Tessa Ross: Saved from the cutting room

Last night's Oscars will have made a lot of people happy, but few more so than Film4 boss Tessa Ross. She tells Ian Burrell how new life was breathed into the channel's once ailing cinematic arm - and why the small screen has gained too

Published: 26 February 2007

Tessa would have liked to have been there this morning, with Cate and Reese and George and Cameron and Tom and Nicole and Kirsten, but instead she had to stay at home in north London and watch the Oscars sitting up in bed.

There were 3,400 guests in Hollywood's Kodak Theatre for the 79th Academy Awards last night but the head of Film4, Tessa Ross, wasn't among them. "We've not been able to get any tickets. I suppose my predecessors must have been - perhaps I'm not pushy enough. And I don't want to be a ligger. I want to be a proper invitee."

Which is a great shame because the cinematic arm of Channel 4 had more reason than ever to be in Hollywood this year. The stars of two of its most successful releases (Forest Whitaker from The Last King of Scotland and Peter O'Toole from Venus) were waiting to see if their nominations in the Best Actor category were successful.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of C4's magnificent first attempt to straddle television and cinema with the landmark broadcast of Stephen Frears's Walter, featuring Ian McKellen's portrayal of a mentally disabled man cooped in a long-stay institution. A quarter of a century on, Film4, in spite of its collaboration with the finest acting and directing talent, is still at the margins as far as La-La-Land is concerned.

Then again, the Film4 of now, which is essentially a commissioning operation, is a very different animal from the fully fledged production company FilmFour that started out in 1982. It will be five years ago this summer that Mark Thompson, when he was chief executive of Channel 4, shut down FilmFour Ventures with the loss of 200 jobs. Thompson had been unimpressed by annual losses of £5m and a three-year barren period following the international success of East Is East, which was set in an Anglo-Pakistani chip shop in Salford and was quintessential FilmFour.

After Thompson pressed down on the detonator with the single-mindedness of a Klondike miner, his predecessor Michael Jackson, a champion of the movie operation, wailed: "It's a mistake to send the signal that Channel 4 is out of film production."

It fell to Tessa Ross, 45, to step among the rubble and start the rebuild. "The now defunct Film4, the now dead Film4," she mutters, recalling the press references when she started nearly four years ago. "The adjectives, I'm afraid, stuck around like a bad smell for a number of years."

The stench of decay has now cleared and a raft of fresh films, encouraged and financed if not wholly produced by the rebranded Film4, are the talk of the awards season.

"We've gone from being defunct - as the press would have it - to having two Oscar nominations, three Bafta wins, six Bifa (British Independent Film Awards) wins. The point is that Film4 is on a roll in the way it should be: supporting British talent, producing British talent, working with great writing, trying to define itself and aligning itself with Channel 4."

The successes have been gratefully received by Channel 4, which won few friends with its recent handling of the meltdown of Celebrity Big Brother and the Richard and Judy quiz scandal.

Film4 has also been raising its profile by expanding its television channel, which was made free-to-air on Freeview, satellite and cable last July. Audiences, which struggled to reach 50,000 when the channel was subscription only, now regularly climb above 500,000.

Jeff Ford, Film4's director of acquisitions, has tried to make the channel more distinct by offering seasons, such as one featuring the work of Korean directors and another based on the work of Robert De Niro (who gave an interview that was used to preview the movies). "It's not just about putting a load of films out there. It's about making the experience more enticing, more interesting and more educational for the viewers," says Ford. Film4 is also using the Channel 4 website to extend its offering through video-on-demand, with movies such as Secrets and Lies, Buffalo Soldiers and Charlotte Gray available for downloading for 48 hours at a cost of £1.99 each.

Though Ross didn't make it to California for the Oscars she had her passport out last week, crossing the channel to monitor work on In Bruges, Oscar-winner Martin McDonagh's story of two hitmen (Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson) holed up in Belgium. "It's a funny and moving script about these two men in this extraordinarily beautiful medieval town and the anomaly of the world that they're from," says Ross of a movie that also stars Ralph Fiennes and will be screened next year.

More imminent are a clutch of British-based films that go to the heart of the Channel 4 ethos. Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten is Julien Temple's sensitive documentary on the life and legacy of his friend, the frontman of The Clash. Filmed at night around campfires - the punk rocker's favourite scene for setting the world to rights - interviewees, including Strummer's first and second wives, his schoolfriends, fellow musicians and film luminaries such as Johnny Depp and Martin Scorsese, discuss his influence. It is "a very ambitious, brilliantly edited piece of film-making", says Ross. "Julien has been thinking about this film for many years and brought it in originally as a piece of television. He realised the ambition of the piece was growing and it made sense to give it the weight of a feature film."

