British film industry ruined by the 'formula merchants'

"Bring on the fisticuffs and let's get moving," urged the British actress Tilda Swinton, in a call to arms for British film-makers at the Edinburgh International Film Festival yesterday.

In a talk dedicated to the late British director Derek Jarman, with whom Swinton worked closely in the 1980s and 1990s, she urged film-makers to follow the promptings of inspiration rather than the box office, and criticised a British film industry in the grip of commercial values.

"The formula merchants are out in force. They are in the market for guaranteed product," the actress said.

The talk, organised by the independent British film magazine Vertigo, took the form of a sometimes poetic open letter to Jarman, who died in 1994, following a long Aids-related illness The talk paid tribute to an audacious experimenter whose films – sexually, politically and formally dissident – included Caravaggio, Sebastiane and Blue, which consisted of a soundtrack accompanying an entirely blue screen.

In the spirit of provocation, Swinton called Jarman "the great Thatcherite film-maker – for every £200,000 film you made, real profits were seen (by someone or other) within at least the first two years."

Diametrically opposed to the Jarman spirit, Swinton argued, is the current UK film industry in which "art is now indivisible from the idea of culture, culture from heritage, heritage from tourism, tourism from 'the art of leisure'". Among the symptoms of this climate, she said, are "the paralysis of individual voices, the concept of the successful product, the eye to the main chance, the idea that it has to cost millions of pounds to make a film".

Film-makers need to think carefully about money and the pressures that come with it, Swinton said. "You have to be careful who's handing it over and why, and what they want from it."

Swinton also criticised the British funding body the Film Council for prevaricating over its involvement in the forthcoming feature Young Adam – adapted from the book by Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi – in which she appears with Ewan McGregor and Peter Mullan.

Swinton herself has largely chosen to work with experimental film-makers, such as Britain's John Maybury, America's Lynn Hershman and the Canadian stage and screen director Robert Lepage, but has recently ventured into bigger-budget work, including Danny Boyle's The Beach and the Tom Cruise vehicle Vanilla Sky. Surprisingly, she said that working on the film "reminded me of Derek – they have so much money that they were throwing film around as if it were Super-8".

She also said that she found a very sympathetic spirit among US film-makers, who demonstrated "the one good thing about advanced capitalism – they're inured to the fact that they have to do it themselves, they don't throw sulks because they don't get funding, they just get on with it."

Swinton's call to arms came in a film festival that had opened with an unapologetically experimental work, Morvern Callar, by the young Scottish film-maker Lynne Ramsay. The cause of the current malaise, Swinton said, is not a shortage of adventurous film-makers, but lies with exhibitors. Her recent appearance in the American independent film The Deep End, distributed by Twentieth Century Fox, ran for only four performances at her local cinema in Inverness.

"I left a message at the box office and offered to come along and talk. The cinema never even called me back. Where's the will? They could have made some money."