Transcript

Anna Higgs:

I remember when I was at film school, being very sneered at for liking popular films. I was like, “Yes, God forbid someone see the work that I make, and we might actually make some money and be able to feed ourselves. Goodness gracious. Yes, let’s make a film about a twig in a puddle.” So, whilst I might have done my own fair share about sort of sneering back at art house, I think being as eclectic as you can is the interesting thing, because there’s just as much space for Kiarostami as there is for Spielberg.

Anna Higgs:

The interviewer asked her, “What was it like working with all these powerful men?” And apparently, they write in the kind of profile that she pulled a face at that comment. She said, “Well, this idea that they were powerful men didn’t really strike me. And I was working with people who were doing really interesting work and working with them empowered me. And so, if you’re seeing them as powerful men, then that is going to be a barrier.”

Aleks Krotoski:

Hello, you’re listening to Standing On The Shoulders, a podcast about giants, not the kind that you run into in fairytales, but the more metaphorical and inspirational kind, whose symbolic shoulders you can stand on to reach greater heights, whose vision helps you to see a dazzlingly clear path ahead. Across these episodes, you’ll be hearing the stories of a number of thinkers and innovators, visionaries, who somehow managed to see a world that other people can’t, and they’ll tell us about the key moments that shaped their professional journeys. And they’ll talk about the towering figure whose work inspired them the most. Hosted by me, Aleks Krotoski, and supported by Pearson.

Aleks Krotoski:

Our guest today is Anna Higgs. Anna is a producer and an executive working at the intersection between film and interactive storytelling. Over the last 20 years, she has worn an impressive variety of hats. She’s worked as a consultant, an independent producer director across every realm of storytelling, commercial and art house cinema, short films, innovative digital projects that were part of documentary series. Today, she heads up Facebook UK’s entertainment division, a role that has her collaborating with studios and broadcasters and publishers and record labels and Elton John. She’s also deputy chair of BAFTA’s Film Committee. Anna talked to us about finding your way up the rickety climbing frame to success in a creative field, where the first step is an unpaid internship in an expensive city, something that people struggle to do without the financial support from mum and dad.

Aleks Krotoski:

She also told us about how the work of an inspirational movie giant, who produced some of the most iconic movies ever made, helped her to develop resilience in film school. But first, she told me about how growing up in Birmingham spurred her drive to innovate.

Anna Higgs:

So, I come from Birmingham, which in the UK terms is the second city, and that is a bit like being the second child. You’re less popular and less sexy, and all of the things, I suppose, that Birmingham feels in comparison to somewhere like London. I’ve got a pet theory that Birmingham’s never become cool, because we’ve never had a really cool pop band to make the accent cool. Peaky Blinders is doing a bit of that now. You had the Beatles with Liverpool, and you had Oasis in Manchester. Everywhere else has become cool, but Ozzy Osborne is not really going to cut it for Birmingham or Noddy Holder. Very, very British references there for an international podcast audience.

Aleks Krotoski:

I think Ozzy cuts through.

Anna Higgs:

Okay, Ozzy cuts through. So, I come from a super working class area. It’s one of the highest deprivation indexes in the UK. And so, I come from a place with not a lot of aspiration. But what’s interesting is that the kind of stuff that I got kind of my head quite quickly around is, I come from a place that was essentially screwed post… It was the workshop of the world. It’s the heart of the industrial revolution, along with places like Manchester. But post the kind of Margaret Thatcher in particular to the ’60s, ’70s, and then into the ’80s, it was totally stripped of its industry and its kind of its heartbeat in a lot of ways. And so, it instilled in me really early on a very big sense of the importance of understanding change, and how you adapt to the world around you, and how you stay ahead of change, or maybe how you think innovatively.

Anna Higgs:

A place where people were inventing steam engines one minute, but falling behind in the race to mechanize in the 20th century in another minute, is a really interesting challenge. How did we lose that? Where did that go? So, that was something that sort of came to me quite early on.

Aleks Krotoski:

Another thing that came to her early on was to persist despite all of the people trying to stop her ambition and curiosity. Anna says that her school was in a very disadvantaged area. And she says that her teachers tried to get her to know her place, which was to set her sights no higher than factory work or becoming a secretary.

Anna Higgs:

It was a really, really low conversion to sixth form, let alone university. You were kind of in training to go and work in an office or at Wilkinson Sword factory down the road, which is probably now closed.

