We chat with writer/director Jamie Childs, actor Oliver Jackson-Cohen and producers Kate Glover and Callum Grant about Jackdaw, filmed in the North East in record time.
This article originally appeared in Film Stories issue #48 in January 2024
We cover independent films a lot in this magazine, and if you’ve read much of it you’ll know that it’s often a battle just to get them made at all. Jackdaw is a rare exception to that rule – it’s flown through the development process. In June 2022 it was merely an idea of a character that writer/director Jamie Childs was building a script around. In a matter of months it was shot and picture-locked. That’s no mean feat, and speaks volumes about the dedication of the movie’s crew, but Childs also admits that there’s also a certain amount of chance.
The director was approached by a member of production company Anton and asked for a script that they could produce and, crucially, finance.
“That was just chance, and I wrote the first draft in like a week,” he says. “I just kind of sat down and wrote a first draft and I thought ‘I’ll send him it to see what he thinks – it’s probably terrible!’ And he was like, ‘This is good. I think there’s something in this, this is interesting.’”
Jackdaw is the nickname of the film’s protagonist, played by Oliver Jackson-Cohen. An army veteran and former motocross champion, he returns home to the Northeast of England to support his younger brother. He makes some questionable choices to do so, arranging to collect a package with suspicious contents from the North Sea. It doesn’t go quite to plan, and he’s soon beholden to some rather unsavoury people…
Genre films
One of the producers on the film was Callum Grant, who immediately understood what Childs was going for with Jackdaw.
“It had this kind of retro action video game vibe to it, but it was taking place in sort of a very real North-Eastern context, which just felt like a really interesting blend of worlds. It felt really ambitious to me, what he was trying to do,” the producer explains. The pair discussed the movie’s reference points at length, with Childs taking inspiration from the likes of Tony Scott.
“I also love Walter Hill and John Carpenter type movies,” Childs adds enthusiastically. “They’re sort of set in this kind of thriller-esque world where everyone’s super-villainous.”
The director wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel when it came to the crime film, but he did want to tell a familiar story in his own
way – a way that doesn’t give too much away to the audience.
“For me, it was like ‘Why not drop us into the story and into a world that we probably will understand quite quickly as we pick up the pieces and people with it?’ ” It was a very different approach to the TV series Childs has worked on, which include Netflix’s The Sandman and Disney+’s Willow.
“Working for a big network, everything has to be spelled out and you really have to try and convince them to be like, ‘People will get this, you don’t need to tell them everything about the backstory of these characters or whatever it is, or how they got to this point in the story.’ If anything, the intrigue will keep them watching more.”
Casting
When casting the lead character, Childs searched for actors who’d led action films previously, but ended up with his sights set on someone less experienced in that arena. He and Oliver Jackson- Cohen met while the director was visiting the set of Amazon series Wilderness, and immediately seemed to bond over the film. It took some convincing, though, to get the actor on board, as he himself recalls.
“[Jamie] was talking to me about [Jackdaw] over dinner and I was like: ‘That sounds great.’ I was like, ‘What you should do is this…’ you know? ‘Maybe you should think about this? What about this?’ and it was completely sort of innocent,” Jackson-Cohen explains. Except it wasn’t, really – Childs then asked Jackson-Cohen to be in the film, but received an unexpected response.
“He was really interested in doing something like this, but genuinely kept telling me that he wasn’t right for the part,” Childs says. “He was like ‘I’m just not the guy you’re looking for for this.’ Not that he didn’t want to do it. He was like, ‘I’d love to do it, but I think you’re choosing the wrong guy.’ ”
Reluctance
“It wasn’t something that had even sort of crossed my mind,” the actor admits. He started to come around, however, when Childs explained what he wanted to do with the film.
“I said to him, ‘I feel like it’s very sort of boys club stuff ’ and he was like, ‘No, no, no.’ But he said ‘That’s why it’s sort of important that you come and do it’ because he was like, ‘I feel like you’ll sort of put in a bit of vulnerability.’”
He was ultimately swayed by the character’s motivations.
“He was like: ‘Ultimately it’s about a man coming home and trying to make sense of the loss of his mother.’ So I guess it was there [that I decided to do it].”
For a talented actor like Jackson-Cohen to initially turn the role down sounds a bit like self sabotage, so I ask why he initially felt he wasn’t a good fit.
“One of the first movies I ever did when I was like, 21 or something, was an action film and I didn’t have the best of times on it,” he recalls. “So I sort of stayed clear of that genre and up until Jackdaw just hadn’t sort of touched it again. I think Jamie is such a fascinating person and I think the way his mind works, his sort of film references, they’re so sort of mental and brilliant.
And so I think all of us just sort of jumped on board, including the studio, but I think everyone just jumped on board because of their belief in Jamie.”
Co-stars
Jenna Coleman starred opposite Jackson-Cohen in Wilderness, and they found themselves together once again for Jackdaw. Coleman has a small but meaningful part as Bo, a woman from the protagonist’s past. As with her co-star, Childs discussed the film with her on the set of Wilderness and convinced her to take the part.
“It was hell, can you imagine?” Jackson-Cohen jokes of working with her again. “No, we had such a great time on Wilderness together and it’s great. I think it just makes it infinitely easier to work with people that you know, and that there’s a sort of trust that’s already built up there.”
Jenna Coleman’s role was one that’s a little bit different for her, as Kate Glover describes.
“I think she kind of had fun doing this type of role because she plays a lot of period parts or, I guess, just doesn’t really do this kind of action-type role. I think she enjoyed the transfer,” she observes of her time on the film. “Jamie’s reference to her was ‘Blondie’, so I think she quite enjoyed dying her hair blonde. She was doing a play in London at the time, so I’m not sure how much they loved that, but I mean, she looked great!”
