Baftas 2015: who is Christine Langan?
A special Bafta award, for outstanding British contribution to cinema, was given to BBC Films, and – like the same award given to Film4’s Tessa Ross in 2013 – it is in recognition of an influential developer of films backed by a TV broadcaster.
Recent work to emerge from the outfit includes Testament of Youth, Mr Holmes and Mrs Brown’s Boys D’Movie, and it is headed up by Christine Langan, who was appointed to the role in 2009. Having begun her career at British Screen, she worked for Granada TV before being taken on as a production executive at BBC Films in 2006.
In her time at BBC Films, Langan has overseen the likes of In the Loop, Armando Iannucci’s Oscar-nominated politics-and-media satire; An Education, the Lynn Barber memoir that provided a star-making role for Carey Mulligan; and We Need to Talk About Kevin, the Lionel Shriver adaptation directed by Lynne Ramsay.
Langan, like Ross, specialises in nurturing talent through the early stages, and has won much renown in the industry for her ability to pull projects together: We Need to Talk About Kevin, for example, was stalled for years until Langan asked for a lower-budget version to be constructed.
Langan told the Guardian that “working in the independent sector, you’re in the lunatic gang anyway, hoping for some magic – a really unusual story or a really knockout performance – so of course awards are important.” Having had so many films scoop individual awards, Langan and her team will no doubt be quietly pleased to have been recognised in this fashion.