FEED Winter 2020/21 Web

Dame Pippa Harris is a producer and chair of Bafta who recently received an Academy Award Best Picture nomination for 1917, which was the first feature film to get certification by the Albert sustainability consortium. Harris talks to us about raising the bar for sustainable production

FEED: You have worked with Bafta’s Albert Consortium to build sustainability and environmental awareness into your productions for film and TV. How do you think the industry is doing generally with sustainability?

PIPPA HARRIS: There’s an increasing awareness and concern about environmental issues, but I think it’s a patchy picture across the industry as a whole. I think television has led the way, primarily because there is much more television production, and the companies makingTV programmes are getting much more experience of working in sustainable ways.They are often making not just oneTV show, but a show with multiple episodes, and they’re probably making three or four series.With film, they may only be shooting one production across the

year and may not get to shoot another one for a couple of years, so there isn’t that throughput that allows them to set up systems which are sustainable. Hopefully, that’s going to change, particularly with the support of the big US studios and distributors who are putting more emphasis on sustainability. And the studios in the UK are also stepping up to the plate in terms of making it easier for producers. I think it’s just the practicalities and expense sometimes that are slowing things down.

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