REFLECTION: A Response to The BBC’s Moral Maze On Diversity

AKA Why I No Longer Want To Speak about Race & Diversity To the BFI (and all the other White People that provide public funding for filmmakers in the UK) or Any Of My White Producer friends:

After ‘working ‘ in the film and television industry for some time now I’ve observed one or two things about race, identity and diversity. But recently things came to a head with two good, white producer friends that have caused me to reflect on my journey in this industry, why I feel excluded from it and, ultimately, why I feel I have to stop talking about race and diversity not only to my white producer friends but also to all the white people in the UK that distribute public money for film funding.

I don’t know about all the filmmakers of colour that have sought funding from the bodies that are supposed to represent everybody in this country so I wouldn’t presume to speak for all of us. But having been around the industry for some time, I have enough empirical evidence to more than
suggest that my experience is by no means unique.

The Beginning

So let’s begin at the beginning. Back in the 1990s, I went to the National Film & Television School. In those days at the NFTS, it was organized very differently today. The school was still run by its first and most visionary director, Colin Young. His attitude to film education was very much along the lines of ‘here is some filmmaking equipment, here are students who want to make films, here are tutors who are happy to advise and guide you…so go out and make films’. My film school experience was a wonderful period of playful experimentation that was probably quite rare at that time for someone of my background, black British and working class.

The truth is, there were very few people of colour at the NFTS. Certainly none of the teaching staff, but for us students who were there, some of us had a sense that on graduation our very presence would necessarily change the complexion of the industry, our work would change perceptions about race in England and that we would be at the vanguard of a different, more varied narrative for British film. After all, this was the National Film and Television School, reputedly the best film school in Europe and I, at least, was driven on by a desire to make films and tell stories about people who looked like me.

Unfortunately, Colin Young left the NFTS while I was still a student and the school was taken over by the former head of the Danish film school, Henning Camre. His agenda was the polar opposite of Colin’s. His attitude to education was Fordian in the sense that he added a factory line rigour to the school. ‘Come in, learn what you have to learn and leave; preferably with as little friction as possible’. This marked the end of the playful experimentation and was, in some ways, a harbinger for what was to come.

Months after my graduation and in the immediate years beyond, phrases such as ‘white privilege’, ‘lack of inclusivity’, ‘unconscious bias’ and ‘microaggressions’ had yet to be coined. And yet these phrases speak of the experiences of every filmmaker of colour (and actor of colour) that I
know and knew. I say knew because many of those filmmakers and actors have of course either abandoned the industry or have moved to other countries where their complexion is less of an obstacle to their employment.

As my time to leave the school approached my plan, naively perhaps, was to leave clutching a brand new feature film screenplay in my hot and sweaty palm that I would write while I was at the school and then wave at whoever would take notice, speaking fervently about its merits and why it should go into production. It was kind of a La Haine before La Haine. And for those of you reading this article of a certain vintage you’ll know that La Haine was a French film (very successful as it happens) about the experience of growing up black in the suburbs of Paris. Well. Needless to say my film was never made, but my first television job once I’d left film school was brought about by that screenplay. It found its way onto the desk of a producer at the BBC’s Eastenders show and I was brought in for an interview. Soon after I was employed as a writer on the show. This happened within six months of leaving film school and was, in some sense, to give me a kind of false impression of what the reality of the industry would be. And I’ll tell you why.

The producer I had attached to that screenplay written during my last year of school was a young woman called Judy Counihan. At the time when we were working together, she had just had a film that she had produced, ‘Before The Rain’ nominated for a best foreign-language film Oscar, in America. Her career was off and running and professionally speaking, Judy was hot. And she wanted to produce my film! Fantastic! What could be better! But like any good producer, Judy had more than just my project under her belt. That said, she applied to the European Script Fund (a European screenplay funding body), they gave us money for the further development of my screenplay and were, in the end, fulsome in their praise for the development work that Judy and I carried out.

God bless Judy, she worked her socks off to bring my screenplay to fruition and get it into production. But she just couldn’t do it. The feedback in this country was always, always that the script was not properly developed and the characters were underdeveloped. And in the end of course, Judy tired of pushing my film and went off to make one of the other films that she was
working on, ‘Antonio’s Line’. This went one better than her last film and she won the Oscar for best foreign-language film.