Fast-tracked
With all the pieces in place, it was time to get shooting, and production company Anton didn’t want a moment to go to waste.
“Anton sort of said that they wanted to shoot it before the end of the year, which at this point I think it was probably September. That was a bit like, ‘Oh my God,’ ” producer Kate Glover recalls. “We kind of got a fast track a little bit – usually things take longer. We were lucky that we could just go quickly. And then I think because they haven’t shot that many films in the North East, they were a lot happier to help us. The council were quick to respond, and we really luckily got to use The Northern Studios – for a low-budget movie, that was an invaluable space to work.”
Callum Grant picks up on how fast everything moved and what it meant for their roles as producers, and the final result.
“It was a pretty intense process to go from a script to a picture-locked film within essentially six months without any support from the BBC for BFI or anything like that,” he adds. “It did really happen off the radar, but with a not insignificant budget for a British debut,” explaining that having a company ready to immediately finance a film is highly unusual. “Normally what happens with these kind of films, Jackdaw would disappear into a development process with maybe one of the institutional partners, you know, the BBC or BFI, and there’s a process that you have to go through – rightly so, in a way, it takes time to go that way.”
Opportunities
With both Childs and Grant growing up in the North East, it was important to them both to shoot the film there.
“I knew that I would probably end up making a first feature up here if it was an indie feature,” Childs explains. “I’m from here, all the places we shot are places that I knew about that I knew I could get massive production value out of for free, essentially.”
A lot of filming took place in Hartlepool and Middlesbrough, with the director getting permission to shoot on a deserted tower block. It was also an opportunity to give people working in film and TV in the North some extra experience.
“As two guys who grew up in the North East,” Grant says, “we both feel very strongly that – from an industrial perspective – in the last five, ten years regional voices, regional talents or regional issues… that the whole issue has been subsumed and forgotten about for a set of different issues.”
He elaborates on this issue by pointing out that, while some studios have invested in Northern production hubs, the industry remains London- centric, and Northern crews get many more chances to work on TV rather than film.
“I think it was great to try and take something that was really difficult technically and logistically to do. And I think the crew enjoyed that and I think hopefully everyone came out of it feeling like we could push the boundaries in the region a little bit, and go and do other stuff, bigger stuff.”
Action scenes
As a crime thriller centred around a former motocross champion, there’s a fair amount of action in Jackdaw. As the main character wears a motorcycle helmet for a lot of the film, you might think that a lot of the action sequences were performed by stunt-people. But you’d be wrong.
“He learned every single bit of fight choreography,” Childs says of Oliver Jackson- Cohen. “He went away for days actually and learned all those sequences. It’s pretty much 95% him in all that stuff.”
When this comes up in conversation with Jackson-Cohen, he seems mildly surprised.
“I don’t know if that’s true, but that’s incredibly kind of him!” he exclaims, before recalling his training for Jackdaw. “Looking back on it, I think they were trying to sort of assess whether or not I could do any of it. And I think they were like, ‘Yeah, yeah, let’s just sort of set you up and see how you do, and see how comfortable you are with it all.’”
Surprising yourself
He has nothing but praise for the team he was working with.
“I’ve experienced this before with any kind of fight sequence, it can sometimes get quite tedious. It has to be safe, so it’s sort of an orchestrated dance. They sort of make you do it over and over and over again. But this team were incredibly safe, but then were not going to waste anyone’s time.”
The actor reflects that the fight scenes required for the role were perhaps part of what made him doubt himself initially.
“I guess it’s just sort of different, and I think that’s also why in the beginning I was unsure about it. It didn’t sort of feel like it was in my wheelhouse, a film like that, and I think I sort of surprised myself a bit because I actually really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed all the fight stuff.”
Cold nights
Some of the most challenging scenes to film weren’t down to the fight choreography, but to the elements. One scene took place outside a petrol station in the middle of the night – and January nights up North can be incredibly unpleasant.
“It was absolutely freezing and it just kept getting colder throughout the night in a way that we sort of hadn’t seen coming,” Grant recalls.
“That was brutal that night. I don’t think I’ve ever been that cold, and that was the night where the crew were like, ‘Is there a law against how cold it can be before we have to stop filming?’” Childs adds, telling me that temperatures reached -15 degrees Celsius. He checked, and apparently there isn’t. “Apparently you can just go to ridiculous minus temperatures and it’s fine. It’s only when the camera stops working you stop filming.”
Jackson-Cohen describes it as “the worst day of everyone’s life,” before elaborating with a tale of “Jamie, Will [Baldy, DOP] and I just eating… Every 40 minutes just eating something.
Like, it was just insane. We were just eating and eating and eating because we were so cold. And then we went out and then they chucked me in the North Sea. That was fun in January.”
Read more: Gladiator II and the lone hero of democracy
He’s referring to one of the opening scenes, where his character picks up a mysterious package from the sea. It turns out that shooting it was much harder on the director than his star.
“We kept [Oliver’s] filming time in the water to bite-size chunks, but I actually ended up staying pretty much the whole day,” Childs recalls. “I had a dry suit on as well and I couldn’t really come in and out because I was setting up for the next set up and stuff like that. I couldn’t do it from the shore because it just would have been too slow and we only had a day to film that.”
But despite the challenges posed by a short January shoot, Childs and his team have remained incredibly efficient. Post-production was short as well, and the film premiered at Fantastic Fest in September last year.
“Ever since I started writing the first word of that script, there was just this kind of mad frenetic energy behind it,” Childs says. “It was like me writing it with this sort of lunacy and then, I was shooting, it was the same, we shot it in 21 days. It was super-rapid, like every day it was a different set piece pretty much, like we never went back to the same location twice really? And then the edit was the same.”
