This week Neil Calloway looks how 47 Ronin qualified for a subsidy from the UK government…
Have you seen 47 Ronin? If you haven’t, I wouldn’t bother if I was you. It’s That-Historical-Film-You’ve-Seen-A-Hundred-Times-Before. An outsider, after being saved by the daughter of a great man, helps a group of natives. It’s very very loosely based on a true story. The opening narration is like something from a video game cut scene. To be honest, it might have worked as one of those BBC Saturday evening series that they show when Doctor Who isn’t on, but a $175 million dollar action film it is not. The Flickering Myth review said “a weak script and shallow characterisation, which makes this only average at best”, which is about right.
There was trouble before it was already released, with reshoots and delays and the studio pretty much acknowledging they were going to take a hit on it, and in the end it didn’t even come close to making its money back. It’s a familiar story, and one I wouldn’t give much thought to had it been revealed this week that the budget was swelled by a £20 million tax break from the British government.
I have nothing against the government giving tax breaks to film-makers in theory, I do have an issue with it when they’re giving them to Hollywood studios to make big budget films about Japanese myths. A film can claim up to a quarter of its budget (or a quarter of the money spent on it in the UK if it was also shot abroad) as along as it fits certain criteria; in short, the film has to pass a “Britishness” test to qualify. Watching 47 Ronin, though, it doesn’t seem a very British film.
In fairness the film was directed by a Brit, Carl Rinsch, and Hossein Amini, the British-Iranian screeenwriter probably best known for Drive worked on the script. I’ve seen Drive; I like Drive; I think Drive is one of the best films of the 21st Century so far. Let me tell you, 47 Ronin is no Drive.
It was partly shot at Shepperton, some of the visual effects were done by Framestore in Soho (the go to people for VFX now, it seems; they worked on Gravity and Guardians of the Galaxy). All these benefit the “points” system required for a film to get tax breaks, as will the fact that British musicians worked on the score. It’s entirely possible that the presence of Keanu Reeves – a Canadian born in Beirut – would have helped the film, as having a British person in a lead role gets a film one point (his mother is English, and he perhaps qualifies through that).
Where the film would not gain points is that it is not set in the UK or EU, does not tell a story based on a British or European subject, and the lead characters are not British or European. I suppose you could argue that the film shows British creativity in that it was partly made over here by Brits, but that’s stretching things.
The argument put forward by the BFI is that for every £1 a film is given in tax breaks, it generates £12 for the wider economy, a good return. I stumbled across the filming of what looked like a huge film in North London last year, and the people who built the giant greenscreen would have been British, and the security guards who told me that they couldn’t tell me what they were shooting were British (it turns out it was the latest Captain America film, which nobody could claim was British and keep a straight face).
I absolutely believe we should support film-makers in this country – the French government spend an absolute fortune on film subsidies, and they have a successful, respected industry. What jars with me is that we’re spending money on films that aren’t British, and aren’t very good.
Government ministers and those at the top of what passes for the British film industry always bang on about how our technicians and creative teams are the envy of the world, and there is obviously some justification in that, but if that is so true, if Britain is the best place in the world to make your effects laden blockbuster, why do we need to pretty much bribe the film-makers to come here?
The truth is that film, like so much these days, is a global market; we’re competing against Canada, Australia, Hungary, Czech Republic, states in the South West of the US, Morocco and countless other places to get studios to spend their money here. We may have great technicians, and we certainly have large studio spaces a short distance from Central London, but if we want films made over here, we need these tax subsidies, and we’re probably going to to end up subsidising some duds.
In a choice between helping a bad Keanu Reeves film or not helping any film-makers at all, I’d give 47 Ronin a £20 million tax break, but don’t expect me to be happy about it.
Neil Calloway is a pub quiz extraordinaire and Top Gun obsessive. Check back here every Sunday for future installments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL18yMRIfoszFJHnpNzqHh6gswQ0Srpi5E&v=Z2vq4CudKRk&feature=player_embedded
Originally published January 11, 2015. Updated April 15, 2018.
