Strong Recommend: The Ballad of Wallis Island

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Welcome to Strong Message Here, Strong Recommend, a journalist and a comedy writer's cultural recommendations.

I'm Helen Lewis.

And I'm Amanda Unucci.

And to kick off this short series, Amando, what have you brought?

I sounded slightly Maoist, dad.

Journalists' cultural recommendations.

This is our five-year plan to improve

this summer we're gonna no I'm gonna recommend this week a film the Ballad of Wallace Island which is a lovely wonderful funny film British film starring Tim Key who some of you may know as Sidekick Simon from Alan Partridge, but is much much more than that.

Fantastic writer Tom Basden who is one of the writers of the film.

Carrie Mulligan is in it who's amazing.

It's basically I don't want to give you the whole story away, but it's about Tim Key plays someone who seems to live alone on an island, nice house, island community, gets on with, but has always been a huge fan of this sort of folk couple from 10 or 15 years ago who then split up.

And he's organising a concert.

They don't know that they're being brought back together again to give this concert.

They're being paid a lot of money by him.

They don't know the concert is just for him.

I'm not giving too much away since this is fairly early on.

And I don't want to say much more about it, but it is a really funny, very moving film about memory, about trying to go back to the past, about having to just get on with life as it is now.

And I'll judge really perfectly.

It's based on a short film they did about 17 years ago.

And they've been trying to get this thing made ever since.

And it's doing really well.

So if it's still out in cinemas, I'd urge you to go and see it.

It will be, I'm sure, streaming at some point soon but it struck me that the film industry and specifically the british film industry is going through a little bit of an identity crisis in that you know what are we do we do just big blockbusters and and films like the ballad of wallace island are one of these small independent films only a very small budget where it's not about trying to be something other than it is it's not trying to be epic it's not actually being all about being british or a debate on what is britishness It just has a story and gets on with it and does it really well.

And I think a lot of the best film industries or the national film cultures that are successful, the ones that aren't obsessed with which country they're being made in.

I mean, French film has an identity that has a confidence about itself, which isn't about, you don't watch a French film to examine what it is about being French.

It just has stories to tell and gets on with them.

And I'm glad to see that actually this film is doing really well.

So I would recommend it, not just because I know Tim Key, but also because it's a sort of it's a it provides a kind of one solution to you know what we should be doing about our film industry.

Was it very low budget?

They filmed it really well.

And I believe you know it was it was Carrie Mulligan reading the script and going, okay, I'm in that probably got the thing green lit, as they say.

You know, I have I've mentioned this before, the whole process of making a film is a shockingly wearisome and uncertain business where you have to persuade the cast that it's fully financed you have to persuade the money people that it's fully cast and if you manage to lie to all those people convincingly enough for a long time the film then happens but there's a 101 things that can happen after that that will pull the whole film apart again like you know the person that you want to be the lead suddenly decides to do something else first so you have to wait a year so the other cast start disengaging you know it's it's always a miracle that a film is made this happened the british theatre had a a similar related problem, which is that all the stars got tied up on mega Netflix contracts in the last kind of six years.

So, if you wanted someone to be in your play, they were sort of kept on retainer to see whether or not something would even be commissioned in the era where the streamers just had absolutely money to burn.

And that meant that lots of actors were sort of essentially on kind of gardening leave when they could have been usefully productively being in plays.

One of the saddest things I ever saw was I met an actor.

I don't want to name who the actor was.

I don't even want to name the production, the streaming content he was in.

But

he was in a hugely expensive series that nobody watched and that was in the process of having its season two filmed and telling me that he had signed a 10-year contract because there were going to be five of these things and they take a year to shoot and then another year to post-produce and put out.

And while he was saying, you know, it's got me a house,

he realized he was in a huge beast that no one was paying any attention to.

And I think there was a period about two or three years when so much stuff was being made for such an amount of money.

Clearly, this couldn't last.

And that's what's happened.

All these streamers and studios have started to contract and go, well, we're not going to make as much this time.

So there's now this uncertainty over the industry.

And buying up old sort of BBC and ITV things.

Yes.

I think that's another thing that's happened, hasn't it?

It's like trying to license old content

and repurpose it for streamers.

Yes.

So I think also, you know, cinema going has fallen down.

Maybe it was a bit to do with

COVID and lockdown and then there was a writer's strike.

So there are fewer films being made.

I think it's harder to encourage people out to the cinema in a way that it isn't so much to like festivals or theatre.

Maybe it's because we're so used to the idea now of watching our kind of dramas and comedies on a screen at home rather than communally.

Whereas theatre, you're going to see something that's alive.

Theatre has had an astonishing bounce back from the pandemic, actually.

I kind of thought, oh, God, it's going to be just wall-to-wall waiting for Godos

until everybody's recouped their money, right?

They're just people doing one-hander and two-handed plays.

But actually, I think that both the West End and Broadway look in much better health than I would have.

Yes, although, you know, speak to anyone who works in the theatre industry, say, but primarily we have to cast people who've been off the telly or in a film or who have a large social media footprint.

That's the other thing.

The wages are still very low comparative to the other,

but that makes it sort of financially viable but that's i think that's a lovely story um about some people with a passion project who made a short and then really believed in it and kept plugging away at it and they finally and they got to make it and now people are really and i think it's that kind of much more flexible way of making a movie as well uh i mean jesse armstrong who did succession shot a movie that went out on hbo mountainhead which i think he wrote in january cast in february shot in march and it went out in may

And most films can take about six or seven months of development, four months of shooting and eight months of editing and then six months of the marketing campaign being put in place.

And I think cinema has to get much more flexible and have a lot more speed to it, has to have a faster way of so it can respond, genuinely respond to current issues and topics rather than force people to kind of think of something that's slightly safer because

in the 18 months that will elapse between you making it and it going out, things might have changed.

Oh, yeah, the um publishing is the same, and it's sort of stately juggernautness.

Publishers want you to deliver a book more than a year before its publication date, so that they can work out things like a marketing campaign.

Now, they can accelerate that for like Tim Shipman Brexit books are an example of ones that were very quickly turned around because they you know, they want them as up to the minute as possible and then out in time for Christmas.

But it's very interesting to see these collision of these industries which have traditionally prized this kind of kind of ocean liner kind of approach and now actually everyone realizes that they have to be a bit more of a kind of well like Steve Baker's fast-moving catamaran right oh I was gonna say Harrier jump jet but uh yeah let's not go over overexcited okay that's a good recommendation so you would say would you say that was a strong recommendation strong well I strong recommend okay culture lovers

so you can find the ballad of wallace island in uk cinemas and thank you for listening to strong message here strong recommend we'll be back next week with a recommendation from me, something slightly different.

I'm going to talk to you about taxonomy.

Oh, lovely.

So make sure you're subscribed on BBC Sands.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

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