Aleks Krotoski:

But she refused to do what she was told, which she says was both a blessing and a curse. Early on, she knew how to read before her classmates did. And she remembers being banished from the classroom to the library because she was so precocious. It felt like a punishment, but actually, she enjoyed the odyssey of reading, but she went on. She read all kinds of things, everything from Toni Morrison and Alice Walker to Judy Bloom. Another moment of revelation came when an arts company visited her school, and they did a couple of workshops to help the kids tell the stories of their communities.

Anna Higgs:

They came to the school and gave us video cameras, and helped us do some storytelling. And suddenly, it was kind of like, “Oh, hang on. So, we can be part of telling our own story? We don’t just receive history from this textbook or receive a particular view of the world?” The closest you could probably get to an experience of someone in our school was EastEnders or Coronation Street, the sort of working-class soap narratives.

Aleks Krotoski:

You’ve said that because you grew up in the area that you grew up with, because you were surrounded by people from so many different cultures, then that gave you the window into seeing different stories and hearing different stories, and other people might not have. Can you talk a little bit about that and how that’s influenced where you are now?

Anna Higgs:

Yeah, so I grew up in a massive diverse area. So, I was in a big Afro-Caribbean community, Bengali, Sikh. I’d not been to an, inverted commas, English wedding until I was about 20, and then discovered they’re the most boring things in the world compared to a Sikh wedding. I was like, “Where is the three-day feast? What’s happening?”

Anna Higgs:

And so, thinking about other perspectives and thinking about the experiences of my friends felt normal to me, but I realize it’s not normal to most people, and I’ve tried, and it becomes less normal to you as you, I think, build your own communities as you go through life. So, I always try and keep a hold on that of like, what experience am I not thinking about? What could I be curious about? What could I try and understand, or have empathy for, that I might not be doing enough work on at the moment?

Anna Higgs:

And I think, as well, that sense of exactly that poverty of aspiration. I think the area that I come from is massively deprived, and it’s only getting worse. The use of food banks in the West Midlands is massive. It’s the same across the UK, but it’s huge. And I think we’re living today in a really brilliant culture of, these people need to pull their socks up and sort themselves out, and do all of these things that they’re being told to do by a very, very, very small percentage of the population that come from huge privilege. And it was really interesting.

Anna Higgs:

I was interviewing Malcolm Gladwell recently, which is not in my usual day job, but he was talking about the idea that the amount of cognitive space everybody has, and the amount of decision-making and thinking you get to do in planning. And the idea that Mark Zuckerberg famously has the same t-shirt so he doesn’t have to waste decision making power. And he said, high flying people think they do the most decision-making, surgeons and tech entrepreneurs, etc. So, actually, they don’t. They have loads more cognitive power because they have a cleaner or a driver or this or that. And actually, it’s people who live in or below poverty that can’t think about, “Oh, if I do this, I could get my kid into school next week” because they’re thinking about where their next meal comes from. And I remember being a kid in a single parent family with my mom, and I remember really vividly and probably some of it in retrospect, but we didn’t ever do a weekly shop.

Aleks Krotoski:

But in the midst of all of this, Anna fell in love with cinema. The love affair began when she was four years old, when she watched E.T. and she thought, “This is magic. I want to do this for the rest of my life.” She forced her dad to take her to the movies every single weekend. And she watched lots of late night TV, which introduced her to the pulpy delights of cult horror.

Anna Higgs:

I used to watch icon Moviedrome late at night on Channel 4, and I would see the different piece of experiences, go, “Oh, wow, that’s a whole thing.” And your eyes would explode. And seeing things like Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit on Channel 4 or BBC Two maybe, late at night and realizing there was this entire kind of world of lesbian fiction and storytelling, and having that come up, and just being introduced to different people’s experiences through such a democratic form of cinema and telly, I think has just become part of my DNA.

Aleks Krotoski:

I love the story of when you decided that you wanted to go to university, and you had an interaction with a teacher that set you off on a different course than you would imagine. Can you describe that? Can you tell me what happened?

Anna Higgs:

Oh, the infamous Mr. Clifford. Yes, so my head of sixth form thought I was a bit uppity because I, at one point, had challenged his A-level history notes for being about 50 years old. Literally, he would read them off the yellowing shreds of paper from maybe his teacher training school? I don’t know. And he decided he didn’t like me at that point. I sent off, being predicted great grades, I sent off all of my applications on the university system and got six rejections back in one go. And I thought, what is going on? So, as I didn’t think it otherwise, being obviously a bit uppity, as Mr. Clifford thought, I went straight to Mr. Clifford, because he was the one that sort of wrote the final piece of review in the UCAS form.