Repeated Patterns

This experience with Judy was one of two patterns to be repeated throughout my career: find hot producer to work with, they love the (black) project that I bring to them, but they experience all kinds of difficulties that they’ve never experienced before in trying to move to production, they eventually give up the project to work on one of their other (white) projects that are easier to move forward.

Another graphic example of this exact same scenario was a project I was working on with my writing partner some years ago. The said hot producer was the late Catherine Wearing, and an actor working with her, Timothy Spall. Catherine had optioned a novel called ‘East Of Acre Lane’, written by Alex Wheatle and set in Brixton. It was partly about the 80s inner-city uprisings. Catherine’s plan was to have a script written and the film go into production sometime within a year later. In her experience in the industry, this was not an unreasonable expectation.

Ha! The script was bounced back and forth between Channel 4 and the BBC and eventually, some four years later, the production was finally abandoned. Why? Because the characters and the plot were underdeveloped. Both Catherine and Timothy were surprised, if not shocked, at the resistance to the project going into production and the difficulties over script development, and both commented that they had never come across this kind of resistance to production before. My writing partner and I could only pass a knowing look between us. He too is a filmmaker of colour. Welcome to our world. Catherine and Timothy, of course, moved on to their next projects.

Since I had no next project to move onto, my partner and I requested and were lucky enough to be granted a meeting with the then head of drama at the BBC, Jane Tranter to discuss what had happened to our project. We had a long and cordial meeting which went something like this: we asked her why there seemed to be a persistent and intractable problem with having black writers and directors tell our stories. Jane agreed that this was a problem and she was doing all she could to change things. If that were true, we said, then why did the problem persist? She said that sadly, the scripts that came in were never good enough, the characters and/or the storylines were never properly developed. We then suggested that if this were true, then every single film or drama that the BBC produced, which presumably was properly developed, would be ‘good’. And since this wasn’t true (even she agreed with this) then films went into production ultimately because someone (in a position of power, a cultural gatekeeper) wanted them to go into production. Jane thought about this. And then said yes, she could see our point and perhaps we should take another look at ‘East Of Acre Lane’.

To be honest, after four years of going back and forth and I don’t know how many re-writes and with Catherine and Timothy already having moved on…the project no longer felt viable and we passed on her offer.

But this event raises the issue of the second pattern that has blighted my career. That of course is the ‘under-developed screenplay’. I should say at this point that whilst I have written successfully for a number of TV shows (including having my NFTS graduation film picked up by Lenny Henry’s production company and screened by the BBC), when it comes to writing a screenplay of my own that, generally, tells a contemporary story with someone who looks like me at the centre of it, no screenplay for film or TV
show that I have been commissioned to write, has ever been sufficiently developed. Apparently. Not one. And this after over 15 - 20 commissions over the years from either the BBC, Channel 4, British Screen, the UK Film Council, the British Film Institute and other production companies. I am in no doubt that more often than not, when script editors from these organizations say that the screenplay is not developed enough, what they are actually saying is ‘these black characters that I am reading about are not characters that I have ever met or had any experience of and therefore I’m not sure I believe them. Can you please go away and re-write them in a way that I (white person) find acceptable and believable.’

Now, I’m aware that that is a sweeping and contentious thing to say but bear with me for just a moment. Never mind today’s microaggressions, in the years after graduating from the NFTS I was told openly by a commissioner at the BBC that a screenplay I had written would have much more chance of going into production if I would only make my central characters white; having been commissioned to write a pilot for a police series with a black policeman as the central character, I was told by a senior editor at the BBC, working for Mal Young, Controller of Continuing Drama
Series at the BBC, that a scenario involving a young black man was totally unbelievable, she questioned the veracity of my research and said that her (white person) experience of living in Brixton meant that she could not believe what we had written and I should go away and develop further. Another similar experience was when, having secured a meeting with the head of drama at Channel 4, Gub Neal, where I was to pitch an idea for a gangster series (a contemporary telling of an old Fritz Lang movie called ‘M’) the conversation surprisingly turned into one about black history in Nottinghill. While I’m not averse to writing a series about the history of Nottinghill and the part black, Britons played in that, this was a million miles away from what I was there to discuss. Needless to say, my gangster series was never commissioned but the series about the part black people played in the history of Nottinghill was commissioned. It was later abandoned because neither the characters nor the screenplay were properly developed.

