London’s Doors Swing Open to Lure Filmmakers Outside

It’s not a part of this city you often see in movies, but visually it’s a stunning one. On this perfect summer day the branches of a weeping willow tree graze the calm surface of a small man-made lake, which narrows into a system of canals, their banks lined by brightly painted houseboats. For obvious reasons, this part of London is known as Little Venice.

Three actors--American Mariel Hemingway, Englishman Colin Firth and Frenchwoman Irene Jacob--disembark from a tourist pleasure boat and stroll along the towpath, talking animatedly. Director Mike Binder shouts, “Cut!,” and another scene of London looking ravishing is committed to film.

Binder, an American screenwriter, stand-up comic and actor based in Los Angeles, also wrote and co-stars in this modestly budgeted independent film, “Londinium,” a romantic comedy with a story that is effectively a love letter to London. (The title is the city’s Roman name.)

“I love this place,” he said on a shooting break. “I come here three or four times a year. I was here on my honeymoon 12 years ago. It’s such a beautiful city. Yet most London movies are set inside, in apartments or restaurants. You barely see the city. I wanted to make a film that made the city look magical.”

Binder is hardly alone. London is currently a destination of choice for filmmakers, enjoying a vogue similar to that of New York in the wake of Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan” period. Despite its varied, historic beauty, London was surprisingly little used as a film location until recently. Its reputation was that of a city hostile to filmmakers, where enterprising attempts to shoot were stifled by bureaucracy. But start to walk across the city now, and it is almost inevitable you will eventually come upon a film crew.

For years the most high-profile films made in London were confined to the studios on the city’s outskirts, which have proved a favored base for special-effects features. Of this summer’s crop of movies, “The Phantom Menace,” “The Mummy,” “Eyes Wide Shut” and “Entrapment” were shot largely on soundstages within 20 miles of Piccadilly Circus.

But two other hits of the current season used the city for exterior locations. It reverted to its 1960s swinging-London mode for the retro sequences in “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.” And most significantly, the romantic comedy “Notting Hill” showed west London could be an attractive, viable film location.

That film showed something else: that a neighborhood like Notting Hill, where most of the exterior scenes were actually shot, was a vibrant but relaxed multiethnic place, where wealthy English-born residents mixed peaceably with Caribbean and Portuguese immigrants, blue-collar market traders and low-income families living in a municipal tower blocks nearby. This easy mingling is a reality in many parts of London today--and compared with current Hollywood representations of modern American cities in such films as “Stepmom” and “You’ve Got Mail” it looked almost gritty.

“Notting Hill,” the most high-profile British-financed film in recent years, also kick-started the notion that London’s more desirable enclaves had been under-exploited by filmmakers. In contrast, last year’s low-budget U.K. hit “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” about working-class thugs, proved the city’s less-picturesque areas, notably its East End, could provide effective locations for films with harsher themes.

Two films currently shooting here come into this latter category. The independent “Gangster No. 1,” starring Malcolm McDowell and David Thewlis, is a violent thriller set in 1960s gangland London. “The Last Minute,” written and directed by Stephen Norrington (“Blade”) and produced by the U.S. company Palm Pictures, is a dark comedy set in the city’s underworld. Both films have made heavy use of East End locations, including Hackney, Shoreditch and the Brick Lane area.

But “Birthday Girl,” a Miramax-backed film also currently shooting here, is much more light and upbeat; it’s about a mild-mannered British man (Ben Chaplin) who orders a Russian bride (Nicole Kidman) via the Internet. So is the low-budget British-made romance “The Low Down,” featuring a cast of unknowns and a story about a group of twentysomething friends in London.

Then there is Binder’s “Londinium,” which is positively giddy in its affection for the city. “It’s very pro-London,” he admits. He has gone out of his way to shoot at sites usually overlooked by filmmakers: the Serpentine waterway in Hyde Park, the South Bank arts complex overlooking the Thames, Regent’s Park, Waterloo Station and the British Museum.

Binder has found the London Film Commission supportive. “The powers that be in the film industry here want to help you,” he said. “They’re not, like: ‘If you can’t help me, I don’t want to know.’ In Los Angeles, you can’t get people like that on the phone.

“Despite all that, it’s the hardest city to shoot in,” he said. “Sometimes I feel I’ve stepped into quicksand.”

Among his complaints: “There’s the traffic. One minute it’s sunny, one minute it’s cloudy, so nothing matches. There’s always planes overhead. One day 50,000 Kurdish demonstrators are marching and half the city’s blocked off. We encountered the world’s largest gay [pride] parade. The day we shot at the South Bank, a guy jumps off Waterloo Bridge and commits suicide, so the place is swarming with helicopters and boats and we can’t shoot.”

Yet all this simply goes with the territory of filming in a major city. No one, including Binder, blames the London Film Commission for such problems; indeed the commission, which was established only in 1995, was recently praised by David Puttnam, the doyen of British film producers, and David Parfitt, producer of this year’s Oscar-winning hit “Shakespeare in Love.”

“We’ve shaken off the image of London as an awkward place to shoot,” said newly appointed London film commissioner Dominic Reid.

Before 1995, there was no single body supervising filming in London. Instead the city’s 33 boroughs all had their own regulations about filming, which made life intolerable for producers. “There’s been some standardization of, say, parking charges,” Reid said, “and we now have a high level of cooperation from the police. It’s made a big difference.

“I think ‘Notting Hill’ was the sort of film that made filmmakers want to come here, because it made London look attractive,” he said. “It was a peg in the wall, if you like, to take us on to another level. And it’s good that other films are using East End locations, that the whole grain of the city is being used in that way.”

It’s ironic that a U.S. filmmaker (Binder hails from Detroit) is more enthusiastic about London than most British directors. “What I have over a British filmmaker is, I’m fresh to it,” he said. “And I have to remind myself to stay fresh. . . . You can’t really appreciate London if you grow up in it.

“Remember ‘Notting Hill’ was made by a bunch of people who grew up here. And I think they didn’t want to make the city look beautiful. They wanted Julia Roberts to be beautiful and for Hugh Grant to be living and working in an everyday city.”

There’s no end in sight to London’s preeminence as a film location; Reid confirmed that a slew of movies, varied in size and budget, are starting up in the city over the coming weeks and months. Binder, too, is certain he will make his next movie in London; indeed, he would live here full time if not for his wife, an Angeleno.

“My favorite thing here is to finish a day’s shooting at, say, 9 in the evening, and walk home, maybe through Regent’s Park,” he said. “It’s a wonderful feeling. And it’s something you could never do in Los Angeles.”