Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner | No 12 | Film Power 100
Producers: Pride & Prejudice, United 93, Love Actually; co-chairmen of Working Title
There is never a shortage of voices calling time on the British film industry (and the climate has been doomier than ever since the axing of the Film Council). But amid the gloom is Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner's Working Title, that rarest of beasts – a properly successful British film company. The most successful, in fact, making confident movies that do Hollywood-style business.
Working Title is the unifying factor of some of the best-loved British films of the past two decades: Four Weddings, Billy Elliot, Bridget Jones, Atonement. Stephen Frears has called Fellner, 50, and Bevan, 52, the most powerful people in British film. Ever. Peter Morgan described them as "fantastic navigators of the system". Bevan started Working Title in 1984 with Sarah Radclyffe (who later left the company). Fellner arrived in 1992 when Polygram took over. Now they form part of Universal. The duo were friends before they went into business, and are well known for finishing each other's sentences.
With a staff of 50, Working Title has nurtured continuing relationships with the some of British film's brightest – Richard Curtis, Joe Wright and Stephen Daldry – plus America's Coen brothers. Upcoming projects include the intriguing proposition of John Le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, directed by Tomas Alfredson, the Swedish director of Let the Right One In, and Atonement director Joe Wright's Indian Summer.