The director of award-winning films and television series including Welcome to Sarajevo, 24 Hour Party People, The Road to Guantánamo, and The Trip, Winterbottom offers an insider’s perspective on the mechanics of international film funding. As well as contemplating his own practice, Winterbottom invites fifteen prominent British filmmakers, such as Danny Boyle, Andrew Haigh, Joanna Hogg, Mike Leigh, and Lynne Ramsay, to discuss their careers. He refers to these discussions as ‘interviews’, but their friendly, frank, and laid-back tone makes them feel more like conversations between colleagues or friends. While Covid-19 has had a negative impact on the British sector and those working in it, one silver lining is the time it has afforded these filmmakers, during the rolling lockdowns of 2020, to reflect on the state of British independent filmmaking and their own experiences of producing films. Although the book was conceived before it, Winterbottom concedes that the pandemic is the reason why so many filmmakers were available to talk to him.

Dark Matter opens with a list detailing how few British films have been made by most of the interviewees (Boyle, Leigh, and Ken Loach are the exceptions). The list is revelatory. Noteworthy is that the best-known films of two of the most prominent British filmmakers, Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin and Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, were made in the United States. While conceding that the small number of films made in Britain does not ‘necessarily represent a series of tragedies for the individual involved’, Winterbottom argues that it is ‘a problem for British independent cinema itself, that even successful directors … have made so few British films’. Winterbottom considers ‘independent’ and ‘British’ slippery terms, but he takes a less elastic approach to the latter. For example, Winterbottom classifies Andrew Haigh’s Lean on Pete, Carole Morley’s Out of the Blue and Steve McQueen’s Shame as US films, despite the fact that they were financed by British funding bodies such as BBC, BFI, and Film4. What Winterbottom really means by British films are those made in Britain by Britons, featuring a contemporary British setting and telling a contemporary British story.

This century, only four films set in Britain have won Best Film at the BAFTAs: three were period dramas and the fourth was The Queen. Loach bemoans the fact that when British films do get made with the support of US finance, it results in ‘endless films about the royal family’ and ‘endless remakes of Jane Austen’, something he calls the ‘tourist view’ because Americans are ‘not interested in what’s going on here in real life’. Similarly, Winterbottom remarks: ‘I’d like to make films about ordinary life in Britain. But it feels like those stories are bound to be for TV.’ It is this desire that is in part the driving force behind his book.

As for the interviews themselves, the distinctive voice and filmmaking process of each director shine through. Loach’s measured and thoughtful responses, for instance, contrast with the theatricality and panache of Stephen Daldry’s replies. Nonetheless, the interviews share this central guiding question: what film or films couldn’t they pull off? This intriguing question yields interesting responses: a Paweł Pawlikowski film about a wolf trainer; a Bowie project by Danny Boyle; Asif Kapadia’s version of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing set in Stoke Newington; Carol Morley’s road movie tracing the British witch trials; and Lynne Ramsay’s sequel to her British film Ratcatcher. While it is interesting to hear about these ‘dreamed of’ projects, one suspects that Winterbottom most regrets the UK-set contemporary films which have not been made, leaving British independent cinema ‘sadly depleted’. Perhaps more critical for Winterbottom is the subsidiary question: why? The reasons are varied but a common theme emerges: ‘a total nightmare’ from a logistical point of view.

Dark Matter is more than just a lament for films that did not proceed. In four short ‘afterwords’, Winterbottom offers some modest solutions for reforming independent filmmaking in Britain. The interviews also offer rich insight into other matters at the heart of the production side of filmmaking, such as the funding and development process and film as a collaborative endeavour. It is also an occasion for Winterbottom to invite fellow filmmakers to reflect on the differences between documentary and feature films, between working in television and film, and the importance of film festivals. In this respect, the book’s strength is in its ability to unite a diversity of voices on an important issue: the state of British independent filmmaking today.

Winterbottom wrote Dark Matter for ‘anyone who wants to make films in this country’, but most of all for ‘the people who administer the public money invested in British cinema’. Its focus on film production is quite uncommon and one of its highlights, offering a rare glimpse at the challenges filmmakers face developing and financing films. The business side of filmmaking may not sound like a particularly appealing subject for a book, but Winterbottom’s disarming approach produces a candour in his subjects not often seen from directors, who are usually guarded about their projects and careful not to bite the hand that feeds them.