnaround as one of the key achievements in her 10 years at the helm.
Largely thanks to Whitaker's efforts, the LFF is in robust health approaching its 40th birthday. Attendances are up, sponsorship is booming, press, distributors and exhibitors support the festival as never before. This perhaps explains the general air of amazement at the news earlier in the year that the mandarins at the British Film Institute had decided not to renew her contract beyond the current festival. At the same time the French Government was awarding her the honorary title of 'Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et Letters' for services toward French cinema in Britain.
Whitaker is clearly frustrated at having to leave her job in such untimely fashion. 'Obviously, I'm not going to go on forever and it's not my job by rights by any means. But there were other things I wanted to do in the next two to three years… I'm not one who wants to sit and play bureaucratic or political games, which is a pity, because that is the way you survive.'
She took over stewardship of the LFF in 1987 and immediately ran into controversy by pencilling in Mike Hodges' A Prayer For The Dying for the Opening Night Gala. ('It was about an Irish terrorist, but it was about redemption. It was about somebody who realised that violence wasn't the answer. I thought to that extent it was an important film to be shown.') Less than a week before the festival started, there was a bombing in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland. 'We all felt that after that, however good the film, we shouldn't screen it.' Instead, Whitaker's first LFF began with Nikita Mikhalkov's Chekhovian fable, Dark Eyes. 'It is a wonderful film. It was actually a really good opening night.' (Opening nights don't get any easier. This year again, Whitaker's original choice was withdrawn at the last minute. It is a testament to the LFF's new-found status that she was able to land a big Hollywood movie like The First Wives Club as a last-minute replacement.)
Whitaker was eager from the outset to broaden the festival's audience base, but was hamstrung by lack of funds. 'There was clearly a limit to how much money the BFI could put into the festival. We felt very frustrated. We knew it was time for the festival to step forward, but as with most things in life it wasn't going to come free.' Sponsorship, she believed, could be the answer. 'At that time arts sponsorship was still relatively rare in this country. It existed at places like Covent Garden and the National Theatre, but that was also a kind of patronage. Commercial sponsorship was still in its very early days.'
Together with her deputy director Rosa Bosch, she began courting potential backers. It was a painstaking business. 'You have a small event so you get small sponsors. Once you've done that, you can build up the event a little bit. And you can encourage the mainstream distributors to give you slightly bigger films. Then that in turn enables you to attract a slightly bigger sponsor.'
The Evening Standard agreed to support The Film On The Square. Another important early backer was American Airlines. 'In those days, they didn't even have direct flights to London, but it was thanks to them that we were able to get the US indie filmmakers over.' This year, support from VISA, who traditionally sponsor sport rather than the arts, has enabled the festival to expand still further. The LFF is now the largest non-competitive film festival in Europe, showing, its publicity crows, 'more than 200 features and close to 100 shorts over 18 days.'
'I'd always been keen on cinema,' Whitaker remembers when asked to explain the unconventional career trajectory that took her into the business, 'but in a purely amateur way. I was a punter. When I got this job, it wasn't something I had wanted to do since I was 12-years-old or anything like that. I remember that my hesitation was that I really enjoyed cinema. I worried that if I just spent all day working at it I'd get tired of it all. Of course, it doesn't happen like that at all. You get more and more hooked.'
She started her working life as a secretary, with stints in insurance companies, factories ('that was quite a political training ground, opened my eyes to a few things that go on') and even an advertising agency, 'which I hated'. Her administrative skills landed her a job running the London offices of a group of companies. Then, one day in 1968, she spotted an job advertisement for the 'Head of the Collection of Posters, Stills and Designs' at the British Film Institute. At first, she was loath to apply. 'I remember thinking they'd want someone with a degree, which at that time I didn't have.' A friend cajoled her into trying for the job and much to her surprise, she was given it.
The collection was 'in a bit of a mess', but she spent the next six years knocking it into shape. 'I established a proper photographic department and that sort of thing.' She also started going to the National Film Theatre 'three, four or five times a week'. After a Comparative Literature degree as a mature student at Warwick University, she was hired in 1979 as director of The Tyneside Cinema and the Tyneside Film Festival. 'It was,' she recalls, 'a very good training ground for what I later encountered in London.'
The Tyneside Festival was dedicated to independent cinema. Often, Whitaker was presenting films that not even she knew anything about. 'What was exciting in Newcastle was that audiences responded and were prepared to experiment. That does happen in London, but here the audiences are much more…' she pauses before alighting on the appropriate word, 'blasé. They have so much to choose from.'