In a yet further example of this pattern, my former writing partner had written a commissioned screenplay for the BBC featuring people of colour; it was rejected for further development on the grounds that the characters were too middle class. Even I was rendered speechless by the idea that a British film was not worthy of consideration for production on the grounds that it featured too many characters who were middle class. Clearly, the problem here was that these particular characters, characters of colour, were too middle class. Too middle class at least, for the white person reading the screenplay. Their idea of people of colour, particularly black people, meant that they couldn’t possibly be middle class and if they were, they were therefore unbelievable and needed further development.

Can you see the pattern? Numbers of projects commissioned and then delivered over the years, rejected on the grounds of not being properly developed. The roles that are then open to black actors, severely limited. Result? Flood of black British actors leaving the country of their birth to find work in America. And soon after my former writing partner’s rejection at the BBC, he too left the country and now resides in Los Angeles. Yet another filmmaker of colour lost to the British industry.

To my mind, this all illustrates, to some extent, what is now referred to as ‘unconscious bias’; that is a bias that we are not consciously aware of, when our brain makes quick decisions, assessments and judgements based on our background, cultural environment and personal experiences.

In other words everybody, in one way or another, responds to stereotypes. This in itself is not a problem since, ultimately, there is a place for stereotypes. They form a kind of short hand, without which negotiating the world around us becomes a huge, almost unimaginable task. However, if we are not aware of these stereotypes that we all carry and we fail to examine them, look at where they come from, we become a hostage to them and we therefore develop biases against those stereotypes that we don’t like. I’ll give you an example of what I mean: I’d taken another screenplay I’d written, a romantic comedy called ‘Cherps’, to all the usual sources for funding and had it universally rejected for the usual reasons: the writing and the characters were underdeveloped and there was no discernible ‘issue’ in the narrative. The subtext to the ‘issue’ note was that the characters were not engaged in battling a ‘social issue’ and therefore there was no drama. The fact that this was a romantic comedy was apparently neither here nor there. But this time, instead of putting the project aside, I begged, borrowed, hustled and scrimped and eventually made the film with essentially no money but a lot of help and support. It took me almost two years. That film went on to win multiple awards and become the first black, British, independently made feature film to be bought by the BBC. (Oh, the irony!) Was the BBC interested in supporting it when it was a screenplay? No! Why? Because it was underdeveloped. I would also say there was an unconscious bias against it and me.

The final rejection to eloquently illustrate the notion that writers and directors of colour wanting to tell stories about contemporary Britain were not wanted, was on receiving a commission from Channel 4 to write a screenplay about a young, Sudanese refugee and her involvement in the early origins of Grime music. The screenplay was duly delivered and myself and my producer at the time, Louis Heaton, were told by Francis Hopkinson, the one who commissioned the screenplay, that it was too good for television and I should try and have it produced as a feature film. The tension in the room was thick. I like to think that even Francis was embarrassed by his response to our work. This was clearly a box-ticking exercise and our screenplay was never intended for production, whatever its merits. Neither I nor Louis have sought work in television drama since this meeting. Louis was also a filmmaker of colour and became yet another professional lost to the industry.

Later that year, in 2009, I was fortunate enough to direct one of Film London’s microwave feature films. On the back of that film, and for my previous work, I was lucky enough to be awarded by the BFI the title of a ‘Break Thru Brit’, which essentially meant that I was a filmmaker to watch. To my mind this was a little late but no less appreciated for that!

The BFI

And so, finally, to go back to where this article began, I’ve recently had another experience with the BFI that has finally caused me to throw up my hands in despair, despair that things will ever change in this country. Years on, after all the talk about their diversity initiatives the most recent of which only happened in October of 2017; after the launch of ‘Black Star’ at the National Theatre on the Southbank, yet another of their diversity awareness attempts; after all the liberal hand wringing over the recent speech by actor, David Oyelowo, and how he feels that black people’s
stories have been consistently excluded and are still being excluded; after the BFI’s own big data research has been released showing what I and my filmmaking colleagues of colour have known for years, which is that we have been systemically excluded from properly participating in the UK film industry ever since before the 2nd world war (see the figures below)*; even after all of this, my latest experience, in 2018 was the following:

In early 2017, I and my current co-producer submitted an application for production finance to the BFI’s production fund. About 2 months later we received a brief email to say that whilst the screenplay contained some interesting and timely ideas and was based on a strong premise, the screenplay was not sufficiently developed. Hmm. That sounded familiar to me and so I requested a meeting with the development executive, Kirstin Irving. After some to-ing and fro-ing I was granted the meeting.

