Sci-fi writers strike back against the Hollywood Empire

It is the future of British film, but not as we know it. After years when the Americans have dominated the world of inter-galactic battles and alien monsters, the Film Council is leading a revival in British science fiction.

Mike Radford, the writer-director of the film 1984, yesterday met 150 aspiring screenwriters in London to launch a scheme to develop new British sci-fi movies.

The Film Council is to invest nearly £2m in developing three feature films in an attempt at reinvigorating the industry with some low-budget creative thinking. The aim is to move away from the reliance on expensive special effects, which has made science fiction the preserve of the American studios, and discover new writers who want to use their imagination instead.

"The reason why there hasn't been any science fiction movies for any length of time is because over the last 20 years, ever since Star Wars, sci-fi has been about special effects," Mr Radford, who was also behind the Oscar-winning Il Postino, said. "That requires a huge amount of money and effectively only the American studios can do it. But 1984 had no special effects at all. And AI: Artificial Intelligence has no special effects for the first 20 minutes – it suggests this child is not a human and as soon as you have that idea in your head, everything is read differently."

Box Film, an independent production company run by former Channel 4 head of drama Gub Neal, is running the development process for the Film Council.

Mr Neal said the idea was to take a genre and use it to encourage new writing and technical innovation. Science fiction seemed ideal because it was under-exploited compared with, say, romance and thrillers, but it could also include other genres like comedy and horror.

The council hoped to find "distinctive" British films, such as A Clockwork Orange, rather than the more predictable, recent American versions, like Judge Dredd.

"The purpose of this is to try to tickle people's fancy and try to get them thinking about it. When I was working in television as a broadcaster, I didn't think about commissioning sci-fi because you thought of it as blancmange and papier mache. We want to get away from that and find things as adventurous and interesting as classics like Dark Star or Cube."

A Spanish co-producer will help fund the production of the best scripts and Box Film is looking for a British broadcaster to become a third partner in the scheme.

Paul Trijbits, who heads the New Cinema Fund at the Film Council which is backing the initiative, said there was an enthusiastic audience for science fiction which had not been served by British films for a long time.

Some of the writers attending yesterday's seminar in London were from the comic strip magazines which sell thousands of copies every weeks to sci-fi fans. But Mr Trijbits said the aim was also to strengthen the British film industry by developing new talent and using innovative technology.

The Film Council is eager to encourage the use of digital filmmaking and other techniques which reduce the cost of making films and make it more likely they will make money.