Tim Bevan Of Working Title Films

How did you set up Working Title Films?
I was working on a ghastly pop promo with Stephen Frears and afterwards he rang me up and said I've been sent this script and would you mind reading it and I did and it was called My Beautiful Laundrette. Stephen informed me that he only made films in February and this was November. So we went in to Channel Four. They liked it and said how much? I thought of the biggest figure I could imagine and said half a million and they said okay and we came out and made it. It was a TV movie at that stage but got a lot of critical praise at the Edinburgh Festival and so there it was decided to give it a theatrical release.

Working Title Films at that stage was you and Producer Sarah Radclyffe?
Yes. I began my education as a producer by following Laundrette around the world. In those days for me, and still now if you are an independent producer, you get a script or project and get a bit of money from the UK and the rest from pre-selling to distributors around the world. This was not a totally satisfactory state of affairs because you have no single strategy for releasing the film and it's very hard to make your money back. By 1990 Sarah and I had been habitually mortgaging our houses against our movies and our films weren't good enough so we thought we were going to go to the wall.

And you became involved with PolyGram?
I was lucky because for some time I had been good friends with Michael Kuhn who was looking to start a film division. I explained to him that we lacked the finance to develop the scripts to their full potential and he agreed to support us. I parted company with Sarah and joined Eric Fellner to create what we describe as a company thats independent in spirit but with studio backing.