“There will be wristbands,” decides George Jaques, leaning over a marble kitchen island, snacking on dried mango. We are on a bucolic farm in Kent when the writer-producer-director is rolling through his marketing plan for his forthcoming film, Sunny Dancer. T-shirts and totes? Maybe. Live musical performances? Sure. Making the cast canoe down the Thames? Definitely.
It’s mid-April and the sprawling lavender fields outside the cottage windows are not quite yet in season, but they make for an appealing vista all the same. Inside the farmhouse, the kitchen speaker has been entirely commandeered by cast members Earl Cave and Conrad Khan. They have installed themselves as de facto DJs, cycling through underground rap (there’s a lot of Fakemink) and dancehall remixes between photographs, fittings and glam.
We are here for the aforementioned Sunny Dancer, Jaques’s ensemble-cast brainchild that follows six teenagers in remission at “chemo camp”, which he has been working on for nearly five years. At 26, the Londoner has already amassed a CV that tends to invite the noun “wunderkind”. A former actor who founded his production company at 16 – “People might say, ‘Where did this kid come from?’, but I’ve been doing this for a long time” – he has since produced plays, short films and now two features. Sunny Dancer is his biggest project to date. “We really bled for this production,” he says. Shooting in just six weeks, to a strict budget and an even stricter schedule, it “was one of the hardest things I’ve ever put together. The scale of the film is massive for a British indie.”
