WHEN the British Film Institute unveiled plans for a new £130m national centre for film, TV and the moving image in London two months ago, its bosses were surprised by the reaction it provoked in Bradford.

The announcement saw a host of film stars welcoming the move, with Idris Elba saying it was "time we had a proper national home worthy of this 21st century art-form".

But many northerners were quick to express alarm that the new centre could undermine Bradford's own National Media Museum.

Tory councillor Simon Cooke asked why yet another cultural institution was being planned for London and accused the BFI of “sticking two fingers up at Bradford".

Amanda Nevill, the chief executive of the BFI, knows as well as anyone what the museum means to Bradford and the North, as she led it for nine years, back when it was known as the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television.

But Amanda, who still lives in Keighley, says the backlash "completely took me by surprise".

She says she wants to tell the people of Bradford there is no truth to any "notion that the BFI, or indeed any organisation, would want to do anything to damage what they have built up".

Amanda says the outcry was due to "a miscommunication" and that the situation is quite the reverse - the BFI relies on strong cultural organisations, like the Media Museum, around the UK that it can work with to deliver projects boosting the film industry.

She says: "We had said from the get-go that absolutely, for it to work, it has to be part of a network across the whole of the UK."

And she says that even when she was running the museum, it had always had a "fantastic relationship" with the BFI, with the two organisations complementing and supporting each other.

But Amanda accepts wider concerns that London's cultural offerings eclipse those in the rest of the UK and a better balance needs to be found.

She says: "I think it's well founded but I don't know quite who we are aiming the criticism at.

"I think we need to be very careful not to criticise London or anything, because London is nothing. London is all the artists who choose to congregate in that one place."

She says the capital is an extraordinary hub of creativity and economic strength that the rest of the world looks at with envy, and she doesn't "think we want to do anything to dint it".

But she understands the concern.

"Me and my senior team, none of us come from London. We have this absolute understanding in our DNA and, I have to say, a degree of frustration, about how we move the dial on this," she says.

For Amanda, it is a question of finding ways the rest of the UK can follow London's lead and counter the "magnetic" pull of talent down to the capital.

"I think we waste our energy on criticism and instead we should use our energy to drive up opportunity," she says.

And Bradford could have a key role to play, according to Amanda.

Asked about the Science Museum Group's plans to change the National Media Museum's focus to the science of the moving and still image, Amanda says the group had committed to having a national museum in Bradford and it was up to them how best to focus it.

She says: "It would be arrogant for us to think we know better than the Science Museum Group as to what sort of national presence is going to really work best in Bradford."

But she says as part of this change, "there is a fantastic opportunity here" for Bradford, as a Unesco City of Film, to become the place which excels at gelling the arts and the sciences together.

While the Government and industry bosses have been keen to get more young people to study the so-called STEM subjects - science, technology, engineering and maths - for the film industry there's one extra ingredient they need: the arts.

And this combination of skills is in short supply, Amanda says.

She says: "They want young people who are creative and scientific. These young people, these skills, are very rare because their education splits them at the age of 14."

"To do that in Bradford would be brilliant," she says.

"Bradford pioneered the use of the moving image in the classroom. We have also got a university and a college, I am very privileged to be a honorary doctor of both.

"They have a fantastic reputation for the arts in the college and the university.

"It has always been at the cutting edge of science and culture, so you have got that bedrock there."

Amanda and the BFI team are currently touring the UK speaking to the public as it shapes its plans for supporting the British film industry until 2022. To have your say, visit bfi.org.uk/2022.