This year looks as if it will be a vintage year for British filmmakers... but a very difficult one for the British film industry as a whole. We will be seeing work by established auteurs like Stephen Frears, Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. Meanwhile, there are signs of a new wave in British big-screen comedy led by movies like the 1970s-set Cemetery Junction directed by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, satirist Chris Morris's directorial debut, Four Lions, and Nigel Cole's We Want Sex, about the 1968 Ford Dagenham strike by 187 sewing machinists. Expectations are high, too, for films from British directors working in North America: Edgar Wright's comic-book adaptation Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and Michael Winterbottom's foray into film noir, The Killer Inside Me.
Back in Britain, Rowan Joffe's new version of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock (updated to the 1960s) marks the first major foray into production of ambitious UK distributor Optimum Releasing. And it will be intriguing to discover whether actor turned director Nick Moran can follow up on the promise of Telstar with his new film The Kid, about an abused child from a grim background building a better life for himself.
Two competing projects about Romans in barbaric Britain, Neil Marshall's Centurion and Kevin Macdonald's The Eagle of the Ninth, means that 2010 is also shaping up as the year of the toga in British cinema.
The downside is that in spite of the promise of all these films, independent British producers are finding it ever harder to finance their new movies. Cuts are looming at the UK Film Council, the public body that has been one of the major investors in UK production over the last decade. With lottery money being diverted to the Olympics, less money will be available for British film-makers and the commercial sector is becoming more and more "risk averse". It's yet to be seen what implications the planned merger between the UK Film Council and the British Film Institute will have on British production. There is uncertainty, too, about what a change in Government might mean for public film policy.
Another worry is that the Harry Potter bubble will soon burst. For the last decade, the British film industry has derived huge economic benefit from the series shooting in the UK. When it ends next year with the second part of the ominously titled Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, it is bound to create a funereal chill in the industry.
Whatever kind of films the Brits make, they remain heavily reliant on backing from the UK Film Council or broadcasters like the BBC and Channel 4 and there just doesn't seem to be enough money to go around. In the short-term, though, there seem to be plenty of decent British-made and British-directed films in the pipeline. Enjoy them while you can.
ONES TO WATCH: BRIT FILMS IN 2010
Route Irish
Ken Loach's new film takes its title from the often lethal road that links Baghdad airport with the city's Green Zone. The focus is less on the Iraq War itself than on its effect on a former soldier whose best friend died on "Route Irish". Scripted by Paul Laverty, Route Irish sees the director reunited with the cinematographer Chris Menges, who first worked with Loach more than 40 years ago. He was a camera operator on Loach's Poor Cow in 1967 and was cinematographer on Loach's early masterpiece, Kes (1969).
Cemetery Junction
Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant make their big- screen directorial debut with a nostalgic comedy set in 1970s England. The heroes are twentysomething clerks, working for a life assurance company and whiling away their days boozing and chasing women. Cemetery Junction is billed as "the funny, touching and universal story of being trapped in a small town and dreaming of escape". The conventional wisdom used to be that British TV comedians struggled to make the transition to the big screen. However, Gervais and Merchant are promising that their evocation of early 70s Reading will be "glossy and glorious, full of humour, romance and drama." (9 April)
Untitled (Mike Leigh)
"An intimate portrait of people's lives" is how Leigh's latest is described. It is doubtful that even the financiers know exactly what the film is about. As Leigh once remarked of his insistence on complete creative freedom, "there is none of that hideous, long-winded process of shunting a film backward and forward... having every cigar-chomping producer putting in his ill-conceived two-pence worth." What we do know is that the new film sees Leigh surrounded by familiar faces. The cast is led by Jim Broadbent and Lesley Manville.
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
After Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, Edgar Wright goes it alone - he has made his new film, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, without his usual accomplices, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. Wright is collaborating with a cast of young Hollywood actors led by Michael Cera, who played the gawky charmer Paulie Bleeker in Jason Reitman's Juno. Based on Bryan Lee O'Malley's graphic novel, the film tells the story of the young slacker Scott who can only win the girl of his dreams by vanquishing her seven dastardly ex-boyfriends. (6 August)
Four Lions
Chris Morris's satire about a bunch of British jihadis who push their abstract dreams of glory to breaking point premieres at the Sundance Festival later this month. Given the furore about alleged Christmas Day bomb plot on a Detroit-bound plane, Four Lions could hardly be more topical. Some are bound to be offended by Morris's hijacking of terror for the purposes of big-screen farce. The film starts from the premise that terrorist cells are "driven by the same group dynamics as football teams and stag parties."