The meeting was brief and cordial and the salient points that emerged were this: given that there was much that was positive about the screenplay but it was felt to be not fully developed I wondered why I was not invited in to discuss this. I was told that filmmakers were only invited in if the BFI wanted a relationship with them and the project was almost certainly going to move forward. I replied that if the BFI is concerned about the lack of representation amongst the films that it supports and the diversity and inclusivity of the filmmakers it supports (the BFI says that it is), why would they not want to have that discussion with me (a ‘Break Thru Brit’, remember)? Where was the attention to diversity here? I was told that in terms of their diversity they were helping Idris Elba with his latest film, Yardie (a film about Jamaican and black British drug dealers). I have to admit, at this point I laughed.

Just to be sure that there wasn’t more than one Idris Elba operating in the film industry, I asked if she meant the Hollywood star and multi-millionaire, Idris Elba. She said yes. I suggested that perhaps Idris did not need the help of the BFI as much as some others. She replied that they were also supporting new filmmakers from diverse communities. That’s a good thing, I said, but what about everybody else? Is she really saying that if you are a filmmaker of colour you either have to be a new filmmaker or you have to be working in Hollywood before you are deemed worthy of support? This question received no answer so I followed it up with another. What was the diversity within the BFI’s development and selection team when they are selecting the projects that they would support. This white person sitting in front of me said, and I quote, ‘Well, I’m an American.’

Now, let’s think about that answer for a moment. With all the apparent sophistication and discussion around issues of diversity and with all the BFI’s talk about openness, transparency and inclusivity, this middle class, white American woman really thinks that her inclusion on the development/selection team properly qualifies as true diversity? Really? Soon after this, the meeting came to an end and I asked if a meeting could be organized with someone more senior at the BFI. Kristin was kind enough to facilitate this and a little while later a meeting was set up with Ben Roberts, the BFI’s head of the film fund. At that meeting my problems with the way the BFI deals with diversity, illustrated by my own treatment, were laid out. In short, they were to do with a lack of diversity within the ranks of the BFI particularly in relation to the films they support to production, a lack of transparency and accountability around their decision making and whether any of these issues were being properly
addressed.

Generally, Ben seemed to be in agreement. He agreed that there needed to be more diversity within the organization of the BFI but he said this was a slow process and that people needed to leave their jobs before the complexion of the organization could change; when I told him about my previous meeting and the ‘Well, I’m an American’ comment and the Idris Elba comment, he rolled his eyes.

Apparently he couldn’t be held responsible for the comments on diversity of his staff (this is an example of ‘white privilige’ by the way, because if he is not going to look into this, then who is?); he agreed that filmmakers of colour had been poorly served over the years by the BFI (he could hardly deny this since their own research says as much) but that they couldn’t interview every filmmaker of colour who applies to them because of the time this would take. I agreed that this was a fair point but given the inequities of the past and the BFI’s own pronouncements about how they were going to be more diverse, etc, why could they not make a greater effort to reach filmmakers of colour? Because if they don’t, how is anything ever going to change? (This is in a context where for decades UK filmmakers of colour have been essentially barred from telling stories about people of colour because the received wisdom within the industry was that these films never make money. And as a former CEO of Protagonist Pictures, leading distributors in the UK industry, Ben would know this. He will also know that this received wisdom is a lie because just this year alone ‘Get Out’, ‘Girl Trip’ and ‘Black Panther’ are the three most recent examples of black films that have turned huge profits.) And in my own case, since I was not only a filmmaker of colour but also one that the BFI themselves had designated as one to watch, could my situation have not have been handled differently? Ben wouldn’t commit to that but he at least ‘invited’ me to re-apply with my screenplay with the suggestion that the outcome would be different this time around. His only stipulation was that the screenplay had to be substantially re- worked and that I should re-apply after October 1st, 2017, when the BFI was re- launching with yet more diversity guidelines in place. Well, the screenplay was reworked (with the help of a freelance script editor who is regularly employed by the BFI, one of their own if you will) and I did re-submit it, just after October 1st.

