Was David Cameron's advice to the British film industry naive?

There's definately some pretentious art-house films out there that take themselves too seriously that should not be publicly funded (Rat Catcher, Hunger, Bronson) as well as some deplorable 'genre' films (Creep, The Cottage, Hush). I'm not sure what David Cameron meant by his comments this week, but I think the term 'commercial' is often misinterpreted.

A commercial film can be art-house, experimental, drama, documentary, animation, genre or any combination of these. It should be regarded as commercially successful not by how much money it makes, but simply by weather or not it makes its money back (this includes all production, marketing and distribution costs). If it doesn;t have an audience big enough to pay for itself then it should not be financed through public money.

The UK doesn't and will never have the financial infrastructure like Hollywood and therefore can't finance films like Avatar or even 'British' qualifying films like  Harry Potter or Bond. So its commitment to supporting all types of film is actually limited up to a certain level of budget. At the other end of the scale I agree with Julian Fellows that the government should not be financing self-indulgent filmmakers whose films have no chance of making their money back. Despite popular believe, this does not include filmmakers like Mike Leigh, Ken Loach or Anrdrea Arnold who are in fact by the above definition 'commercial filmmakers'.

This out-of-date attitude towards the UK film industry as being only capable of making fluffy period drama, gritty social realism, middle class romantic comedy or east-end gangster films has to change. We need to put more energy into educating British film audiences, by giving them access to the huge variety of wonderful high quality International and British films out there that don't make it to the multiplex. How we do this successfully is any ones guess and is probably just as hard to answer as "What makes a commercially successful film?"