Film producers Working Title: ‘Every movie still comes down to: cover your nuts and jump’

Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner don’t do many interviews, but the last one they recall enjoying was also with the FT. When was that? “Mid 1990s?” Fellner says. The timeframe adds up. Back then, everything must have been enjoyable for Working Title, the London production company the pair have run for more than 30 years. The breakthrough was a tightly budgeted romcom called Four Weddings and a Funeral, with an unfamous star, Hugh Grant. A box office smash, it left a permanent imprint on British culture. From there, the company just kept making hits: Bridget Jones’s Diary, Billy Elliot, Fargo, Notting Hill, Senna, Shaun of the Dead. The list goes on, but we all have busy lives. Not least Bevan and Fellner.

Three decades later, the pair are in the Georgian storehouse off central London’s Marylebone High Street that acts as company headquarters. The morning outside is very Working Title: the city pretty in spring, red buses with ads for their new film, genre-busting comedy Polite Society. Like many of their projects, the movie has made a splash globally. Bevan, 65 and beaming with energy — the pitch man — notes that wherever he is in the world, he finds old Working Title films on TV. But here in London, their smartly mainstream storytelling can feel like part of the national fabric.

Veteran status doesn’t displease them. Conversation turns to modish American studio A24, makers of this year’s Oscar winner Everything Everywhere All At Once, a rare producer with as distinct a brand as Working Title. “Early in our careers,” Bevan says, “I got some great advice: be in the film business, not the fashion business. Because in fashion, you go out of it.”

And yet they’re doing this interview, they say, partly to remind the world that they’ve always made more than romcoms. “We’ve done almost as many films with the Coen brothers as we have with [Four Weddings writer] Richard Curtis,” Fellner says.

Straight-backed, dry and 63, Fellner is the more obvious numbers guy. A Working Title film, he says, can be many things. So can Working Title. The company still annually launches half a dozen movies into cinemas. It also backs streaming projects, television and even a school: the London Screen Academy, training 16-19 year olds to enter the film industry.

All this is hands-on. “Their secret is they’re still real producers,” says Donna Langley, chair of Universal’s film division, with whom they have a long partnership. “They don’t phone it in. They’re on the sets.”

The modern film industry is nothing if not transformed. “Everything changed when we all let Netflix come and take over,” Bevan says. But their MO is much as it was 30 years ago. “Every movie still essentially comes down to this: cover your nuts and jump.”

Yet sometimes you have to adapt. Polite Society, the rollicking tale of a Pakistani-British teenager determined to become a stuntwoman, was written and directed by Nida Manzoor, a 33-year-old making her first feature. Bevan talks of staying in touch with younger audiences through casual chats with fresh-faced staff at Working Title. “All brilliant and half our age.” (Fellner quickly adds that a traditional development department is also hard at work.)

But the young can be nostalgic too. Last year, the company produced Ticket to Paradise, a knowing riff on vintage romcoms, starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts. “Outside, people were cynical,” Bevan says. “They said: ‘Nobody gives a shit about those two.’” In fact, the film was a hit, part of a clever dance the company has lately performed with its own legacy. Bevan and Fellner also backed What’s Love Got To Do With It?, a cross-cultural love story written by Jemima Khan with more echoes of Working Title’s past. And beyond their own offices, much-admired indie Rye Lane winked broadly at the memory of Bridget Jones. While ignoring fashion, they have drifted back into it, bringing with them a reputation as the kind of heavyweights you call to get things done.

Among forthcoming projects is Blitz, an epic portrait of ordinary Londoners in the wartime bedlam of 1940, written and directed by Steve McQueen. “Steve came to us,” Bevan says. “He wanted to make a big movie, and to work with someone who knew how. And who could contribute and protect him.”

If weight of experience delivered them the project, it also brings novelty: a first collaboration with Apple, which will release the film later this year. But the sense Blitz has of Britain looking anew at the past and its own self-image is all the more intriguing for being a Working Title movie.

