BFI Vision Awardee Anna Griffin Has Set Up a New Production Company - We Hear All About It

Great news! Anna Griffin, Nottingham’s own 2018 Screen Star of Tomorrow, has set up a brand new production company, Jolly Griffin - building on the work of Griffin Pictures, her well-respected, award-winning existing organisation. 

But what is a production company, I hear you ask with a slight tinge of embarrassment? Don’t worry, it’s complicated. “Producing is different for everyone in the role - it’s an umbrella term that can capture loads of different things,” Anna explains. “I work directly with writers or writer-directors throughout the entire filmmaking process. Often they’ll come to me when they have an idea, and perhaps they've just got it down on one page - if that. If it captures me, and if I think there’s an audience for it, I’ll collaborate very closely with them to develop that story and get it into a shape and structure that can be developed into a film. Then we’ll work on bringing that film to life, and finally selling it to distributors who can hopefully get it in front of people.” 

If you’re a writer or director who gets the chance to work with Anna, you can consider yourself lucky. Simply put, she’s well deserving of that Star of Tomorrow nod - with projects like Calibre finding their way onto Netflix, films like The Tunnel finding themselves on the BAFTA long-list and, most impressively, shorts like A Last Resort finding themselves as the subject of full-page articles in the illustrious LeftLion magazine. Not a bad record, that.

Now, through Jolly Griffin - established alongside The Revolution Will Be Televised’s Jolyon Rubinstein - Anna is hoping to bring more filmmakers’ fresh ideas to life. Provided they have something interesting to say, of course. “I never make stuff solely for entertainment’s sake,” Anna asserts. “I think there's definitely a place for that, particularly now that the world is so shitty and people just want escapism - but that's not where I come from. I always want to make something that can start a conversation. I'm currently working with Samantha Morton on a film called Starlings, for example, which will be set and shot in Nottingham. It's a semi-autobiographical piece about her life here, having left the care system, and it's a beautiful bit of work that explores adolescence and puberty and growing up, but also what it feels like to freefall into the world when you've got no support structure around you. So that film has a message and it will spark a dialogue about care - or lack thereof - in this country. 

“Stuff we’re doing at Jolly Griffin will be similar. We've got projects that deal with migration. We've got projects that deal with dyslexia. We've got stuff that will hopefully encourage people to have open conversations and take issues to audiences in a way that they've not experienced before. We don't want to just hammer home our leftie ideologies, but instead tackle subject matters you may think you know everything about from a perspective you've never heard before.” 

Many of these ideas will be developed by Rubinstein himself, who Anna instantly “hit it off” with when they met at Sheffield DocFest a few years ago. Then, during the pandemic, they were chatting all the time on Zoom. While the world was taking it slow, they developed a bunch of ideas all channelling the trademark satirical twinge that made him his name - but with a little less of the humour. “Due to Jolyon’s background in comedy, he wasn’t known as a dramatic writer,” Anna notes. “So we started talking and putting some ideas down on paper, and then as the world opened up, we were able to pitch them to people in real life, including to an amazing woman at BBC Drama, who just really loved what we were coming up with. We've got a couple of script commissions with BBC Drama out of those conversations, and they were both ideas that Jolyon has come up with.” 

Whoever is putting ideas to paper or taking up duties behind the camera, though, one thing’s for certain - Notts is where Anna’s heart is. “The East Midlands is so rich with talent, and I feel very lucky to be working with a bunch of those talented people,” Anna says. “I feel quite chuffed that I have been able to help local people bring their short films to life or get scripts into development, and I've been able to offer a home to local talent that can get their ideas out into the film world. What I'm really excited about with Jolly Griffin is that now, through the relationship with the BBC, we have got a platform through which they can get TV ideas in front of people. That’s fantastic.” 

Right now, this support for local talent is more important than ever. Anna laments the countless created-by-the-Conservative-Party challenges facing the film industry at the moment, with the centralisation of decision-making, Government-mandated cuts to funding, and consequent migration of talent to London making the lives of independent filmmakers outside of the Big Smoke increasingly difficult. This makes the financing Jolly Griffin gained from the BBC’s Small Indie Fund, and the deliberate application of it locally, particularly crucial. “When the Tories came in and disbanded the UK Film Council, everything became really centralised and all the lottery money that was going to regional screen agencies went to the British Film Institute, which is London-based,” she sighs. “As a result, all the regional activity just dried up. Crews didn't have any work. So that’s why I'm really passionate about staying here and doing things here and, hopefully, re-establishing the industry here to make it somewhere that people can live and can thrive in this field.”  

So, when you see the Jolly Griffin logo attached to a project, make sure you show your support - and prove that there’s more to the UK’s creative scene than whatever’s cracking off in the capital. But what’s the first project you can show that support to? “We're doing a story set on Easdale Island, which is off the coast of Scotland, in development with a platform called WaterBear,” Anna says. “They're an amazing streaming platform that has an environmental and social impact element to it. That project is a sort of pilot for a feature-length story... That’s all I can say right now.” In truth, we don’t need all the details - with our city’s own award-winning talent behind it, we know we’ll have a jolly good time when we see it for ourselves. 

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