Second time lucky for Brits in '07

Sophomore directors lead box office list

By ADAM DAWTREY

David Yates directs Daniel Radcliffe in the fifth 'Harry Potter.'

Joe Wright with Saoirse Ronan on the set of 'Atonement.'

Sophomore directors led a British uprising at the U.K. box office in 2007.

Six films by Brit helmers made it into the year's top 20, compared with just two in 2006.

What's unusual is that five of those six were directed by second-timers -- David Yates ("Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," $98 million), Steve Bendelack ("Mr. Bean's Holiday," $44 million), Edgar Wright ("Hot Fuzz," $42 million), Matthew Vaughn ("Stardust," $29 million) and Joe Wright ("Atonement," $23 million).

All of them made the "difficult second film" look easy. This comes after the U.K. Film Council published research just a few years ago that showed an alarming majority of rookie directors never managed to make another feature. The industry was drowning in a glut of failed first films.

Something has clearly been put right since then. The sophomore class of '07 is just the leading edge of a recent wave of British filmmakers whose careers are starting to build the kind of momentum the U.K. biz has previously struggled to generate.

Many learned their craft in TV, arriving in movies with the maturity to make the most of their opportunity, and the versatility to move easily between studio and indie projects.

Take Paul Greengrass. His fourth proper feature "The Bourne Ultimatum" ($47 million) makes him the odd man out among the sophomores in the Brit top six. But like them, he broke through as a film director in only the past couple of years, reinventing the Hollywood action movie with an urgent, improvisatory style learned in Brit TV.

Yet after his debut movie "The Theory of Flight" flopped in 1998, Greengrass was one of those failed first-timers without a sniff of a second chance. He returned to TV, honed his style in docudrama, and broke back into cinemas with the hybrid telepic "Bloody Sunday" in 2004.

Yates was also a UKFC statistic after his virtually unseen first feature "The Tichbourne Claimant" in 1998. But his powerful TV work, notably "Sex Traffic" and "State of Play," eventually won him the fifth Potter pic. He coaxed the best performance so far from Daniel Radcliffe, and added emotional intensity to J.K. Rowling's darkening saga.

Bendelack and Edgar Wright both cut their teeth in cult TV comedy, while Joe Wright won BAFTAs for his miniseries before crossing over into movies. "Atonement" didn't quite reach the same box office heights as his more populist debut "Pride and Prejudice," but marks an advance in dramatic ambition and critical kudos.

Vaughn earned his spurs another way, producing for Guy Ritchie before making his own directing debut with "Layer Cake." Given his lack of experience behind the camera, it was a big leap from gangster movies to family fantasy, both in genre and budget, but "Stardust" proved that Vaughn is a filmmaker to be reckoned with.

Further down the box office chart, Kevin Macdonald made a seamless transition from feature docs to fiction with his dramatic debut "The Last King of Scotland" ($11 million), while critics' darling Shane Meadows finally found an audience with his fifth pic "This Is England" ($3.1 million, and on course to sell 400,000 DVDs).

The jury is still out, however, on two more sophomores with a TV background, Julian Jarrold and Peter Webber. Jarrold's "Becoming Jane" ($7.6 million) was a modest advance on his equally derivative debut "Kinky Boots," but the big test will be whether he can deliver something fresher with "Brideshead Revisited" in '08. "Hannibal Rising" didn't do much to enhance the reputation Webber won with his admired first effort, "Girl With a Pearl Earring."

Julian Gilbey's second film "Rise of the Footsoldier" grossed a mere $340,000 (though still four times more than his microbudget, BAFTA-nominated debut "Rollin' With the Nines"), but locked into the lucrative audience of young male DVD buyers with projected sales of 400,000 units.

If 2007 was the year of the sophomores, it was a washout for rookies. Leaving aside Anton Corbijn's "Control" and a handful of sparky docs, few first-timers caused any ripples. Sarah Gavron's "Brick Lane," Gary Love's "Sugarhouse" and Andrew O'Connor's "Magicians" were among the disappointments.

That's likely to be a blip. Rookie prospects are already looking stronger in '08, with buzz growing on Justin Chadwick's "The Other Boleyn Girl," Martin McDonagh's "In Bruges" and the first releases from microbudget studio Warp X. Second-timers to watch include Paul Andrew Williams with his black comedy "The Cottage," and Saul Dibb with his Keira Knightley costumer "The Duchess."