Anna Higgs:

And he said, “Oh yeah, well, I changed your predicted grades.” I said, “I’m sorry, what?” And he changed my mock exam grades to lower them, and also written the most insane review of my personality ever. So, all of these universities then rejected me because he said I was a social misfit, and that I was not going to get anywhere near the grades that the courses are asking for. And it was kind of fascinating. It was devastating. I was massively upset. I remember being in hysterics, but also since then, it stayed with me as, I wonder how many other kids he might have done that to, that wouldn’t have gone and asked. Because he had… It’s kind of stunning he told me. He didn’t have to, he could have just gone, “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe they’re just really competitive this year” or whatever and got away with it. But he told me what he’d done. He was so sure in his assessment of my character, or the assassination of my character maybe, that he told me.

Anna Higgs:

So, I ended up kind of enrolling other people and talking to various universities, and getting them to change their mind because my head of sixth form was a sociopath, and a couple of them changed their minds, not all of them. Nottingham, I’m looking at you. But actually in the end, what was good is the one that had been really supportive and I’d had to do a real convincing job on was the one where you’d go to America for a year, not just six months. So, in the long run, it kind of all worked out.

Aleks Krotoski:

Anna’s tenacity and hard work, you will see, are the driving forces in her career. A little later on, she told us about a person who’s been a constant source of inspiration throughout her career, somebody who served as a kind of North Star lighting her path. But first, we spoke about how her career and film began. Anna got her start with the community arts company that came to her class, and she continued to work with them all through her A-levels and university.

Anna Higgs:

As well as a restaurant job and a pub job and working in Waterstones, I had so many part-time jobs. So, I kind of started to work with them on lots of stuff. And they were working, they were called Jubilee Arts, and they were working at, what ended up becoming the forefront of edutainment. They were making these interactive CD-ROMs and doing stuff that was peer-based education. So, they did this amazing sexual health CD-ROM, but you’d have to go to a museum to see all of these things now because they’re so, so, so old, like 25 years old, some of them. And they had to do filmed bits. So, there’ll be photography involved. But I got really interested in doing the little filmed bits, because you told the story and you got it to come to life with the young people who were explaining the problem.

Anna Higgs:

Film, I’d always loved, my real kind of entree to the passion of film, and kind of visual storytelling and kind of film and TV was I saw E.T. when I was four. So, this idea of them when that company came in with film cameras and going, “Well, hang on, you don’t have to beat Steven Spielberg to do this sort of storytelling,” kind of blew my mind.

Aleks Krotoski:

But after university, Anna started to worry about money. So, she got what she calls a paid MBA, with the consulting company, Accenture.

Anna Higgs:

Because I figured, if I want to work in the creative industries, I haven’t got a trust fund or a parent with a house in Notting Hill, so I need to be able to understand the business side as well as the creative. That was a really conscious decision.

Aleks Krotoski:

But five years on the job was all she could take. She needed to tell stories again. So, she worked with the Arts Council on a project in which she forged creative partnerships with people in the most underprivileged parts of England and Wales.

Anna Higgs:

And then after that started to sort of slug away. Lots of people had said, “If you want to get into film, you have to go to the National Film and Television School.” It’s basically the Oxbridge of the media world. And it was true at the time. It’s very much the kind of old boys network. So, I needed to get as much experience as possible. I was working away on all sorts of small digital storytelling projects, on all sorts of community film projects. I went and worked for free as a PA on a big American feature film with a costume designer friend of mine, and all sorts of just connecting every dot I could find, till I’d got enough experience and applied to the NFTS and sort of sold them on the fact that I didn’t come from sort of a film dynasty or from that world was fine. And actually, it was more interesting that way, etc., etc. So, I kind of negotiated my way in.

Aleks Krotoski:

What seems to be a thread throughout this is that you have experienced barriers to entry, right? Whether it’s a financial barrier to entry, whether it’s a background in terms of where you came from barrier to entry. And at every turn, you have said, “No, no, no, that’s not a barrier. In fact, I’m going to use that to my advantage.” And where do you think that came from, that resourcefulness to regard something that would stop other people in their tracks, and say, “Well, I guess I’m just going to go off and do something else.” Where did that come from?