Tamara Drewe
Stephen Frears follows up on The Queen with an adaptation of Posy Simmonds' graphic novel. Offering a modern reworking of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, the new film stars Gemma Arterton as a big city femme fatale returning to her rural roots. Once a shy and awkward teenager, she is now the focus of envy, lust and gossip wherever she goes.
Never Let Me Go
This adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 novel stars two of Britain's biggest young stars: the long established Keira Knightley and the fast-rising Carey Mulligan. It is produced by DNA, the UK production company behind 28 Days Later and Sunshine. US director Mark Romanek was behind the very creepy Robin Williams drama One Hour Photo. Never Let Me Go promises to be equally unsettling. It is about a very sinister boarding school where human beings are cloned to provide organs for donor transplants. (November)
Brighton Rock
Rowan Joffe's new screen version of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock is likely to be very different to the Boulting brothers' 1947 version. For a start, the new film is set in the 1960s - the era of mods, rockers and Quadrophenia. Sam Riley plays the razor-wielding Pinkie (the role made famous by a young Richard Attenborough.). "We're making Brighton Rock as contemporary as we possibly can because the story feels "modern". It's too alive, too vibrant and too relevant to be contained in the late 30s," Joffe has said of his adaptation.
The Killer Inside Me
Pulp writer Jim Thompson is the patron saint of film noir. The Grifters, The Getaway, The Kill-Off and After Dark, My Sweet were all adapted from his work and he helped script Stanley Kubrick's The Killing. Now, prolific British director Michael Winterbottom has made a film version of his 1952 novel. The film stars Casey Affleck as the small-town deputy sheriff who is also a sadist, a psychopath and a killer.
Mr Nice
Oxbridge educated drugs smuggler and libertarian Howard Marks is played by Rhys Ifans in Bernard Rose's biopic. Expect an epic - Rose has already characterised the film as "the Lawrence of Arabia of stoner movies." (8 October)
Centurion
The Wire's Dominic West exchanges the mean streets of Baltimore for the muddy bogs of Pictish Britain in horror meister Neil Marshall's foray into sword- and-sandal territory. (23 April)
The Eagle of the Ninth
Tourism in the remoter reaches of Wester Ross is likely to be boosted by Kevin Macdonald's The Eagle of the Ninth which was partially shot last October at Achiltibuie on the Coigach Peninsula. This rugged part of Scotland should make a suitably austere backdrop for a film set in 2nd-century Britain and exploring the circumstances behind the disappearance of the Ninth Legion somewhere in the Highlands. Channing Tatum, Donald Sutherland and Jamie Bell head the cast.
"Y'what?" Little Eric says.
"If they are faster than you, don't try and outrun them," Big Eric says, getting into his aphoristic stride. "If they are taller, don't outjump them. If they are stronger on the left, you go right. But not always. Remember, to surprise them, you've got to surprise yourself first."
The philosophising is a joke, but it's also at the heart of the film. Little Eric learns that he has to think positive and take risks to have a chance in life. Looking For Eric is also a film about old-fashioned solidarity - Cantona tells the postman you must always trust your team-mates, something he grows to appreciate through the film.
As the two Erics chat, Loach is looking through his monitor. I've known Loach for ages, and have never seen him so content. He laughs at Cantona's attempt to deliver the sowing thistles line. "It was a dirty trick by the writer, because a French person cannot say those words."
Looking For Eric is Loach's first comedy in 20 years. It's a wonderful, humane, feel-good movie. Though, as you'd expect with a Loach film, he still plumbs the depths along the way. The film deals with broken men, drugs, poverty, violence, betrayal, corruption. Business as usual, then, for the director, except he's swapped down and dirty realism for down and dirty magic realism.
