The Power 1000 - London's most influential people 2013: Imagineers, Film

 
19 September 2013

Idris Elba
Actor
NEW ENTRY
It may have taken US TV to launch the Canning Town-born actor over here, but Elba has been seizing the day ever since, with British TV (Luther has become a bona fide cult), Hollywood blockbusters (Prometheus, Pacific Rim, Thor) and, to cap it all, the title role in the biopic Mandela, which is due out in January.

Josh Berger
Warner Brothers UK, president
The studio has made a £100 million commitment to the UK under Berger, who has been welcomed onto the British Film Institute board. His realm also includes Ireland and Spain, while Muggles shell out for his Harry Potter Warner Bros Studio Tour at Leavesden.

Christine Langan
BBC Films, head
Arguably the one department of Auntie not to have had a crisis, BBC Films has kept the quality flag flying. The Alan Partridge movie is out and Mr Banks, the story of how Mary Poppins almost didn’t get made, with Tom Hanks as Walt Disney and Emma Thompson as PL Travers, is coming.

Tim Bevan
Eric Fellner
Producers
In retrospect, Les Mis looks like a no-brainer, but it wouldn’t exist without the determination of the Working Title duo. Their films have dominated British screens this summer, with The World’s End, the Richard Curtis romcom About Time and Formula One movie Rush.

Clare Binns
Picturehouse, director of programming and acquisitions
The UK’s most distinctive arthouse brand, with 60 screens, was recently bought by commercial chain Cineworld for just under £50 million. But they’ve held on to Binns, who has shown a unique flair for spotting which film will work where and for how long.

Juno Temple
Actress
NEW ENTRY
The 24-year-old daughter of director Julien Temple is one of our brightest rising young stars and is just beginning to get the roles she deserves, such as Patsy in biopic Lovelace and Alicia in the scary Magic Magic, due out this autumn. Next year will (probably) see her as Princess Margaret in the Coronation Night caper film Girls’ Night Out.

Riz Ahmed
Actor
NEW ENTRY
A rapper (he played Glastonbury in 2007), movie star and Oxford graduate, Ahmed has had an impressive run of films, from his big-screen debut in Four Lions via Plan B’s Ill Manors to the title role in Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. More seems sure to follow.

Gemma Arterton
Actress
Does she ever stop? The former Bond girl has already been in three movies this year — big-budget actioner Hansel & Gretel: Vampire Hunter; arthouse flick Song for Marion; and vampire epic Byzantium. Next up is Runner Runner with Ben Affleck and Justin Timberlake. A return to the West End — she trained at RADA — is rumoured.

Gareth Cattermole/ Getty

Amanda Berry
Bafta, chief executive
Heading the UK equivalent to the Hollywood Academy for a decade and a half, Berry has transformed Bafta from a Piccadilly club into a major venue for film-related events. Under her watch, the annual awards have similarly gone global. Next year’s gongs go out in February — a month before the Oscars.

Tessa Ross
Film 4, controller
Now responsible for all film and drama at Channel 4, Ross won a Bafta for Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema earlier this year. Sophie Fiennes’s Pervert’s Guide to Cinema and Under the Skin, starring Scarlett Johansson, are among the latest offerings from Film 4.

Helena Bonham Carter
Actress
Tim Burton
Director
It’s been a quiet year for the Goth king and queen of north London. She put in a memorable appearance in Les Mis, played Liz Taylor in a BBC4 TV drama and takes a smallish role in The Lone Ranger, while he’s been busy on a biopic about painter Margaret Keane. But London is, as ever, film-friendlier for their presence.

Emily Blunt
Actress
After a string of Hollywood hits Blunt has been away from our screens for a while, thanks to production delays on the Tom Cruise sci-fi epic Edge of Tomorrow (formerly All You Need Is Kill) and also to the ho-hum US response to Arthur Newman, with Colin Firth. But she’s still one of our top Hollywood exports.

Naveen Andrews
Actor
NEW ENTRY
Welcome home, Naveen! After six years lost to Lost followed by two more to US TV as Lord Akbari in Sinbad, the Wandsworth-born Andrews returned to the big screen this autumn as the hunky Dr Hasnat Khan opposite Naomi Watts’s Princess Di in biopic Diana.

Clio Barnard
Director
NEW ENTRY
Barnard made the switch from the visual arts to narrative film with The Arbor and went on to make The Selfish Giant, which won rave reviews at Cannes this year. It opens here in October. Possible future projects include a film adaptation of Rose Tremain’s The Trespass. Barnard’s first name rhymes with “Bio”, rather than the car.

Daniel Craig
Actor
He has given James Bond a lonesome streak, and 007’s 23rd outing, aka Skyfall, suggested that the burden of being the spy was beginning to weigh on Craig — even as box-office takings smashed $1 billion. He will join director Sam Mendes again for Bond 24, but it’s dominated his career for the past five years — a long time in the prime of a gifted actor’s career.

Benedict Cumberbatch
Actor
He may not have been quite so ubiquitous this year, but Cumberbatch has no fewer than nine projects in the pipeline, with his portrayal of Julian Assange in The Fifth Estate and of “Little” Charles Aiken — alongside Julia Roberts and Meryl Streep — in the movie version of August: Osage County promising to be cherishable.

