A panel hosted by Wendy Mitchell posed a provocative question to a group of film-industry veterans: would British classics like 'Trainspotting,' Bill Forsyth's 'Local Hero' and 'The Wicker Man' get financed if they landed on desks in 2026? The session brought together Picturehouse's creative director Clare Binns, Killer Films' Christine Vachon, Film4's head of distribution and sales Stefanie Fahrion, BBC Film's commissioning executive Alice Ojha, and Casarotto's Simon Renshaw.
On 'Trainspotting' — a story built around heroin use, a dead baby, filthy toilets, heavy Scottish dialect and no obvious box-office cast — Binns pointed back to Danny Boyle's earlier film, calling 'Shallow Grave' "one of the most exciting films I ever saw" and saying it announced "a new voice." Fahrion argued the extremity itself was a selling point, citing "so many iconic moments" with enough "shock value" to generate "talking factor" and "FOMO." Renshaw called it "a big swing," but also "something that's going to get people talking." Vachon was the most confident of all: "I pitch it as genre or genre adjacent," she said, adding that at the right price, "I don't think it's risky at all."
'Local Hero' drew a different kind of scrutiny, centered on financing structure. Vachon said, "I don't think you get any American equity or a pre-buy unless it was a really big, big star," suggesting instead the film be made "with as much soft money as possible" before being sold for "a nice high price to the U.S." Binns saw an audience opportunity in underserved older cinemagoers, noting "they might not come opening weekend," but predicting "this will be a word of mouth" film.
Discussion of Lynne Ramsay's jump from shorts to her first feature turned into a wider debate about public funding. Renshaw called that leap the real hurdle, with a known cast often needed to reassure financiers and distributors. Fahrion noted that distinctive voices like Ramsay's frequently emerge through public development or production money in the U.K. Vachon, working from a U.S. perspective, joked, "What is this public funding of which you speak?" and proposed an alternate panel title: "How the fuck would you get this movie made in America?" Her own answer: "We'd make it for about $300,000," with the job being to figure out "how do we create a case for this?"
Finally, 'The Wicker Man' — with its paganism, full frontal nudity, remote island setting and human sacrifice — was framed as a natural fit for today's market. Vachon called it "exactly what… the A24s, Neons, etc. are looking for right now." Renshaw noted it could be made inexpensively, while Binns pointed to the original casting of Richard Chamberlain "doing something new, different for him" as a hook. The panel noted that upon release, British Lion had packaged 'The Wicker Man' as the secondary feature to 'Don't Look Now.'
Photo: Sarah K Joyce, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