After all, the company’s first golden period helped frame a national moment: the timeline from 1994 (Four Weddings) until 2003 (Love Actually) mirrored the age of feelgood Britain, prosperous and optimistic. But then came a backlash: complaints that a film like Notting Hill had been oddly monocultural in multicultural London. And when the national mood turned ugly, nostalgia became politicised. In the bitter 2019 election campaign, a Conservative party broadcast saw Boris Johnson restage a scene from Love Actually.

When I mention the sniping they have sometimes faced, the mood cools fractionally for just a moment. “I mean, the fact is the Richard Curtis brand was a billion-dollar set of movies,” Bevan says.

“A billion plus,” Fellner says. The mood in the room stays genial, more or less. But did being tagged as reactionaries irk them? Fellner speaks first: “Yes is the answer.”

The hint of prickle is justified. An obvious reading of a film such as Polite Society would be that Working Title has now decided to embrace inclusion. But Bevan’s first film as a producer was My Beautiful Laundrette, the landmark gay romance between a Pakistani-British Londoner (played by Gordon Warnecke) and a white punk (a young Daniel Day-Lewis). And the romcoms that turbocharged their business were movies for largely female audiences at a time when there was scarce prestige in that. “There was total snobbery in the industry,” Bevan says. “It was tricky to even get people to direct those films.”

Now Bevan describes working with a talent such as Manzoor in terms somewhere between creative thrill-seeking and enlightened self-interest. “Polite Society could have easily been a small Channel 4 thing, but we thought: ‘No, we can resource this properly and cut through to a much bigger audience.’ And Nida is the sort of interesting voice that, actually, we either keep finding or die.”

“We”, you suspect, doesn’t only mean the company. Working Title remains a giant in a British film industry that often seems Lilliputian. Bevan and Fellner both admit to concern over its future. They also feel they have a solution.

It comes with the London Screen Academy, a state sixth-form college in north London co-founded with Bond producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, and fellow industry leaders David Heyman and Lisa Bryer. When Bevan shows me around, the scene is just what you would expect from a school set up by blue-chip producers: the curriculum impeccably thought through, with an emphasis on the waiting real world. (And a lesson in connections too: Rishi Sunak visited the day before me.)

There is also a focused assault on the nepotism Bevan and Fellner say dogs the industry. The student body is drawn from inner London, diverse in class and ethnicity. A cohort of the most promising graduates has been given crew roles on the set of Blitz. “Steve probably thought, ‘Who the hell are all these kids?’” Bevan says. “But I just said it has to happen.”

Yet the ground LSA students are stepping on to continues to shift. Blitz was pitched to several Hollywood studios before it became clear that only Apple could offer the finance McQueen needed. “Steve wasn’t looking for big money for himself,” Bevan says. “But he wanted to make a spectacular film, blowing things up on massive sets. And Apple were the one company happy to go there.”

For Bevan and Fellner, the big picture for movies is confused. “We know cinemas are rebounding,” Bevan says. “But a lot of movies are still not being made.”

And when they are, it’s often by streamers. Besides Apple, Working Title has worked with Netflix on films including Roald Dahl’s Matilda: The Musical. Projects are pending too for Universal streamer Peacock. Bevan and Fellner are diligently upbeat. “It’s good!” Fellner says. “We existed in one system, and now there’s a new system.”

Still, they admit to craving the buzz you only get with a cinema release: the “aura” that comes with enough marketing spend to put films on the side of buses, the instant clarity of box office results. “Rather than being notified that 65mn people watched your film for at least 20 minutes,” Fellner smiles.

And they sometimes miss the people too. “Different personalities run the companies now,” he adds. “They often come from tech. So you lack what you might call the mad fucker element.”

And that, Bevan says, is what makes movies tick. “I just think there’s a big question about whether data really unlocks the best films for audiences. Or is it someone who says, ‘You know what? I really like this idea. These people are talented. So let’s jump.’”

‘Polite Society’ is in cinemas now

Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ftweekend on Twitter