Anna Higgs:

I think I’ve always been a grafter. I think I get it quite a lot from my nan, my nanny, Alice, who is my dad’s mom. She had no education, was a cleaner and a carer and worked in a charity shop, had three children, all sorts of things, and just would never stop moving. And she’s from the Black Country. She’s from like proper Peaky Blinders land, which was… She was an amazing influence in lots of ways.

Anna Higgs:

But I think, I don’t know, I’ve always been interested in a lot of stuff. I’ve always been quite eclectic. And so, sometimes, my struggle has been focusing down on like, “I want to be a particle physicist.” I admire the specificity that some people get to have by being a specialist. Although now, someone’s written a book about how good it is to be a generalist, I’m feeling a bit better about myself. But I’ve always thought, “Well, I’ve got to try.” And I think particularly because I had to earn my way through stuff, I was been a waitress since 13 and I’ve had to work. I’ve always managed to, once I’ve got into something, managed to prove how valuable I am by working really hard. And as a waitress, I got promoted really quickly, and in other things, I’ve had the same experience. So, I think I kind of prove things with results, and feel like I can also often think my way around a particular challenge.

Anna Higgs:

I do quite a bit of mentoring now, and I always say to people, “For me, CVs only make sense backwards.” That’s something I’ve invented, because mine’s manic, if you look at it forwards. But it does, I think, you can always find the thread of what’s interested someone, if you look that way, kind of set of experience or a journey.

Aleks Krotoski:

Anna went on a pretty adventurous journey right after film school. She founded her own production company, Quark Films, and it was a tough hustle. You had to choose between surviving and growing, unless you had some unbeatable advantage, like maybe a famous parent who wrote bestsellers and gave you the free IP. Anna didn’t.

Aleks Krotoski:

Her next stop was at Film4, where she spent six years developing a host of really exciting digital projects. One of these was an immersive website that went along with a film about Nick Cave’s creative process. The website was called the Museum of Important Shit. It was named after a phrase that Nick Cave uses in the film. And then, she became the creative director of Nowness, a short-form, digital video channel.

Aleks Krotoski:

Tell me a little bit about Nowness. Tell me about that job, because that seemed to be quite formative in terms of establishing you as somebody who worked with community, but also really set the flagpole for digital culture here.

Anna Higgs:

Yeah. So, Nowness was phenomenal. It was such a wonderful experience. It came out of leaving Film4, which is a hugely prestigious and wonderful place to work. And I said in my interview, Jefferson Hack, who was one of the founders of Nowness with LVMH, asked me what I thought of the work on the channel. And I said, “Half of it, some of the best short-form video storytelling I’ve ever seen, full stop. The other half, I have no idea what I’m watching. And I think what we need to do is clarify what a Nowness film is and think about how you do that.”

Aleks Krotoski:

Anna says she had a bit of a maverick gig. It was three jobs rolled into one. One part involved commissioning and curating 365 films a year. Another was about building commercial partnerships. And on top of that, she spearheaded a massive structural organization for which her paid MBA came in handy. But her most memorable achievement was setting an ambitious gender parody target for the channel. One day, she told the team that from now on, Nowness would screen 50-50 pitches from male and female directors.

Anna Higgs:

And even the quite kind of young and progressive team said, “Well, we can’t do that. We can’t do that overnight.” I said, “Well, yeah, we can. We’re going to have to,” because that’s one time I was kind of quite specific and dictatorial. And we did it, and all of the stats on the site improved because we were telling more diverse stories and being more inclusive. It was really interesting that, given a really, really fair playing field, what ended up happening is, a lot of the women directors we were working with started to win more of the branded content pitches. They were actually accessing more and more and more of the higher budgets because they were coming in with maybe the bolder ideas or the slightly left field ideas or something.

Aleks Krotoski:

Did you imagine that you would have had this position, this role in promoting women’s filmmaking? Or was this something that just happened when you realized that there was an imbalance?

Anna Higgs:

I don’t know if I ever imagined that in terms of like, “This is one of my goals with my career,” but I’ve always wanted to find a way to get broader stories told. I remember doing a talk for Nowness at a big festival, and was kind of paraphrasing the Spider-Man thing and saying, “With great reach comes great responsibility.” And I believe that massively. So, yes, we need to make great work, but we need to make it with those things in mind.