Cantona has a huge presence, especially with his collar pulled up and his chest puffed out. Dark eyes, deep voice, direct stare; even his smile is scary. In his heyday at Manchester United, the fans simply called him God. Loach is on the small side - size seven and a half feet, delicate hands, a beansprout of a man. Vincent Maraval, one of the film's producers, tells me that the first time Loach and Cantona met it was awkward. "They were both very intimidated by each other. Very humble. They couldn't think of anything to say." Maraval says it was a good job he was around, otherwise they would have just sat in silence.
Well, yes, Loach says, of course he was overawed - he was a huge fan of Cantona's. "I mean, I'm not overimpressed by anybody in films because it's the business and we just work in it, but when it's somebody from outside who is very special in their own field, and particularly if it's a field you care about, then I think you are overwhel ..." He looks embarrassed. "Well, not overwhelmed, but you are impressed because, that level, it's something you can't approach - you can only stand back and admire really."
Loach says he loved the wit of Cantona - as a player and as a man. He mentions the famous and much-derided seagulls quote, after Cantona was banned for kung-fu kicking a Crystal Palace supporter. "When the seagulls follow the trawler, it's because they think sardines will be thrown in the sea." The seagulls in question were the press, the trawler Cantona himself, and the sardines his titbits. "The wit of it was to say it to the hacks, who would then scratch their heads and say, what does it mean?"
Cantona's production company had originally approached Loach with an idea he had for a film about his relationship with a fan who had become a friend. Loach and his regular writer, Paul Laverty, didn't much fancy the story, but they had always wanted to make a film about football and, despite their golden rule not to work with famous actors, this was, after all, Cantona. It was Loach, by the way, who created British cinema's greatest football scene in Kes when games teacher Brian Glover provides a running commentary as he dribbles past his tiny pupils imagining he's Bobby Charlton.
Laverty went away and dreamed up the story of the two Erics - big Eric the idol and little Eric the loser. If he was working with a famous man, he might as well explore the nature of celebrity - how stars are perceived, how we put them on pedestals and what their lives might actually be like. While Cantona is larger than life, Eric the postman feels he has become invisible, even among his friends - middle-aged, crippled by uncertainty and lost in his memories.
Laverty says there were two conditions he set before agreeing to let Cantona loose on his script - first, he had to feel for Little Eric's situation and, second, he had to be willing to take the mick out of himself. Hence all the proverbs. "Big Eric was up for that. He laughed his head off at some of the daft ideas. He's prepared to laugh at his own persona - he's done lots of adverts referring to sardines. He's a very bright, perceptive man."
Ken Loach and Eric Cantona, the odd couple. But perhaps it's not so surprising they teamed up. They are two of the most uncompromising men I have met. Loach, now 72, has won numerous awards in Europe (three years ago, he won the Palme D'or at Cannes for The Wind That Shakes The Barley), but has not had a commercial hit in Britain since Kes in 1969. He often uses real people rather than actors in his films; refuses to show his actors the whole script, so they are surprised by what happens next (in Kes, David Bradley, the boy who plays Billy Casper, thought his kestrel really had been killed); he turned down an OBE in 1977 ("It's all the things I think are despicable: patronage, deferring to the monarchy and the name of the British Empire, which is a monument of exploitation and conquest," he said in 2001); and has had films about trade unions commissioned by Channel 4 and ITV, and then withdrawn (he says both decisions were politically motivated). He might be quietly spoken, but Loach is not a man who holds back.
As for Cantona, he makes Loach look like a diplomat. In 1987, he was fined for punching team-mate Bruno Martini in the face. The following year he was banned from international matches for a year after calling the French team's coach a "bag of shit". At Montpellier, six players called for him to be sacked after he threw his boots in a team-mate's face. In 1991 he threw a ball at the referee, and when he was banned for a month at the subsequent disciplinary hearing, he walked up to each member of the panel to tell them individually they were idiots. When his ban was increased, he announced his retirement from football. He changed his mind and returned to play the best football of his life in England at Leeds and Manchester United. Alex Ferguson called this sublimely gifted footballer his most important signing. In his six seasons in England, he won the premiership title every year except 1995, when he was banned for nine months for that kung-fu kick.