Dame Judi Dench
Actress
Her role as M (surely her best ever?) may have come to a shocking end in Skyfall, but Dame Judi shows little sign of slowing. She was recently in the West End (Peter and Alice) and Philomena, a new film with director Stephen Frears, is due out in November.

Richard Ayoade
Actor and director
TV’s The IT Crowd is now history for Ayoade, who made his directing debut with Submarine in 2010 and hit Hollywood in 2012 with The Watch. But directorial follow-up The Double could prove problematic: hailed as one of the most anticipated films of 2013, it still has no UK release date.

Michael Fassbender
Actor
With the rare ability to be seen both as a serious actor and as magazine-cover material, the future looks both bright and varied for Fassbender: an (untitled) Terrence Malick project, Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, the X-Men prequel shooting and talk of a screen Macbeth. Looks like he’s here to stay.

Chris O’Dowd
Actor
NEW ENTRY
From British TV to Hollywood and back — that has been the trajectory so far for O’Dowd. Worldwide stardom came from playing the lovelorn traffic cop in Bridesmaids, while his role in The Sapphires showed just how sweet he could be. And playing Felix Dennis in The Hippie Hippie Shake should put the cherry on the cake … when it’s finally released.

Colin Firth
Actor
His recent films — the Gambit remake and Arthur Newman (unseen over here) — have failed to click. But the star of The King’s Speech has another Bridget Jones on the way and there is talk of a Woody Allen film, so there’s no shifting him from the pedestal labelled Major Grown-Up Movie Star.

Philip Knatchbull
Curzon Film World, chief executive
Britfilm royalty — his father was producer Lord Brabourne — Knatchbull has proved that you can make money with arthouse films (upcoming titles include controversial Palme d’Or-winning lesbian drama Blue Is the Warmest Colour) and has helped turn the Curzon Soho into a cinematic magnet.

Keira Knightley
Actress
Our top young female A-lister’s usual virtuoso mix of films is fast approaching critical mass: musical romance Can a Song Save Your Life with John Carney, high-octane action thriller Jack Ryan and Laggies, an American romcom about a woman who can’t grow up. Knightley, now 28, has nothing to hold her back.

Jude Law
Actor
Regular gossip-column appearances shouldn’t disguise the fact that Law is still one of our best film actors — and one of our most bankable stars. Wes Anderson’s upcoming The Grand Budapest Hotel — starring Law, Ralph Fiennes, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Bill Murray and a host of others — promises a five-star comeback.

Mike Leigh
Director
A keen supporter of young film-makers through his chairmanship of the London Film School, Leigh continues to pursue his unique brand of film-making, developing his scripts over a long rehearsal period with a regular cast of actors. Like Ken Loach, he is more honoured in Europe than in the UK.

Ken Loach
Director
The Spirit of ’45, his documentary about the welfare state, reached an unusually wide audience through various platforms. Still very active at 77 and never one to dodge an issue, Loach is about to start shooting a film about an Irish communist who used his dance hall as a revolutionary recruiting centre. He has reportedly also optioned Julian Assange’s autobiography.

Steve McQueen
Director
After a storming debut with Ulster-set Hunger, conceptual artist-turned-filmmaker McQueen followed up with the rather chilly Shame. But word-of-mouth on his upcoming costume drama 12 Years a Slave, starring Brad Pitt, Michael Fassbender and Chiwetel Ejiofor, suggests something rather special.

Shane Meadows
Director
Having turned his This Is England movie into a hit TV series, Meadows returned this summer with one of the best music docs in quite a while, which not only profiled the Stone Roses but actually listened to their music. It’s been too long since he made a full-length feature, though.

Carey Mulligan
Actress
An Education, Never Let Me Go, Shame, The Great Gatsby ... few actresses can boast such a run of good choices. Next comes a smallish role in the Coen Brothers’ upcoming delight, Inside Llewyn Davis, and a much bigger challenge as Bathsheba in Far From the Madding Crowd. That should be one for the portfolio.

Amanda Nevill
British Film Institute, chief executive
Anyone who thought the job might be a poisoned chalice after the axing of the UK Film Council reckoned without Nevill’s qualities: open but obstinate. Now comes the test — in the summer, the BFI was hit with a 10 per cent funding cut.

Nick Park
Animator
Aardman’s Nick Park has earned more overseas revenue than most British film-makers thanks to Chicken Run and Wallis & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, plus such TV spin-offs as Shaun the Sheep and Timmy Time. Last year’s The Pirates! found limited treasure, but Aardman has a dozen features in development, including a new Wallis & Gromit tale. Say cheese.

Steve Coogan
Actor
NEW ENTRY
The Hollywood years were a little worrying (voicing a dachshund in Marmaduke was scarcely a career high), but the double whammy of his wonderfully creepy Paul Raymond in The Look of Love and the resurrection of his most memorable character in Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa should guide Coogan back into cynical British hearts.

