Due to budgetary constraint, the film was made over an almost three year period. Pre-production began in October 2012 and the film was finally delivered in May 2015. However, David Nicholas Wilkinson began work on the project in 1982 but it was not until 2012 and the Governments introduction of the SEIS scheme that made the film a viable proposition for investors. It opened in UK cinemas in July 2015. If Louis Le Prince had lived, he was due to show his films to the world at the Morris-Jumel Mansion in New York, George Washington's old headquarters. This would then have become the world's first movie theatre. The First Film (2015) was screened at the Mansion as part of an historic screening, squaring the circle, 126 years late. The New York Times recommended this event as a "must see" for two weeks running.
When The First Film was released in UK cinemas director David Nicholas Wilkinson appeared on Radio 4's Today Programme. Following the broadcast, an Englishman living in France contacted Wilkinson to say that he had been researching for a book he was writing about Paris in the late 1880'/ early 1890's.
He claimed that France was then on the verge of a second revolution and that many prominent figures who were suspected of being revolutionaries were killed by a greatly increased secret police force. He said that he has strong evidence to prove that Louis Le Prince as a French-born American citizen who had spent most of his adult life in Leeds was believed to be an American spy and thus a traitor to France.
Louis Le Prince has never been acknowledged in France as the man who made the world's first film.
He claimed that France was then on the verge of a second revolution and that many prominent figures who were suspected of being revolutionaries were killed by a greatly increased secret police force. He said that he has strong evidence to prove that Louis Le Prince as a French-born American citizen who had spent most of his adult life in Leeds was believed to be an American spy and thus a traitor to France.
Louis Le Prince has never been acknowledged in France as the man who made the world's first film.
In 1982 after the success of David Wilkinson's "To The Lighthouse" which was nominated for a BAFTA award, he started to pitch this documentary idea to broadcasters in the UK and overseas. Every one of them turned it down, almost all of them because they did believe the story. One person at the BBC told Wilkinson, that "if Leeds was really where the first film had been made I would know about it, and I don't so it isn't true". The film went into production in October 2012 thanks to Keith Loudon a former Lord Mayor of Leeds matching Wilkinson's own money, which came from the sale of his parent's old house in Cookridge, Leeds.
Christopher Barnett was the 2016 Media Award Winner: TMT News for Best Original Score in a Documentary: The First Film (2015).