In 1984, she was lured back to the capital as head of programming for the National Film Theatre. She wasn't universally popular in the position. 'I had all these attacks saying that I was a radical feminist who did nothing but programme boring films.' Such criticism is given predictably short shrift. 'If you are running a cinematheque, you have to show all sorts of films for all sorts of audiences, which I hope I did.'
The accusations that she was overly highbrow in her NFT programming days seem all the more ironic given her record at the LFF. Under her stewardship, the festival moved out of its South Bank cocoon and began to attract filmmakers and stars who in earlier years would probably only have been seen in Venice, Cannes or Berlin. 'I'd like to think I'm populist in the best sense. Having had the excitement of finding out different kinds of movies myself, I just wish to try and give other people that pleasure. Show good American movies and people come to those, but then they've got the booklet and they're reading it, and they're at least aware of other things. They realise there is a whole new world of cinema out there. If you can get some of them thinking actively about that world… that's what I like to think of as my populist approach. It's a bit like being the loss leader in a supermarket.'
There is no official market at the LFF but Whitaker points out that business does get done. 'We have an industry office. Buyers and sellers can go to screenings… we know we sell quite a lot out of the festival. We just haven't been very good at identifying it and blowing our own trumpet.'
Ten years on, one of her major disappointments is the way foreign language distribution has crumbled, a state of affairs for which she holds television to blame. 'I think it is totally indefensible. To have almost totally cut foreign language movies seems to me one of the most immoral acts the BBC and Channel 4 have ever done.' She acknowledges that TV stations, like festivals, need audiences ('you don't want to show a film to two men and a dog') but accuses them of 'forgetting their responsibilities to the nation as a whole' in the clamour for ratings. She is saddened that so few of the foreign language titles she brings over to the festival go on to achieve commercial distribution. 'But I'd like to think we have at least opened minds to the possibility they might succeed. The people at the Odeon have seen for themselves how many people will turn up for an American indie or a film with subtitles. If it's the right film, people will go to it.'
On a more positive note, Whitaker believes that the LFF audience award, which provides £10,000 toward the distribution of the winning film, has helped give several offbeat movies a theatrical life. For instance, Endaf Emlyn's Welsh-language comedy, Leaving Lenin, was released in British cinemas, 'which it probably wouldn't have been without that award.' She is also still enthusiastic about such initiatives as the LFF's school screenings. 'We had Spike Lee talking to the school children last year which caused some pandemonium.'
Running the LFF, Whitaker testifies, is a stressful business. For three years, from 1987-90, she somehow managed to combine it with her position at the NFT, 'but I really didn't have much of a social life. It is too much for one person to do both.' Not that her workload seems to have decreased. 'Most people's jobs go along on a plateau with the odd blip up or down. Mine just goes from nought to…' she gestures upward toward the ceiling of her tiny office behind the NFT. 'It's a bit of an odd existence.' The job starts in earnest in February at the Berlin Film Festival and builds from there. By November, it is always sheer chaos. 'Whenever there is a crisis, which there always is, you think the stars must be in the wrong conjunction.'
In the early days of her stewardship, the LFF was chronically understaffed. Since then, matters have improved. But every festival remains something of a lottery. 'Are we going to make the admissions? That's the hairy bit. Are we going to make the box-office? It's in the lap of the gods.'
Ask her which films she has been proudest to show and she fires off a lengthy list. Highlights, for one reason or another, include Enchanted April ('everybody thought I was crazy because it was on 16mm and we were going to show it at the Odeon, Leicester Square, but it looked fantastic'), Strange Days ('very much an in-your-face movie… it was the first time we'd opened with a film by a woman and Bigelow has such command of the medium - people may have hated it, but at least they had something to talk about at the dinner afterwards) Hal Hartley's first feature, One False Move, Babe, Reservoir Dogs, various British films such as Peter's Friends and Cello (later retitled Truly Madly Deeply), and all the movies from the Middle East, Iran and China that she has helped London audiences to discover.
In less than three weeks' time, Whitaker's final LFF will be over. What does the future hold? 'I'm going to have a break, get a suntan, get the institution out of my system and then I'll look around for something else. So anybody out there who has got some fantastic job that I'm just right for, I'm open to offers…'
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