When Cantona returned from his ban, he scored one of the greatest goals the game has seen, against Sunderland, turning on a sixpence, beating three defenders, playing a one-two with Brian McClair, then outrageously chipping the ball into the top corner, apparently in slow motion. After the goal he held out his hands to be adored, preening.
He retired for real at the ridiculously young age of 30. No injuries, no trauma, he'd just had enough. While Loach has spent most of his career revered in France and ignored at home, Cantona is still revered in England 12 years after he stopped playing. But in France he tends to be regarded as an underachieving maverick - although he scored 20 goals in 45 appearances for the national side, he last played in 1995 and had retired by the time France won the World Cup in 1998. Since retiring, he has worked consistently as an actor in French cinema, a pretty good one - notably as an obese police inspector who falls in love with a murder suspect in 2003's L'Outremangeur.
In the afternoon, Cantona and I head off to another location - a council tower block in Manchester. I ask why he was so keen to work with Loach. He stares at me with those dark, defiant eyes. It's a look that says: who wouldn't want to work with Loach? "We wanted someone who was English, we wanted someone who was involved socially and politically, and we wanted someone who was a fan of football. In France, it is well known he is a fan."
Had he seen any of his films before working with him? Now he gives me a how-could-I-not look. "I have seen a lot of Ken Loach's films. I've seen Riff-Raff, Carla's Song, Land And Freedom, the one about the war in Ireland, Family Life ..." He reels them off. Unbelievable. He has seen just about every Loach film. Family Life, about a pregnant teenager who ends up having electric shock treatment, is one of the most miserable films ever made. I tell Cantona that I am a Loach junkie, but even I found this too depressing and walked out of the cinema. He smiles, and tells me it is a great film.
Cantona did not watch many films as a child. He preferred to play football on the street, in school, everywhere. Even as a boy, it seemed like a profession. "I always knew I had to work hard." His father, a psychiatric nurse, told him it was not enough to be gifted. "He'd say to me, OK, you have abilities, now you need to work hard. Work, work, work." Like Loach, Cantona grew up in a working-class family - he was born in Paris, but the family soon moved to Marseille.
He believes the modern game has betrayed its working-class roots by pricing many of its traditional supporters out of the game. "The real fans of football come from the working class. Now they cannot afford to come and watch the game. So maybe when the game will need fans, they will be in trouble. And they will realise they were wrong - the people who come today don't come for the right reasons."
To Cantona, now 42, football was as much an art form as a sport. When Paul Laverty was writing the script, he asked him for the favourite moment from his career - Cantona did not mention any of the famous goals but a chipped pass to Ryan Giggs. He says that the move from footballer to actor was a natural one to make - acting is just another form of performance.
Cantona leaves me to play the trumpet into the Manchester skyline, as Little Eric (brilliantly played by Steve Evets) delivers his post. It's a beautiful scene. Big Eric lifts the trumpet to his lips and blasts out La Marseillaise - poignantly, it's recognisable, but still hopelessly out of tune. "When Big Eric plays the trumpet, he's all fingers and thumbs," Laverty says. "I suppose what I wanted to show is him struggling through life like everybody else. It's implicit in the relationship between the two Erics - they're just two flawed human beings in this adventure of life."
I ask Cantona when he learned to play the trumpet. "When I was banned, I wanted to focus on something else." Did the nine months drive him mad? "No. I'm never bored. I always find something to occupy me, to love. I didn't watch many games when I was banned. I tried to improve myself."
As he approached the Crystal Palace fan, did he realise what he was going to do? "No. I just reacted as a man. With my personality. And after, I think." That's how he's always lived, for good and bad - act first, think second.
Did he regret it? "No. I don't like it when people say, 'I had a bad time.' I endured. So I learned a lot and now I am a man. Every experience makes you a man."
In 1997 he told Alex Ferguson he wanted to retire because he had lost his passion. Was he surprised that he fell out of love with the game? "Yes. It happened because I felt I couldn't play better. You need to say to yourself, 'I can improve every time.' One day you realise you will not improve any more, and you lose a bit of the passion." He says he had lost the ability to surprise himself.
