David Puttnam

David Puttnam, producer of Chariots of Fire, profoundly said this of Hollywood and of the cinema:

"Far more than any other influence, more than school, more even than home, my attitudes, dreams, preconceptions and preconditions for life have been irreversibly shaped five and half thousand miles away in a place called Hollywood. I labour over all of this in order to explain exactly where my passion for cinema stems from, exactly why it hurts me that the movies so frequently sell themselves short, unable and unwilling to step up to the creative and ethical standards that the audience is entitled to expect of them.

The medium is too powerful and too important an influence on the way we live, and the way we see ourselves to be left solely to the tyranny of the box office or reduced to the sum of the lowest common denominator or public taste. This public taste or appetite being conditioned by a diet capable only of producing mental and emotional malnutrition. Movies are powerful, good or bad, they tinker around inside your brain. They steal up on you in the darkness of the cinema to form or confirm social attitudes. They can help to create a healthy, informed, concerned, and inquisitive society, or in the alternative, a negative, apathetic, ignorant one merely a short step away from nihilism and despair.

In short: Cinema is Propaganda. Benign or Malign, social or antisocial, the factual nature of its responsibility cannot be avoided. To an almost alarming degree, our political and emotional responses, rest for their health, in the quality and integrity of the present and future generation of film and television creators”