Anna Higgs:

Women filmmakers was one thing, but also, I was really inspired by this amazing research piece that Melanie Hoyes at the BFI did about black stardom. And they did this massive research piece across the last few decades of black filmmaking in the UK, and found that there was only one film in that entire time span that featured leading black characters who weren’t in some sort of gangster story. And that one film was Debbie Tucker Green’s film Second Coming, which is extraordinary to think that you’ve got… Well, what? Even if you take the percentage of kind of black and minority ethnic population for the UK, that that is the single example of some sort of positive piece of storytelling is mind boggling.

Anna Higgs:

So, inspired by that piece of research, we commissioned three films about the future of black stardom, and asked three black filmmakers to tell us what their vision for the future is. One of those was by an amazing filmmaker called Jenn Nkiru, who is well on her way to stardom anyway, but this film, I think, definitely gave her a bump and was really, really interesting in terms of her just having carte blanche to do what she wanted. It wasn’t with a particular agenda or a particular thing. So, seeing her set herself free and seeing the sort of storytelling that she came to with that was so invigorating. And it’s brilliant to see what all of those filmmakers are going on to do next.

Aleks Krotoski:

At Anna’s current job as the head of entertainment at Facebook, she helps broadcasters and public figures adapt their messages to the platform. She works with them to present their work in a way that facilitates discovery, so that they can go after larger and less obvious audiences. She’s also trying to democratize storytelling even further by supporting popular media created by everybody.

Anna Higgs:

So, I think what I’m most interested in is that democratization, that everyone is creative and everyone wants to engage with storytelling that they love. It’s those campfires, right? The campfires that we gather around change, but the desire for great storytelling and to be connected as human beings around great storytelling doesn’t.

Aleks Krotoski:

When we met, she had just come from VidCon, the biggest campfire in the digital communications world, and one that brings together brands, fans, and loads of creators.

Anna Higgs:

So, amazing individuals who are sharing their passions and building community around the stuff that they do. We also work with music artists, public figures, which means famous people, from the queen to David Beckham. And we also work with producers and broadcasters. So, it’s all about how we can have amazing video storytelling on the platforms, but also how we help those people that are doing that storytelling, find and connect and deepen their engagement with audiences.

Aleks Krotoski:

And a lot of that has to do with the fact that it is itself, a unique storytelling medium. It’s not something that you can just strip the audio from and slap it into a podcast, or strip the video from and slap it into a YouTube channel. It actually does need to be a storytelling medium of its own right. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Anna Higgs:

Yeah, very definitely. So today, I was interviewing the brilliant pair, Mark and Rox, who are LadBaby. And they’re a really good example of that. So, it’s not about exactly like you say, just stripping something and putting out in its component parts onto an audio platform or a video platform. Really, particularly I think Facebook and Instagram, is about authenticity and about getting to know the real person, because it’s based on your real identity, right? So, LadBaby from the very first time that they found out they were expecting their first child have sort of charted their journey and the amazing kind of misadventures of being a family. And they do that with real passion, real heart. They check if they think it’s funny, then it must be funny to somebody else. And they really, really think how they get that stuff out on the platforms.

Aleks Krotoski:

Anna then told me about the one big person who’s inspired her throughout her career, someone who played a pivotal role in the path that she decided to take. The person that you’ve nominated, I had wondered if perhaps Mr. Clifford was going to be the person that you nominated.

Anna Higgs:

Standing on the shoulders of Mr. Clifford.

Aleks Krotoski:

Standing on the shoulders of Mr. Clifford.

Anna Higgs:

I don’t know. I mean, he was quite an old man, so I don’t know if he’s upright anymore. But yes, he… No, I wouldn’t like to stand on Mr. Clifford.

Aleks Krotoski:

Kathleen Kennedy is a powerhouse exec in Hollywood. She heads up Lucasfilms. And Anna’s childhood favorite movie, E.T., happens to be the very first film that she ever produced for them.

Aleks Krotoski:

What do you think it is about what she’s done as a female producer in Hollywood that really speaks to you?

Anna Higgs:

I think there’s a couple of things. I think if you look at her body of work and you go onto her IMDB page, she has 111 credits as a producer. Some of those are execs, some of those, she will have been right across. But it’s the most bananas set of films. If you’re a kid that was born in the ’70s and kind of grew up cinematically through the ’80s like me, she made Back to the Future. She made E.T. She made Jurassic Park. She made The Goonies. She, like, Gremlins. You keep going, and it’s like, how she co-founded Amblin with Steven Spielberg and her now husband Frank Marshall. So, as a producer, just looking at that is the most envy-inducing set of films you could ever wish to be part of. They, by virtue, partly of their time, we had less stuff out there, but they are pop cultural milestones. They are defining era of kind of cinema and film.