Three months later I was saddened but not so surprised to receive an email from Ben that went into some detail saying why my screenplay was ‘strong and original’ in concept but that it needed ‘further exploring and developing’. The original decision to not have me in for interview and discussion would stand. (For those of you white readers unsure about the term ‘microaggression’, this is an example thereof).

Why This Matters

With all the problems that there are in the world, why does any of this matter in the grand scheme of things? Well, of course it doesn’t. Or does it? Don’t nations and societies and people know themselves better when a true diversity of voices about those nations and societies and people are properly heard? Isn’t that why we listen to stories? To be beguiled and delighted and informed? To have experiences different from our own that serve to enrich and enlighten? And doesn’t exclusion and division only lead to other, greater problems in society? It seems to me that as a filmmaker and a storyteller the work that I do is about creating something, characters, that pass for reality, my reality. It’s called drama. And yet the white people that control public funding (always white people) don’t seem to recognize not only this reality but almost any contemporary reality from a black perspective. They are in effect gatekeepers of reality and this myopia, to my mind, can only be a negative for social debate and social exchange.

In the UK there is an ongoing debate around race and diversity. In fact I recently listened to a debate about diversity on the BBC radio 4 programme, The Moral Maze (23rd July, 8pm; check it out if you want a laugh). A more shoddy, dated and lazy piece of radio journalism I can barely imagine! The very fact that terms like ‘white privilege’ and ‘micro-aggressions’ and ‘unconscious bias’ exist is because terms like ‘systemic racism’ exists; and that term exists because people have historically fought to bring it and other phrases that articulate the reality of racism and exclusion into existence. And that means that there has been debate and action around these issues for some years now (not that you would recognize this listening to The Moral Maze). My question to Ben and Kirstin and Jane and Gub and Francis and John and Mal and others like them would be ‘when social scholars and historians look back on this debate in the early years of the 21st century, where were you?’ What did you do? Which side were you on?’ Because, in the end, the race and diversity problem in the industry is caused by all the people mentioned above and many more. That’s what ‘systemic’ means.

And one more point: my white producer friends. One of them heard about the latest diversity initiatives being made by the BFI and the television broadcasters; he looked at me and my project and said ‘Well, you’re alright then! But what about the rest of us?! Things have now gone too far, mate’ (a point of view also expressed on the Moral Maze). His implication was that this brief moment of apparent change somehow put him at a disadvantage. The decades of exclusion that I and other filmmakers of colour had suffered were neither here nor there. And this, remember, is coming from a friend. This is a further example of ‘white privilege’. The second white producer, on hearing of my rejection for interview with the BFI, couldn’t understand why I was angered by it. On explaining carefully and slowly exactly why I was angry he responded that lots of his other (white) producer friends had also been rejected, that this was a tough industry and I should get over it. They all have.

On one level, of course he’s right. This is a tough industry and I have indeed got over it. But on the other hand just because this is a tough industry I don’t see any reason why it should be tougher for filmmakers of colour than it is for white filmmakers. Why? As I write this article I’m fully aware that some of you (white) readers won’t recognize the validity of what I’m saying and the reaction will be something along the lines of ‘Oh, he’s just a whinger.’ To that accusation I would reply, whether or not that is true, it’s kind of beside the point. If we are ever to have a proper, grown-up, adult debate about the racial and cultural diversity in our industry we have to speak the truth. And this is my truth.

The whole diversity debate seems to have firmly taken on board how women have been marginalized in some areas of the industry. No doubt this has been brought directly into the spotlight in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal. Where race is concerned this is not the case. And that’s why I no longer feel able to talk to my white producer friends about race. Or indeed organizations like the BFI.

*According to the BFI’s own data, out of 1,172 UK feature films produced in the UK (UK films of more than 40 minutes duration, released theatrically in the UK and produced by a UK based production company) between 2006 – 2016, only 157 (13%) featured black actors in a leading role; however, more pertinently, of the 45,000 roles in totality over this period, only 218 (0.5%) were played by black actors and exactly half of these appeared in a mere 47 films. Even more damning to some extent is that these films are generally based around crime, music or sports and “It could be argued that where there are black roles they are telling us nothing new (Sight & Sound, November 2016),” allowing types to prevail.