Episode 050: Lizzie Francke, Senior Production and Development Executive at the BFI's Film Fund (Live at the Glasgow Film Festival)

Lizzie is someone I’ve wanted on the podcast for a while. In fact when I first started this project whilst working at the BFI, I was always sort of biding my time slash working up the courage to ask her.

And then serendipitously I was asked to do a live show at Glasgow, where two films that Lizzie had exec’d were showing and it seemed like exactly the right moment.

She’s sort of the perfect guest for Best Girl Grip - not that perfection exists - but in terms of the expansive career she’s had from journalism to programming to being the Artistic Director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival to production to execing over 50 feature films at the BFI and working with renowned filmmakers such as Joanna Hogg, Andrea Arnold, Lynne Ramsay, Andrew Haigh, Pawel Pawlikowski and Mike Leigh, I love that her career has taken many different directions and it was such a pleasure to interrogate how she chartered that path. 

Thank you so much for listening to this season, whether you joined me since October when I released the episodes recorded in Toronto, which feels like lifetime and an epoch ago, or if you jumped on the bandwagon more recently, I hope you liked what you’ve heard so far. I’ve been thrilled and awed and galvanised by the people I’ve managed to interview, and it remains my favourite part of doing this podcast. So I’m looking forward to seeing what season three bring in that respect.