Anna Higgs:

And I think particularly for me, a lot of popular film gets quite sneered at. I remember when I was at film school, being very sneered at for liking popular films. I was like, “Yes, God forbid someone see the work that I make, and we might actually make some money and be able to feed ourselves. Goodness gracious. Yes, let’s make a film about a twig in a puddle.” So, whilst I might have done my own fair share about sort of sneering back at art house, I think being as eclectic as you can is the interesting thing, because there’s just as much space for Kiarostami as there is for Spielberg.

Aleks Krotoski:

Anna says that if you look at Kathleen Kennedy’s lengthy IMDB page, it includes both popular and art house cinema.

Anna Higgs:

She’s one of the producers of Persepolis, this mad Iranian graphic novel movie. And she was on The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. And she does the English language versions of the Studio Ghibli stuff. So, you can see a sort of eclecticism and a curiosity in that, which I really like.

Aleks Krotoski:

But it’s the fact that she was a female producer at that time. I’ve met one, maybe two other female producers who were part of that stable. And that’s it. There were like three female producers in an ocean of male producers at the time. And I’m wondering, to what degree, for her, the gender issue was probably the barrier. Whereas for you, you found other barriers that you worked around. How do you see how she worked with this gender barrier as something that’s inspirational for you?

Anna Higgs:

I think the gender issue is something I’ve definitely faced as well, but I think I read a really interesting interview with her, a kind of profile of her in Vanity Fair. And they asked her how she felt… She was the assistant to John Milius, I think it was first, and then met Steven Spielberg and became his assistant for two movies and then produced E.T. And the interviewer asked her, “What was it like working with all these powerful men?” And apparently, they write in the kind of profile that she pulled a face at that comment. She said, “Well, this idea that they were powerful men didn’t really strike me. And I was working with people who were doing really interesting work and working with them empowered me. And so, if you’re seeing them as powerful men, then that is going to be a barrier.” And I think that’s the interesting thing.

Anna Higgs:

There’s a part of, we can fight individually all sorts of systemic prejudice and kind of instilled attitudes to people, but I think you can intimidate yourself out of something. And so, I think that idea of just wanting to be part of great work, and being really interested in what you’re doing, it also helps massively if you’re a producer and you forge a very, very good relationship with a brilliant director, because directors are your currency in the world when you’re a producer. But I think that sense of her having that curiosity and that passion for story and that passion for the form of storytelling that is movies, shines through in everything that she sort of decides to do, whether it’s Persepolis or whether it’s Indiana Jones.

Anna Higgs:

The kind of other layer of what I think she does that I’m really interested in is that she also works as quite a big advocate for the industry. So, she’s not just making her stuff and making loads of money doing it, she was president of the Producers Guild of America. She also sits on the National Student Film Council in the state. So, there’s all sorts of stuff she’s doing that’s at the lower levels, next generation of talent of industry. And I’m sure she’s faced loads of issues, particularly I think probably because she’s married to her producing partner, Frank Marshall. I bet there’s quite a lot of rooms she’s been in where, in earlier days, maybe Frank has been the one that’s gotten spoken to and she hasn’t been. How she’s dealt with that, I’d be intrigued to know. But you can see by the path and the trajectory that she’s taken, that she hasn’t let that become a barrier either.

Aleks Krotoski:

Anna says that another thing that she admires about Kathleen is that, as the head of Lucasfilms, she’s really worked hard to provide opportunities to a diverse and an inclusive crop of trainees.

Anna Higgs:

Star Wars was one of the first big UK franchises to have interns on set. Can you imagine that being the start of your career, your first credit is a Star Wars movie? You’re probably going to be okay as an assistant props master after that. So, it’s those sorts of things of knowing you still have a sort of role to play in your industry.

Aleks Krotoski:

How common is that? I’ve met other people who are in the industry for whom that is incredibly important, but is that something that is incredibly rare, to make sure that the people who are coming up next are adequately supported? I imagine that Hollywood and filmmaking in general is a very dog-eat-dog industry.

Anna Higgs:

I think it’s becoming more common, which is good. There are empirical arguments for the commercial rewards to be gained by having a more inclusive and diverse workplace. Full stop, there’s a huge set of McKinsey report, which I throw at anyone who says it’s too much like hard work to do that kind of thing. I’m like, “Read the McKinsey report. It says you’ll make more money. If you’re not going to do it for morally good reasons, just do it and be a cynical old bugger.”

