The 100 Best British Film - What Qualifies As British?

The 100 Best British Film - What Qualifies As British?

Posted on Friday October 7, 2011, 16:31 by Helen O'Hara in Empire States

We've just published our list of the 100 Best British Films of all time, and since I can already sense the nitpickers honing in on it, let's discuss what makes a film British. Is it the cast and crew? Shooting location? Money? Director? Some combination of the above? Or an indefinable sense of Britishness, loosely justified by some vague connection among its makers?

Well, we've gone for some or all of the above. Both Brazil and Blow-Up were directed by people definitely not born in this country (Terry Gilliam, who's American, and Michelangelo Antonioni). And while we can reasonably argue that Gilliam's been here long enough to qualify as an adoptive son, Antonioni has, er, not. What's more, Brazil was clearly a big Hollywood studio-funded picture, with a few American stars (we're talkin' to you, Mr de Niro). Still, we couldn't quite not include it: it feels very British in its view of bureaucracy, just as Blow-Up captures the Swinging Sixties in London perhaps better than any other film (although Performance comes close).

Harry Potter presents an interesting case. It's based on a British series of books, entirely filmed here, with an almost entirely British cast and crew, and it's arguably done more for British cinema than any other film or series of films on the list (yes, even than Bond) thanks to its long-term settlement at Leavesden and sheer scale. An entire generation of British crew has come up through the films and gone off to work elsewhere in the industry, so it seems extremely ungrateful to carp that the money comes from Hollywood, or that the director of the first two films was a Yank (and of course one of the directors featured in our selection is a Mexican). So we've included two of those.

We've included Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca, even though it's often called his first American film, and Slumdog Millionaire, even though that was shot in India, and Monsters, although that went on location to Mexico. After all, you wouldn't rule out Zulu just because it shot in South Africa, would you, or Lawrence of Arabia? Still, at least those three have British directors, which generally counts for quite a lot.

Generally, then, it's more impressionistic than strict. A foreign director's fine if it feels British; a foreign shoot is fine if the director's British; and we don't much care where the money comes from (which accounts for the omission of technically British-but-let's-face-it-Irish film In Bruges).

You may very well disagree. If so, feel free to make your arguments below.