Budgets and Markets

Chapter 21 Lessons for producers

The 13 case studies dealt with in Part Two are not wholly representative of European film production in the early 1990s. When we embarked on this study, we identified 30 films which, taken as a whole, met our criteria for selection:

• they were widely spread among the European film-making countries
• they were films of which the European film-making community as a whole could be proud
• they included low-, medium- and high-budget productions
• they were representative of the balance between the domestic and international appeal of European films.

Those 30 films soon became 20, for the simple reason that producers of the unsuccessful films in our selection were unwilling to provide us with information. The 20 were then ...