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Explore The Times 51st BFI London Film Festival

A generation ago it wasn’t even a contest. Anyone who loved the cinema dreamed about the steam-belching, neon New York streets of The Godfather, Taxi Driver and Manhattan. All London seemed to offer in return was Bob Hoskins and One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing.

But as The Times 51st BFI London Film Festival opened tonight with a film set in the capital’s darkest corners, one of the British film industry’s leading figures said that London had overtaken New York as the leading centre for major film shoots outside California.

Adrian Wootton, chief executive of Film London, said: “We are vying with New York for joint second busiest production centre in the world after Los Angeles and we have more of the big studio films than they do.”

He cited the Harry Potter films, Children of Men, The Da Vinci Code and The Bourne Ultimatum as recent blockbusters that had made extensive use of London locations.

Increasingly, international film makers who might have worked in North America are setting their work in London instead, he added. Woody Allen, perhaps the director most intimately associated with New York, has shot his last two films in London. The director Christopher Nolan prefferred the city to New York as a stand-in for Gotham City in Batman Begins and the forthcoming The Dark Knight.

“New York is now about smaller-budget, independent feature films and television shows. We have got a larger volume of high-budget blockbusters. If they were making King Kong for the first time now, I like to think it would make more sense to have him clinging to the London Eye than the Empire State Building.”

Eastern Promises, the film chosen for the festival’s opening night gala tonight, is another case in point.

It is the first film that the director David Cronenberg has shot entirely outside his native Canada. The lead roles are taken by an American, an Australian, a Frenchman and a German and the plot revolves around Russian immigrants, but the end product has a unique London sensibility. Steve Knight, who wrote the script for Eastern Promises and Dirty Pretty Things, another film which presented a slice of unfamiliar London life, said: “The great thing about Americans is that they are prepared to mythologise their cities. London is now ripe for that and we should not portray it as some sort of theme park. It’s an international city full of different people and groups and often the most interesting stories are from communities who aren’t considered to be typical Londoners.”

British film production is overwhelmingly concentrated in London and last year saw a 46 per cent increase in activity from £577 million to £842 million. There were a record 13,802 days of filming in the 33 boroughs in 2006, with Battersea Park the most popular location.

Political will, demographics, global economics and technology and are all strengthening London’s claim to be the most recognisable city on celluloid with every passing year.

The creation in 2003 of Film London, a film and media agency funded by the UK Film Council, has helped to break down the red tape which traditionaly hampered filming.

Fewer than sixty per cent of London’s population are white British people, creating a multicultural melting pot that filmmakers find stimulating. Hollywood stars are already familiar with the city and comfortable “hanging our here”, Mr Wootton said.

Cronenberg said that he was attracted to film in London by a combination of the character of the city and tax incentives.

“The script was written by Steve Knight as a story that works best in London. The textures and the ambience felt like a London story. There are great attractions for shooting here. The support for working here is well renowned. The financing made it easier to shoot the film here in its entirety rather than shoot part of it here and another part elsewhere.”

Tomorrow’s Top 5

13:00 Glory to the Filmmaker! Odeon West End 1

14:00 Champagne Spy NFT1

18:30 Interview (2007) Odeon West End 2

21:00 Redacted OWE 2

18:30 Blackmail + Blue Bottles Trafalgar Square

To book tickets go to www.lff.org.uk or call the Box Office on 020 7928 3232

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