The French connection: How our film industry is changing

Historically, the French have seldom shown much enthusiasm for British cinema. The revered French director François Truffaut famously suggested that there was "a certain incompatibility between the terms 'cinema' and 'Britain'." British film culture, in Truffaut's eyes, was either hidebound and literary or lowbrow and vulgar. We didn't have visual flair. We didn't respect the cult of the auteur. In the 1930s, when the French were making moody, lyrical tales of amour fou, we were producing George Formby comedies. In the post-war years, when the French New Wave was reinventing film language, we spent our time on John Mills war films and Norman Wisdom yarns.

Given Truffaut's disdain for British cinema (excluding his beloved Alfred Hitchcock), it's surprising how excited the French now appear to be about it. In recent years, French companies have been investing in every aspect of the British film business from production to distribution and exhibition.

French money is paying for more and more of our most cherished British movies. Even such a quintessentially British title as Stephen Frears' The Queen was co-financed and co-produced by the French-owned Pathé, as was Frears' previous film, Mrs Henderson Presents. Mike Leigh, Ken Loach and Nicolas Roeg have all likewise received French support. Moreover, their work is often better appreciated on the Continent than it is back at home. When Leigh won the Palme d'Or in Cannes for Secrets & Lies in 1996, the Brits suddenly started to take him much more seriously.

French companies have also been hoovering up rights to many of the most important British library titles. The French major StudioCanal, for example, has acquired at least 1,400 British films - everything from The Dam Busters to The Ladykillers, and including such gilt-edged classics of British cinema as The Third Man and Roeg's Don't Look Now.

In another new development, leading French directors are now clamouring to adapt British novels. The best reviewed film in France this year is Pascale Ferran's DH Lawrence adaptation, Lady Chatterley (winner of five awards at the Césars, France's answer to the Oscars). Last month's Berlin festival closed with François Ozon's Angel, an English-language melodrama based on the novel by Elizabeth Taylor, an English writer who remains a well-kept secret over here but has long been revered in France.

The French are also keener than ever to come to the UK to promote their own wares. Later this week, as if to underline the fact, a small army of French actors and film-makers led by Juliette Binoche and Alain Resnais is due to descend on London for the annual Rendez-vous with French Cinema festival.

So what has provoked this Gallic love affair with British film? Some suggest that it is the lure of London and a love of British nonconformism and eccentricity. "In France, there is a very big appetite for the British sense of humour, what they see as the British, crazy, 'anything goes' attitude," says British producer Simon Perry. "The French like London because it is so full of people dressed weirdly and behaving in ways the French wouldn't necessarily dare to. You see people in Soho you wouldn't really see in French streets."

Others point to the fact that the international film industry is dominated by Hollywood. By building a bridgehead in the UK, French producers and distributors gain easier access to the English-language market. London is the nearest major English-speaking city to Paris and it is therefore simply economic sense to set up shop there.

François Ivernel, who has been running Pathé's operations in London for several years, disagrees with Truffaut. "He could be wrong sometimes," he says. "I think there has always been a great admiration for British films in France." When Ivernel was a teenager, he used to "run" to see Frears' films. He points out that Loach and Leigh movies invariably perform better in France than they do in the UK. "I think maybe the French love British cinema more than the Brits," he suggests. "It's a bit of a paradox."

Certain key differences remain in British and French approaches to film-making. "It starts entirely from the top. [In France] the director is the auteur. You cannot in France fire a director from a film," the producer Christopher Garnier-Deferre recently commented. "In England, he is a technician. If you don't like the rushes, you get rid of him." Some in France envy the pragmatic British approach. "It [the cult of the auteur] is a positive in that it allows the emergence of real film-makers, but it is also a negative in that we have some almighty individual who is prone to becoming some kind of control freak," says French producer Philippe Carcasonne. Underpaid British film-makers can only dream of the kind of autonomy enjoyed by their Gallic counterparts.

Speak to French film-makers and it quickly becomes apparent that they are often better informed and more enthusiastic about aspects of British culture than the Brits themselves. Lady Chatterley may still be regarded by many Brits as a piece of literary smut, but for Ferran it is a beautifully written, utopian love story. The French writer-director based her movie on the second version of Lawrence's novel rather than the better-known third version. "He [Lawrence] was the first male novelist to have written such a marvellous book about a woman," Ferran enthuses. "He really managed to get inside the head of Constance [Lady Chatterley], which was something that Flaubert did not manage to do with Madame Bovary."

Chatterley was shot in France, but Ferran has retained the English characters and locations. "I did not want to turn it into a fairy tale. I didn't want to shock English audiences by setting it in an absurd way."

Ozon waxes equally enthusiastic about the English novelist Taylor. "I discovered the book six years ago and I fell in love with it," he says of Angel. "When I read the book, I was sure the rights would be in Hollywood but then I realised they were free." He adds that it was the Englishness of the story that appealed to him.

French critic Agnes Poirier, author of Touché - a French Woman's Take on the English, is sceptical that the French are quite as enamoured of British cinema as they may appear. She points out that the French have always been "internationalist" in their approach toward film culture. French producers may have helped finance work by Leigh, Loach and co, but they have been equally supportive of other film-makers such as David Lynch, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Nikita Mikhalkov and a host of Asian directors. "It's the English language they [French audiences] like, rather than Britain," she says. However, she argues that the Brits have plenty of auteurs of their own - if only they would notice them. In particular, she draws attention to film-makers such as Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson, who were associated with the Free Cinema movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

As Poirier points out, when British auteurs do emerge, they are rarely afforded the same opportunities as their counterparts in France. "They are not given the means to flourish; they don't have the public support, institutional support, political support, philosophical support and cultural support. British auteurs are not taken seriously. Authorship in cinema is not considered as seriously as it is in literature. Theatre and literature are deemed as more important than cinema. In France, that is not the case."

French producers and financiers argue that the British need to accept that film is more than just a business. "One day, people [in the UK] will finally understand that culture is not shameful. Cinema is culture and it's also a business," Hengameh Panahi, the boss of Paris-based Celluloid Dreams, recently commented.

There is a sense that French producers working with British talent are simply stepping into a vacuum created by the British themselves, who don't dare to support their own local talent. For example, Celluloid Dreams has recently agreed to co-finance such British fare as Son of Rambow, the new film from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy team Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith, and Mrs Ratcliffe's Revolution, starring Catherine Tate as a British housewife who braves life in Communist-era East Germany.

So what does it say about the UK film financing landscape that so many of our leading film-makers are dependent on French support to make their movies? "I think the British film industry needs to have more self-confidence in itself," suggests Ivernel. "There is this idea that the only place to make movies is Hollywood and that the British film industry is a cottage industry. I think you have great film-makers, great stories, great books, great everything to make films in the UK."

As French and US companies fight between themselves to back the best British film-makers, the downside is that the profits don't stay in Britain. Then again, at least British work is being showcased. And the more the French invest in the UK industry, the easier it is to forget Truffaut's old jibes.

A Rendez-vous with French Cinema, Curzon Mayfair, London W1 (08707 564 621), 29 March to 1 April

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