Speeches by Bryant.

“What do you look like in pink? I guess that is the question.”

“I had a horrible feeling when I said it that you were going to ask that question. If we make it too complicated, there is a danger that it is just unusable. Historically, I have come across examples of people saying that they are making a production and that they are based in Wales to meet some kind of quota or other, …”

“In particular, I hope that we are going to start hearing about a lot of independent films being made that might not otherwise have been made. I think Gurinder Chadha got a mention earlier. I hope I am going to get this right: I think she is making her own version of “A Christmas Carol” at the moment. She was very hesit…”

“I have heard the requests for that. I am not the Chancellor of the Exchequer, so I will not be making that commitment today. There are good arguments for it. There are some downsides, too. If you make a film but you cannot distribute it, that is a bit of a problem. “One Life” was probably the most financially successfu…”

“I can remember that there used to be a row about that. France has always insisted on quotas for music and film and all those kinds of things in French films, but then French cinemas have nobody sitting in them. I am quite hesitant about telling audiences what they must watch. What about “Wicked”? It was made here and h…”

“I will have to write to you about the downsides. I knew you were going to ask me that.”

“I do not know where we will end up with the BBC charter review. It is not in my area of responsibility. However, I have always thought of the £3.75 billion licence fee as a massive production budget. Wherever we end up, I want us to have a massive production budget for making television, and not just high-end televisio…”

“There is a whole series of things that are not specific to DCMS but apply across every sector. I have already referred to the issues that we have with freelancers and the fact that it is a very freelance-heavy industry. Some of the problems that we have had in the last 12 to 18 months have related to the strike in the …”

“Well, we could. We have been thinking about ways in which we could do that. It is not as simple as it might seem. I think I read in one of the submissions that you have had that there was a suggestion that the tax credits could be only applied to companies that signed up. We are looking through the legal niceties of al…”

“One of the main things—I think that the independent film tax credit will help with this—is that we need to make sure that we are making British content as well. Secondly, we need to make sure that British content can be exported well around the world so that it makes money. Thirdly, we need to have strong public servic…”

“I would love to make Alastair answer that question, but he is smiling at me and saying it is my job. I think it is still a political football, but the BBC is one of the greatest cultural institutions the world has. It is renowned around the world and sometimes given credit for things that it has not even made because t…”

“The BFI gets income from itself, from showing films and stuff, and it gets income from grant in aid and the lottery. That mixture renders it £157 million a year or something like that. We will write to you and say if I have that figure wrong.”

“£127 million. The BFI, as I heard earlier, was asking for more money and a lot of people are asking the Department for more money. I fully understand that, and I have to keep saying to everybody it is a very straitened set of financial circumstances. If we were to restructure the good causes from the lottery, and there…”

“Copyright obviously works differently in all the different sectors that are covered by the creative industries, but you are absolutely right. Since Queen Anne in 1710 and then Dickens, we have had a very strong understanding of copyright in the UK. It is slightly different from the French understanding under the Napole…”

“Our aim is not to achieve that. There are several parts to the consultation, as you know. There is the text and data mining exception that everybody focuses on, and then opt-in, out-out, the rights reservation issue and the transparency issue. Then there is the other issue, which I think Dr Pavis gave evidence to you a…”

“Well, one possibility is we end up doing nothing but, as I said, that is not an optimal solution. We are trying to incentivise and engender a technical solution. I am not so sure that it is as impossible as some are suggesting. I went to the Daily Mail group last week and a lot of British newspaper houses have signed u…”

“It won’t just be us. It will be us working with everybody else. I suspect that this will be an ongoing process of debate and consultation.”

“No, I don’t think so, honestly. As you know, I am in two Departments, and I am meeting a lot of people on this subject. Feryal Clark and I have pretty much divided the labour, in the sense that she is mostly seeing the AI companies and I am mostly seeing the creative industries, but we have a couple of roundtables comi…”

“Unless they are required by law to have transparency about their inputs and their outputs. They have to say what URLs they have searched to come to their conclusion as part of the large language model training and their outputs. In other words, when it comes up with the fact that it has created a picture or a story for…”

“Indeed, economic and moral rights have always been part of the combination that makes for copyright—so your consent and your remuneration. They are two separate things. Of course, copyright has always had a series of different exemptions for all sorts of different purposes. As I say, my biggest anxiety is that if we do…”