Alison Owen: is the film industry really dying?
Presenting the keynote speech at the BFI London Film Festival this year, one of Britain's leading producers, Alison Owen, examined how cinema can withstand fierce competition from games and online and explored what makes the form of the two-hour feature so unique.
There's many people out there touting the death of the movie industry as we know it. But is that true? This was the main question asked, and in part answered, by Alison Owen  (Saving Mr Banks, Jane Eyre) when she presented her keynote speech, The Power of the Story, to an audience of international film professionals last week.
The first solid point made by Owen was that whatever the form, the medium, the times, people would always keep enjoying good stories, and there would always be a demand for them.
Furthermore, the producer said she thought it "crazy" to say the internet was going to kill off movies. "The internet is a container, not a substance. It should be helpful to our business." To emphasize this point she quoted Evan Williams, founder and former CEO of Twitter who recently said that that the internet "is a giant machine designed to give people what they want."
Owen, who also worked as a producer for British productions such as Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead and Sarah Gavron's Brick Lane, pointed out that the internet doesn't change our wants and needs but just enables us to do these things (like communicating with our friends) easier, simpler and faster - and in some cases for free. "So, the problem is not technology per se, but the management of that technology - and the lack of a pervasive business model it seems.
How can we make technology work for us in the film industry?
"People didn't suddenly wake up one morning and unanimously say 'I'm fed up with mid budget dramas. I'm only going to see action tentpoles from now on. Human nature just doesn't work like that. Human nature stays the same, the one thing that stays constant, like death and taxes. And people still want good stories.
"As digital comes of age, there's going to be more and more demand for content," she said. "If we can make the technology work for us, far from getting our P45's, filmmakers are about to make millions of dollars."
But is the film industry up to speed with how to do this? Are they currently being out-teched? It seems so. As an example, Grand Theft Auto V reached a billion dollars in its first three days of release. In just one single day the game made more money than all but one of this year's movies managed to garner in their entire theatrical runs (the only exception was Iron Man 3). At the same time, YouTube clips get millions, billions of hits and go viral, being watched from Mumbai to Beijing and from New York to London. Â
Does the threat come from real life programming?
"Reality TV programmes have their own channels. How can movies attempt to compete with these kinds of numbers? And do we even need to? Are we scaring ourselves by unn