'Let's not call it an industry, that's a scary word," Chris Fujiwara, the artistic director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, said to me on Wednesday night from the red carpet outside the Edinburgh Festival Theatre.
What should we not call an industry? Well, I had asked Fujiwara, whose second EIFF is now in full swing, that with 10 "Scottish" films in the programme (a loose defination: there are actually nine films with Creative Scotland money behind them), out of around 130 in the festival, whether the Scottish "film industry" was healthy.
It was an interesting reply. He said, in response, that he thought Scottish film "culture" was healthy, even "very strong". Which means that there are talented screenwriters and filmmakers in Scotland and, by hook or by crook, by the fragile piecing together of one piece of funding after another, films do get made.
But why is it not an industry, in Fujiwara's eyes, one wonders? Well, there is just not the economics of scale, year after year, in Scottish filmmaking.
The biggest movies, by budget, that are made in Scotland are outsiders coming in, such as World War Z or Cloud Atlas. Their economic impact is sizeable but their presence is inconsistent and cannot be relied upon.
And of course – and you may be familiar with this argument by now – with no film studio in the central belt (either in Glasgow or along the M8 corridor), this consistent level of industry, on a significant scale, will not happen.
Creative Scotland's funding for film each year is about £4m: enough to help create several films and make sure they at least have a chance of happening, but not enough to drive an entire industry.
The capper: this week, following The Herald's Game Of Thrones story (to recap – it could have been shot here, but we don't have a studio, and Northern Ireland won it over), Screen Daily said that there are not enough studios in the UK to hold all the film and high-end TV productions that want to shoot here. But Scotland, for lack of foresight or planning or maybe just plain cojones, cannot cash in on this oversupply because we haven't built anything.
It's a curious situation. A healthy culture? Perhaps. A healthy industry? We shall see.
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