Imagineer - Film page 62
Rex Features

Tilda Swinton
Actress
Bowie videos, the new face of Chanel, uncompromising support of films she believes in … Swinton is one of our greatest stars while having zero truck with celebrity culture. She’s got an Oscar on the shelf and two intriguing films — Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive and Terry Gilliam’s The Zero Theorem — on the way.

WireImage/ Venturelli

Adrian Wootton
Film London, chief executive
A combination of film buff and astute political operator, Wootton seems equally at home in his day job promoting London in film (and films in London) as he is nights, lecturing on French crime movies or Charles Dickens. Film London’s Microwave scheme, meanwhile, has launched such fascinating first films as Eran Creevy’s Shifty and Plan B’s Ill Manors.

Robert Pattinson
Actor
Twilight’s last gleaming has pretty much faded while Pattinson’s potential as a serious actor — revealed by films like Cosmopolis — has yet to be fully realised. Futuristic Aussie thriller The Rover and a TE Lawrence biopic with Werner Herzog, which has still to get off the ground, should secure his long-term future.

Danny Perkins
StudioCanal UK, chief executive
The French are coming. Well, actually, they’ve arrived: first Pathé, now StudioCanal, which, under Perkins’s stewardship has put the heft of its French parent, payTV giant Canal+, behind that all-important mid-range area of film distribution where you need deep pockets.

Simon Pegg
Actor and writer
With The World’s End, the third part of what now looks like a trilogy (after Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz), set to eclipse the memory of a comedic misfire called Paul (the one with the alien in the campervan), Pegg seems confirmed in his role as a Very British Funnyman.

Nik Powell
National Film & Television School, director
NEW ENTRY
Powell’s Act I was founding Virgin with Richard Branson. Act II was walking the financial tightrope with Palace Pictures. But Act III — running the country’s oldest film school — has proved to be Powell’s peak.

Ben Roberts
BFI Film Fund, director
NEW ENTRY
If you’re not a film-maker, you probably won’t know him; if you are, you can’t afford not to. He’s been deciding who gets the Lottery dosh for the past year. Since that is estimated at £273 million between 2012 and 2016, he’s every film-maker’s bestest friend.

Fabien Riggall
Secret Cinema, founder
Tapping into the appetite for a “secret” event that was a part of Nineties rave culture, Riggall launched Secret Cinema in 2005 and has since attracted thousands of film lovers to odd locations all over London. We can’t tell you where the next one is, though: it’s a secret.

Daniel Radcliffe
Actor
This summer The Cripple of Inishmaan on stage and The Woman in Black on screen helped the de-Potterfication of Radcliffe. Beat Generation biopic Kill Your Darlings, in which he plays Allen Ginsberg, should complete the process when it opens next month.

Julien Temple
Director
Temple has become our foremost director of music docs about edgy performers like Joe Strummer, Dr Feelgood and The Kinks. His upcoming documentary about the “real” Rio should be a corrective to what they’ll show you during next year’s World Cup.

Clare Stewart
British Film Institute, head of exhibitions
The job includes running the London Film Festival, which gives her a higher profile than most BFI folk. With a penchant for orange and an unpredictable taste in films, Stewart has ruffled feathers at BFI Southbank. Festival audiences, meanwhile, continue to grow.

Jeremy Thomas
Producer
His dad and uncle made Carry On films, but Thomas has gone the other way as Britain’s most committed producer of auteur movies. Bernardo Bertolucci, Wim Wenders, Jerzy Skolimowski, Terry Gilliam, Jim Jarmusch, Jonathan Glazer and others owe him a debt.

Ben Wheatley
Director
NEW ENTRY
With a knack for making news, Wheatley has graduated from Down Terrace (very low-budget), Kill List (less low) and arthouse-comedy-horror Sightseers (almost normal). Just recently his latest, A Field in England, went out on TV, in cinemas, on DVD and via download, all on the same day — and did very well, too.

Sienna Miller
Actress
Beautiful, willowy star of new Hollywood drama Foxcatcher but she is being more picky now she’s a thirtysomething mother, declaring she won’t take a role “unless it’s something spectacular”. Wowed the critics on the London stage in Flare Path and with TV film The Girl, so Miller’s more discerning approach is paying off.

Tom Sturridge
Actor
NEW ENTRY
Sienna Miller’s smouldering beau — they had a daughter, Marlowe, last year — cut his teeth in movies such as Being Julia and The Boat That Rocked. He is just as accomplished on stage and was shortlisted this year for a Tony Award for his New York theatre performance in Orphans.

Ruth Wilson
Actress
NEW ENTRY
Raised in Surrey near the Shepperton film studios, Wilson made her name on the London stage, picking up two Olivier awards, and in TV in Jane Eyre and Luther. She is now on Hollywood’s radar after starring in The Lone Ranger opposite Johnny Depp.

Kristin Scott Thomas
Actress
NEW ENTRY
Francophile actress known for playing elegant female roles in films such as Gosford Park, Nowhere Boy and her most recent, Only God Forgives. Spoke out about the prejudice facing older women on-screen. “You’re watching yourself get old, on a screen that hides nothing,” she declares candidly.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in