Aleks Krotoski:

Anna feels strongly about this, that people who’ve gone on to become successful must not lose sight of their responsibility, that they should not let the door slam shut behind them.

Anna Higgs:

I do know producers, though, that sit on panels at festivals and talk about the importance of the next generation, but refuse to be part of any mentoring scheme. You’ve all got to make your own decisions, but I think if we want the world… I’ve benefited from being part of this world. And I got into this world by having people help me and then open doors, as well as my own hard work. I think if we want to stop complaining about the streamers killing cinema and think about what healthy future industry looks like, in the creative industries in general, we all have to be a part of that. And so, if you’re not going to be a part of it, I think you probably have to take a little bit of a look at yourself.

Anna Higgs:

There’s an amazing new film coming out called Rocks by Sarah Gavron, but it’s made about a community of young women in London, and she decided that she couldn’t make it about these people. She had to make it with them because, as she put herself, she’s a privileged middle-class, white woman who lives in London and doesn’t connect in that universe. And the writers, amazing, amazing set of writers. One of them, Theresa Ikoko, who said this amazing thing about, “Should you know, we got into here, we’re sitting here at London Film Festival doing this panel with you because Sarah Trojan-horsed that shit. She just Trojan-horsed this in,” and that’s what I now hold as my mantra is Theresa’s statement. It’s like, how can I Trojan-horse this shit? How can I Trojan-horse this shit? Which is quite hard to say.

Anna Higgs:

But I think that is what we’ve got to do that particularly when you’re aware of the number of barriers that I nearly fell out to. Say I’m very determined. There was a point at which I was holding the offer from the National Film and Television School, but knowing I couldn’t really afford to go, and an offer from the civil service to go and be the head of information for the highways agency in Leeds. And it was like 45 grand. At the time I was 25, and it was like final salary, pension and all sorts of amazing stuff. And I nearly like, it was a real heart and head moment because I didn’t have any money, and I couldn’t quite afford the film school. There was all sorts of things that were going to stand in that way. And I couldn’t have been the information officer at the national highways agency. How was, what was I even thinking?

Anna Higgs:

But there was a thirst for security. There’s a reason that I’m not an active indie producer anymore because I couldn’t afford it. And I’m happy to admit that it was not a sustainable business. Maybe there was bits of it that I was doing wrong, but also, there’s something broken in the system. There’s been a recent survey that the average UK producer is making seven to eight grand a year, which if you’re in London, you can’t be doing. So, it becomes a sort of self-perpetuating trap, as much as I love Kathleen Kennedy’s IMDB list of titles, to my name, I think what I get to do, and particularly the move to Nowness, now at Facebook, is I get to do stuff at such a scale and such A-level of impact that I’m not just helping one or two people, maybe. I’m maybe helping a hundred or a thousand. That’s not coming from an arrogant place, but that’s because that’s what gets me up in the morning. And the more that I can do that sort of stuff, the more that we’re turning the dial a little bit quicker each time.

Aleks Krotoski:

Amazing. Thank you very much.

Anna Higgs:

Pleasure.

Aleks Krotoski:

For more information on Anna, go to AnnaHiggs.com. And for more on Kathleen, go to lucasfilm.com, or just check out her incredible filmography on IMDB. For show notes and links to the stories that we mentioned in this episode, you can go to StandingOnTheShoulders.net.

Aleks Krotoski:

Standing On The Shoulders is a Storythings production. This episode was written and produced by Shruti Ravindran. Our audio engineer and sound design was by Kenya Scarlett. Social media by Kate Norton. Artwork by Darren Garrett and Eden Brackenbury. Our executive producers are Hugh Garry and Caroline Leary. Supported by Pearson and hosted by me, Aleks Krotoski.

Aleks Krotoski:

It takes a lot of time and a big team to make this podcast, more than most people would even imagine. So, if you liked this show, please go to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast fix, and rate it. It really does help people to discover us.

Aleks Krotoski:

Now, on our next episode…

Rachel Weiss:

We have a next generation of consumers who are feeling lonely and isolated, and what has happened to the psyche of everyone in a modern day of like, what’s happened with social media? What does community look like? Who do you trust? These are the questions that keep me up at night.

Aleks Krotoski:

Thank you for listening.