Cantona's pride would not allow him, or us, to witness his deterioration as a footballer. But he found retirement tough. Is it true that he compared it to dying? "Yeah, it was, but I lived that before because, when I was 24, I retired from football for two-three months, and I really believed I had retired. And it felt like a death. With myself and with people around." He says it was a painful experience, but also strangely enjoyable. "I liked it. It's a dream for a lot of people to come when they put the body in the cemetery ... to see the reaction of people."
And how did they react? "People tried to encourage me not to take this decision, but they quickly realised it was better not to say anything. I prefer to live this kind of death than to kill myself."
Maybe it's all of this that makes him so capable of empathising with Eric the postman - yes, he experienced enormous highs, but, despite appearances, he also had a developed sense of his own vulnerability; the fact that a footballer's peak is so short-lived that he's unlikely to do anything as well in his life again.
It's April 2009, and it has just been announced that Looking For Eric will be in competition at Cannes. It's strange how Loach's movies have never had so much as a sniff of a Bafta, while the rest of the world can't give them enough prizes. For once, though, a Loach film is getting a decent release in Britain.
The odd couple don't seem half as odd as they did a few months ago. In his own reserved way, Loach is every bit as cocksure as Cantona. And in his own cocksure way, Cantona is every bit as reserved as Loach. Rebecca O'Brien, Loach's long-time producer, says she is not at all surprised they ended up working together. "They are both very shy men, self-effacing, neither of them puts up with any shit, and both are pretty serious about football." Plus, she says, with a wicked producer's grin, "Eric being French helps - France is our best territory, always has been!"
What did Loach most admire about Cantona as a footballer? "He was a player of consummate skill and great cheek." Loach is staring out of the window. A parabola of water is squirting over a wall in our direction. There is no sign of what or whom it is coming from. Loach is giggling. "It's a very tall man," he says. It could be a scene from one of his films. For all their bleakness, he's always enjoyed knockabout farce. "Oh yes," he says, refocusing. "Most people who enjoy football just saw in Eric's performance a very strong personality that communicated the joy of football."
What did Cantona admire about Loach as a film-maker? "I like the way it's so real, like documentary. And I like how you don't know if you have to laugh or cry. For instance, in Riff-Raff, in the pub the girl sings and you laugh because she cannot sing well, but at the same time, the way they film this scene, you can cry. It's a strange feeling."
When I met French producer Vincent Maraval, he told me that Cantona had found it tough in France because he was expected to compromise. "In English football, you have more space for the strong personality, for being yourself," Maraval said. "And Eric is not for any compromising in his life or his career. He is always very straight what he thinks about you ... he is the opposite of a hypocrite. He had a lot of respect for the stories Ken was telling, and has a vision of life that is very pure. He could feel that Ken was on his side."
In the film, Big Eric plays with the notion that he is a superior being. He tells Little Eric, "I am not a man, I am Cantona." I ask Cantona if he could imagine saying the line in real life. "Yes, I could say that, because I have a lot of... auto-derision?" He grins, and looks at Loach for confirmation.
"Yes, self-mockery," Loach says.
When he came to England, Cantona turned away from the gated properties and exclusive clubs beloved of contemporary footballers. He lived with his first wife Isabelle and their two children in modest, semi-detached houses in the community. When they split up after close to two decades, it was painful - Cantona has said neither came from families where there had been divorce. In 2007, he married the actress Rachida Brakni. Loach has been married to his wife Lesley for 47 years.
Cantona has always regarded himself as on the left politically, and talks with pride of his grandparents fighting for the republicans in the Spanish civil war. His parents taught him all the important things in life, he says. "I think I had a very good education of love ... le plaisir des petites choses, a delight in small things. I'm not sure the people who want to show their power with big houses, bigger cars, are very happy. I feel sad for them."
We talk about their various run-ins during their careers, and both agree compromise is not their favourite word.
It's amazing how two such obstinate buggers have ended up working with each other and loving the experience.
"Well, it's not obstinacy," Loach says. "I think it's more that life's too short to sell out, really. Why bother in the end? It's easier to stay with what you think than make a compromise with something you're not happy with. Then you regret it for ever."
He looks at Cantona, and Cantona looks at him.
"Yeah, exactly," Cantona says.
