How Britain became the world's busiest film studio

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One of my local weekly papers in north London reported recently that Nicole Kidman, no less, had been sighted in Primrose Hill, on the set of her new film Paddington – an adaptation of Michael Bond’s children’s books about a lovable little bear.

The tone of the report was faintly excitable (Celeb! Right here on our doorstep!) but the truth is, you almost can’t move for big Hollywood stars in Britain these days. They’re here by the truckload, busily shooting movies, most of them American-financed.

You may feel you’ve heard this story before. There have been many false dawns in the history of British film production – and government agencies here haven’t exactly been slow to trumpet Britain’s status as a place to get movies made. Their triumphant press releases are legendary.

So it comes to something when the Los Angeles Times – effectively Hollywood’s hometown newspaper of record – makes the point unbidden. A report last month noted that Brad Pitt was here, shooting Fury, Sony’s World War II action drama, in London and Oxfordshire. At Shepperton Studios, Johnny Depp and Meryl Streep head a large cast adapting Stephen Sondheim’s musical Into the Woods for Disney, and Marvel is filming Guardians of the Galaxy and The Avengers 2. Nearby Pinewood is hosting JJ Abrams' new Star Wars films, Ridley Scott's biblical epic Exodus, and the 24th Bond, which may film on the studio's brand new, 45,000 square-foot 'Q stage', opened earlier this week by Skyfall star Ben Whishaw. And Ron Howard is directing In the Heart of the Sea, an adventure yarn about a 19th century seagoing vessel threatened by a whale. Chris Hemsworth stars; it is mostly being shot at Leavesden studios in Hertfordshire.

Leavesden is a key location in this success story: it was, of course, the site for the phenomenally successful Harry Potter films, which can be said to have turned the corner for UK production. In fact, Britain is now such a popular filming destination that our studios are now experiencing a 'capacity crunch'; according to a report in Deadline, Edgar Wright's Ant-Man is just one film that planned to shoot in Britain but was turned away due to a lack of space. All of which makes Pinewood's plans for expansion - currently being opposed by Buckinghamshire council - more urgent.

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Britain already had a world-class franchise, in the shape of the James Bond films – but they tend to only come along every three or four few years, whereas there were eight Potter movies in the space of a decade – which meant virtually continuous employment for literally thousands of film workers in this country.

But in fairness, governments of both parties have played their part in promoting our film industry in the past decade, and offered tax breaks to foreign productions willing to shoot in Britain. It also helps that Britain has far more than its fair share of experienced film crafts people – the folks behind the cameras who help movies come to life. This has been true for years now; Steven Spielberg told me back in the Nineties that he loved shooting in Britain (he partly made Saving Private Ryan here) because of its highly skilled film workers.

The Potter franchise gave many of those workers continuous practice at perfecting their skills – to the extent that Adrian Wootton, chief executive of both Film London and the British Film Commission, could tell the Los Angeles Times: “Don’t think of us as the cheapest place to film. Think of us as the Rolls-Royce of places to film.”

What else do we have going for us? First-rate actors, many of them stage-trained, who these days effortlessly cross the Atlantic and make their mark on American film and TV productions, as well as those here at home.

And one of the great under-reported stories is the influence of London’s brilliant special effects houses, which contribute so much to CGI-dominated movies. The big one currently is Alfonso Cuarón’s masterpiece Gravity, the visually gorgeous outer space epic. But Cuarón couldn’t have done it without the guidance of Tim Webber, his visual effects supervisor who, with his team at Framestore in London’s Soho, created those heart-stopping images.

All this adds up to a rarity: an unconditionally good news story about a sector of British industry. It’s all about inward investment: more workers in the film business are working more, and on relatively lucrative projects. They get paid more, they feel more affluent, they pay for more goods and services in Britain, and pay higher taxes to the exchequer.

In that way they give a small boost to an economy that needs all the help to get. What’s not to like? Maybe, after all, it is worth getting excited if Nicole Kidman is spied on a London street.

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