This Is England, the latest offering from Shane Meadows (director of Dead Man's Shoes), has already won Best British Film at the Bifas and is scheduled to be released in late spring. Meanwhile Edinburgh is the setting for the forthcoming romance Hallam Foe directed by David Mackenzie and starring Jamie Bell, and also the raunchy comedy Festival (released last August). This may not be a coincidence. The movie which Ross aspires to above all, Trainspotting, was also set in the Athens of the North.

Ross, who has a wide-ranging role as head of film and drama at Channel 4, is not promising that all of these films will be hits. "Film 4 tends towards the contemporary or the resonant or the urgent or the experimental or the questioning. That means risk-taking will deliver success as well as failure but that's an important part of grabbing the bull by the horns and saying 'This is a creative process.' The risk is a big one."

The types of script that Film4 tends to back are rarely straightforward, she says. "There's very little we do at Film4 which is a no-brainer. We don't do period costume drama. We don't do straight adaptations of loved novels. We tend very rarely to do those things which make it a very easy pre-buy from the US."

Nevertheless she needs American financial muscle to grow. "We are fairly ambitious. We would like to continue to make films that have recognition outside the UK as well as inside it. It would be very exciting to balance the output with larger, more ambitious co-produced films with American distribution so that we knew there was the weight of money behind them so that they would be seen all over the world."

What really excites Ross is the directors she gets to work with. She has Ken Loach making a television film called These Times about immigrants to the UK and the work they find. Peter Lord of the Rings Jackson is adapting Alice Sebold's novel The Lovely Bones.

Ross, who has three children, spends countless hours reading new books that might lend themselves to film, and is besotted by Meg Rosoff's How I Live Now, which she read to her 13-year-old daughter. "It's an extraordinary story of a young, angry, clever anorexic girl from New York who comes to the UK and has a wonderful extraordinary affair with her 14-year-old psychic cousin who lives with a wild hippie family in Oxfordshire, with a mum who has just gone off to Norway as part of the peace process," gushes Ross, who is now trying to finance a film version with the director Thomas Vinterberg. "My passion gets all hot. I'm all excited about the possibility we might be making something that's important."

Other books that form the basis of Film4 projects are Blake Morrison's When Did You Last See Your Father? and Monica Ali's Booker-nominated Brick Lane, directed by Sarah Gavron.

But Film4 does not always look to the world of publishing for its inspiration. Working with the Film Council, it also runs Warp X, a cutting-edge digital film operation, based in London and Sheffield, committed to facilitating nine low-budget movies from young directors within three years. The first two of these, a comic drama called Complete History and a thriller titled Punch, set among Ibiza's clubs, are already in production.

More cutting edge still is MyMovie Mashup, a user-generated film being made in collaboration with users of MySpace. The movie, with a £1m budget funded by Film4 in partnership with the social networking site and the independent Vertigo Films, will be made by a director chosen by MySpace users. Peter Carlton, Film4's senior commissioning editor, hopes the film, which will be in production by the autumn and will premiere next year, will uncover fresh film talent from within the MySpace community. Users will get opportunities to audition for parts and to comment on, even possibly edit, the film script when it is posted online. "It's a very interesting experiment. There will be professional directors bidding for this gig alongside complete unknowns," says Carlton. "In many ways we don't know what will happen but that's what exciting about it."

He does not believe the film will end up becoming a publicity stunt for a key component of Rupert Murdoch's empire. "Nobody is doing this entirely for the good of the human race. We all have our brands to look after. But we also have relationships with audiences to look after and audiences do smell rats pretty quickly, particularly online communities."

Tessa Ross is proud of Channel 4's 25-year relationship with the British film industry. The original Film4, she says, was "so exciting, so ambitious" but wrecked by unrealistic expectations at the box office. "What was expected was money-making and you can't set up a creative enterprise as a money-spinner in the short term. Our bottom line is creative enterprise and I don't stand up to anybody and say, 'I'm going to make you rich.'"

She needs to be allowed to take risks and to suffer the occasional failure. "The middle ground isn't what Channel 4 stands for at all. If I have to work to an acceptable medium how can I ever find something extreme and extraordinary? I have to be allowed, I believe, to make mistakes... though I'm sure not too often."

From the rubble of the old defunct production company, she has established a new bastion of creativity for British film. "I'm happy to be a builder. The point is to rebuild something that will be sustainable," she says. "I'm keen to ensure that the DVDs that end up on the shelves from the films that we've made are DVDs you'd want to keep for 50 years."

www.myspace.com/mymoviemashup

The ages of Film4

Trainspotting

1996

Directed by Danny Boyle and based on Irvine Welsh's story of heroin addiction in Edinburgh. Gritty and funny at the same time, it became a cult.

East Is East

1999

Based in Seventies Salford, it starred Om Puri as a Pakistani fish and chip shop owner with seven mixed-race children. Directed by Damien O'Donnell.

Motorcycle Diaries

2004

Directed by Walter Salles, the story of Che Guevara's youthful road trip across South America. Widely acclaimed.