Sherman to Gillard: “The King’s Speech could have been Australian”
Producer Emile Sherman was in Canberra for a ‘Welcome Home’ celebration hosted by SPAA, and said that if the Producer-Distributor Film Fund had been in place, his Academy-Award winning film The King’s Speech could have been an official co-production.
“The King’s Speech, despite having an Australian producer, an Australian executive producer and an Australian star in Geoffrey Rush, is a British film. Put simply, if the PDFF had been in place when I was financing The King’s Speech, then I would have been accepting the Oscar for Best Picture for a film that was officially Australian as well as British,” he said.
Sherman met with Prime Minister Julia Gillard and other senior politicians, and pushed for the establishment of SPAA’s PDFF project – a $60 million fund over three years which would generate production of up to 27 new Australian films with a total production value of $405 million, creating more than 1700 permanent jobs in the sector.
“Emile, like his fellow producers of Australian feature films, is tenacious in his determination to make quality films, but his ability to raise private finance is severely hampered by current international financial conditions and the limitations of existing Government support mechanisms. Emile was able to make The King’s Speech against all the odds, but as a British film, not as an Australian film,” said SPAA executive director Geoff Brown. “The PDFF would make it possible to make many more films like The King’s Speech in Australia.”
The PDFF was conceived as an interim measure to overcome the early defficiencies of the Producer Offset.
“The rational for the Fund is to harness the market knowledge and power of the major distributors and to secure their investment in the cause of an outward-looking, ambitious Australian film industry. And, at the same time, it will make the Producer Offset more effective now and into the future. While the fundamental principles of the Offset continue to be supported by the film industry, events of the past two years have seen it having a limited effect, and indeed there has been a marked decline in private investment support for independent Australian films,” added Brown.
