It is hard to imagine what students would have put up on their bedroom walls over the past 30 years without the work of Stephen Woolley and his wife and fellow producer, Elizabeth Karlsen. The posters for all the films they have either produced or distributed tell the story of independent cinema.
After bringing audiences foreign arthouse hits such as Paris Texas, Eraserhead and Diva, Woolley had his first triumph as a producer with The Company of Wolves in 1984, going on to make a series of landmarks in British cinema, including Letter to Brezhnev, Absolute Beginners, Mona Lisa, the Oscar-winner The Crying Game, Scandal, The End of the Affair and Made in Dagenham. And this winter, the Observer can reveal, the couple are to be honoured by Bafta for their Outstanding British Contribution to cinema.
“I am so thrilled Bafta have given us this,” said Karlsen, who will collect the award with Woolley at the Bafta ceremony in February. “We are really honoured to be seen as worthy,” adds Woolley, “but part of the reason, I think, is that we are still making drama for cinemas – and that is increasingly tough.”
The duo, who work from a small mews office in central London, are feted within the industry for their skill at spotting stories that will stand out from the pack. Their working model was the acknowledged inspiration of the once dominant, though now disgraced, US film empire set up by the Weinstein brothers, Harvey and Bob. It seems that Karlsen and Woolley continue to defy the market by focusing on finding the right narratives rather than swooping on the newest book.
“We don’t approach the business like a studio would,” said Woolley, 62. “Carol [the 2015 film starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara], after all, was taken from a Patricia Highsmith book from the 1950s. The latest bestseller is not the only place to look.”
Karlsen sees her job as simply giving expression to cinema’s “radical voices” but the strange and gratifying thing is that these films also find audiences. And awards. They have racked up 52 Bafta nominations so far, including nine for Carol, and the next film from the stable, Colette, starring Keira Knightley, is looking well-placed to feature next year. “Keira is so good in it,” says Karlsen. “The story really spoke to her.”
The current emphasis on sequels and remakes in the film industry is a symptom of a nervousness that limits the imagination, she believes.
“Chasing the newest thing can actually be a producer’s downfall. And there is an economic imperative that can set in and make you try to turn movie-making into a science: something it constantly resists,” said Karlsen.
“Some films turn out the way you want; others don’t. But we’ve been lucky, either individually or together, to have made a series of films that really have entered the canon.”
Karlsen, 58, is a New Yorker who discovered a great sympathy with Woolley’s taste in films and his attitude to life when they met in the late 80s. She remembers watching The Company of Wolves in a cinema with her brother and still regards it as the dawn of a new era in cinema.
Woolley was by then at the centre of the British independent film industry, having set up Palace Pictures and run the Scala cinema, in King’s Cross, north London. “The films we showed ran the whole gamut, from Stephen Frears to Pasolini, but they were always transgressive and surprising.”
A move into producing films was first suggested to him by the veteran independent film mogul Jeremy Thomas while Woolley was in Tokyo buying the distribution rights to Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence. He took this thought back to Neil Jordan, the Irish director of Angel, a film he had just secured a cinematic release for, and together they developed what was to become The Crying Game, the 1992 thriller that marked the beginning of a fruitful collaboration.
Soon Woolley was overloaded. “We were acquiring so much and producing too. I couldn’t keep doing it on my own. I needed help. The problem was the people I met either knew about budgets or about films. What I needed was someone who had that Scala imagination but also understood money. Then Elizabeth came into my office.”
Karlsen already had a thirst for subversive films, having worked with Bill Sherwood, the promising American director who died young of complications from Aids. “With Bill, who would have gone on to be a great director, I realised I wanted to produce,” she recalls.
As a child, Karlsen was fascinated by the film National Velvet. “When I saw Elizabeth Taylor dressing up as a boy jockey for the race, it really meant something to me. And those are the stories I am still drawn to.”
Woolley says they attempt to share the workload. “Liz pushes harder than me on some stuff. But we try not to confuse the directors too much by contradicting each other. Liz is generally more capable of doing other things with her time. Whereas everything I do really goes back to film.”
Talking about work is far from forbidden at home. “Occasionally on a Sunday morning I might suggest we don’t talk about a problem we are having,” admits Karlsen.
For Woolley work is not really work, though. “I am so lucky. I’ve always done this thing I enjoy with a great team.”
At their company, Number 9 Films, they concede that they are operating against all the odds these days. “Film drama is a diminishing area so part of our job is to go out there and bang the drum. We have got to compete. And we want small local cinemas to survive, from the Watershed in Bristol to Glasgow Film Theatre. We need to keep them open.”
It is this sense of a cultural mission that Bafta has chosen to salute. According to Marc Samuelson, chair of the academy’s film committee, the decision to honour Karlsen and Woolley was unanimous: “When you think how hard it is to get independent films made, theirs is an amazing achievement. It was an easy decision to make.”
Karlsen is still motivated by the pleasure of seeing an audience in thrall to the big screen. “Every Christmas now, Carol plays at the Palace in New York and it is fantastic to see. It is packed. When you sense that shared experience that people have in a cinema it is so special.
“We see it at festivals, as we did with Colette this year. But we need to make sure we can still replicate that magical cinema experience for wider audiences.”
