David Thompson: Movie shaker

The failure of FilmFour has given David Thompson, the BBC's film chief, an even greater role in the British film industry. He talks to David Lister

It has been a memorable week for David Thompson, the head of BBC Films. On Friday night Albert Finney and Vanessa Redgrave won marvellous reviews for the BBC drama The Gathering Storm, about Churchill's wilderness years and recall to power. On Saturday night, BBC2 repeated A Rather English Marriage, a funny and moving drama again starring Finney, this time with Tom Courtenay. That BAFTA-winning film epitomised the Thompson philosophy of doing what Hollywood doesn't – making films with great acting parts, rather than taking on Hollywood at its own game, the big action thriller.

Most importantly, last week saw the decision by Channel 4 to serve notice on its loss-making film production and distribution wing, FilmFour. Channel 4 insiders said the way ahead would be to follow the BBC model.

Thompson takes exception to this. While Channel 4 means, in part, that it is moving its film work back in-house rather than keeping a separate production and distribution house, its likely return to low-budget British films is not, stresses Thompson, the BBC model. "If it's a case of just doing low-budget British films, which is what I hear, then that is not the BBC model," he says. "Certainly, we have never tried to take on Hollywood; our way has been to grow scripts which have great parts for actors, something that is in short supply in Hollywood. There's no point taking on Hollywood with big action films, because they do it better."

The demise of FilmFour makes Thompson, the head of BBC Films for the last five years, not just the most important dedicated film executive in television, but one of the most important in the British film industry. Yet his has been an unusual route to success, starting off as an English teacher at the top girls' public school, Bedales. One of his pupils there was Frieda Hughes, the daughter of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Thompson remembers being extra careful in the notes he put on her English essays, knowing that they would be read by her father, the poet laureate. That would keep any English teacher on his or her toes.

Now he is dealing with the Plath family again, but this time in film form. Thompson's latest commission is a remarkable one, even though his former pupil is unlikely to approve of it. BBC Films are to make a movie about the Hughes-Plath relationship, with Gwyneth Paltrow as Plath, and Paltrow's actress mother Blythe Danner as her on-screen mother. It will be the first time the two actresses have starred together. The part of Hughes has not yet been cast.

The eye-catching project typifies the run of form that Thompson is having at the moment. The Oscar-nominated Iris, directed by Sir Richard Eyre and starring Kate Winslet and Judi Dench, was another landmark for BBC Films – and the sort of film that a few years ago one would have expected to see in the FilmFour line-up. Billy Elliot, too, was a BBC film. This year's releases include the new Lynne Ramsay film starring Samantha Morton, Morvern Callar, and the Amélie star Audrey Tatou in Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things.

It would be foolish to pretend the success has been all one-sided. BBC Films notably failed to raise the cash for East is East, which FilmFour released. But equally there's no disguising the fact that Thompson is driving the sort of project that would have once been FilmFour territory. One such is a movie that has just started shooting, and which brings rock's biggest icon, Bob Dylan, back to the screen after an absence of 15 years in a film in which Dylan will play a singer and perform some of his own numbers.

Thompson, though, derives no joy from the demise of FilmFour's production and distribution wing. He knows that it weakens the British film industry. "The loss of FilmFour is a very bad thing," he says, "because it does undermine confidence." Thompson revealed to me that he was once under pressure at the BBC to start up a spin-off film-making and distribution unit along the lines of FilmFour, but he successfully rejected it.

"We have never had our own distributor or sales agency. We prefer to do it project by project. The same person who is good for distributing Billy Elliot may not be good for Me Again [a forthcoming comedy thriller with Bruce Willis]. Our model is very much keeping our feet on the ground with British talent, particularly new British talent like Lynne Ramsay. And the strategy now is to do larger-scale films with British talent in partnership with that talent.

"The problem with talent in the UK is that directors, producers and writers often don't get the chance to make more than one film, so we are teaming up with American producers to give them that chance."

Developing partnerships with other companies, often big American studios, for distribution is another key aspect of the Thompson model. "With the new Sylvia Plath film, we have a script which we develop and pay for and then we hawk it around and choose the right partner for it, in this case Focus Films. People say, 'What's happened to Play for Today and the sort of writers it brought on?' But in many ways that same spirit of originality is alive in the British cinema." Thompson also has an executive role in TV drama. "That keeps us rooted in the television world and the talent we want," he explains.

And it's a spirit that Hollywood can barely comprehend, let alone imitate. Thompson says: "What would Hollywood have said to Stephen Daldry, who had never directed a feature film before directing Billy Elliot? All three main performers in Iris were nominated for Oscars, but Hollywood would have turned up its nose at a film about an old woman who gets Alzheimer's. Now they are looking again at what we are doing."

And as if to drive the message home to Hollywood, David Thompson has just opened a BBC Films office in Los Angeles.