Film: Showing at a cinema near you? Maybe

Producer Keith Griffiths has stayed firmly on the fringes of film. He tells Chris Darke how important - and difficult - it is to reach a wider audience.

There's a framed postcard above Keith Griffiths' desk that reads "imaginez autrechose" - "imagine something different". The fostering of cinematic otherness has been the hallmark of Keith Griffiths' career as a producer.

For 15 years he ran Koninck, the production company he co-founded with The Quay Brothers, whose animation and live-action films he continues to produce. From Patrick Keiller's charmingly jaundiced essay films London and Robinson in Space to the animated Czech surrealism of Jan Svankmayer he has built up a portfolio of films whose eclecticism is its best advertisement.

Critic Iain Sinclair says he is a great facilitator of contemporary British cinema, and a "curator of acceptable subversion". If there's an identifiable character to Griffifths' output it's probably to be found in what he means when he says that "we're probably invisible largely". That he makes this admission evenly is an indication that if he's not now happily marginal then he's secure enough to have bloody-mindedly prospered. Not that there aren't doubts to wrestle with. "There's a point where you wake up in the middle of the night and say, `What on earth am I doing?'" he admits.

"A lot of people associate me with the marginal and the obscure in terms of film culture and presume that I've no interest whatsoever in mainstream TV or cinema, which is absolutely not true. My whole background is based on an admiration of those who really do their work well - I don't care whether they work at the margins as I do or at the heart of the industry. Someone like Tony Garnett has said to me, `All that matters is the work itself.' It's such a simple thing but it's absolutely true. You really have to focus on the work you do because the work that I'm doing is hard enough to get financed."

What makes Griffiths interesting as a producer is precisely his marginal status, the fact that he's not only survived but prospered well beyond the multiplex. In other words, he's only done what most British and European producers try to do, survive on the margins of the Hollywood monopoly. He has done it with a cultural agenda. He admiringly cites the French producer Anatole Dauman as a model of single-minded production. In 1946, Dauman founded Argos Films whose commitment to the then-experimental and visionary work of Chris Marker and Alain Resnais blossomed into full-scale art cinema production with films such as Hiroshima, mon amour, Ai no corrida and Wings of Desire.

Griffiths knows that the market for such work has dwindled since the Sixties and Seventies. "Trying to find something new and original to say about the dilemma we're in is almost impossible. All that one ever says is that we've got to do something about exhibition and distribution. But what does that mean? Someone has got to come up with an imaginative solution but that doesn't mean you're automatically going to be able to drag an audience in. There is a major danger in condescending to an audience but it is possible to build an audience in a very diverse market."

It's a tradition for the producer to pay lip-service to an idea of "the audience" but if you're concentrating on the personal and visionary end of film production then "the audience" is one to be first found, then nurtured and maintained. Griffiths broaches this problem by referring to Pandora Films, his German co-production partners on three films. "I like the fact that they are both producers and distributors." He admits to having a burning ambition to run a cinema. "I think that the disappearance of the repertory cinema has obviously been of significance. There must be a way of doing that and building in contemporary cinema as well. It's a way of linking production and distribution, of backing your own judgement."

And what would be the opening feature? "It'd be the film we're going to make next year which is about Scott Walker, and is to be made with him and directed by Mark Stokes. It'll be a theatrical post-modernist documentary."

Keith Griffiths hosts an all-day workshop on independent film production at the Lux Centre, 2-4 Hoxton Square, London N1 (0171-684 0101) tomorrow, from 10.30 am.