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EXCLUSIVE: Kirk Jones, the writer and director of StudioCanal’s I Swear movie that collected five competitive BAFTA Award nominations today — six if we include the Rising Star Award nom that the movie’s lead Robert Aramayo had already nabbed — swore that he and his wife would bankroll the production in its entirety.
“When people ask me why there are no other recognizable names at the front of the film, no BBC Film, no Film4, all that kind of stuff, I say the film was financed in a very, very unique way, which gave me total and complete freedom over the script, the casting shoot, everything,” Jones tells Deadline. Until now he has kept quiet about the fact that Jones and Cindy, his wife of over three decades, ponied up the film’s budget themselves, which was roughly in the area of £2.8 million (about $3.73 million).
“Two things ran in parallel,” Jones explains. He and his wife sold their house in Buckinghamshire, on the outskirts of London, where they’d lived for 30 years. “Everything I had from my career was in that property, and we decided to move to the West Country,” to Bristol, where Jones grew up and where his parent’s reside. “So it was basically like coming home,” he adds.
The couple figured they’d invest the money and rent until they found a new house.
In parallel to that, Jones penned I Swear, a feature based on the life of John Davidson, a Scot who was diagnosed with the neurological disorder known as Tourette syndrome, whereby an impulse to the brain makes him spout streams of four-lettered words. The film, with Jones’ witty script and Aramayo’s standout performance, is an unmissable delight.
“I was told how much the budget was going to be, and my key worry was that because there was so much swearing in there, if we went a traditional route to finance the film, someone would start saying, ‘Guys, listen, you’ve got to bring it down. You’ve just got to bring the C-word down and the F-word down.’ And we only had one informal conversation with one UK sales agent and they said exactly that,” Jones recalled during a post-BAFTA nominations announcement interview.
The filmmaker behind Waking Ned Devine and Nanny McPhee consulted with Cindy, a fashion graduate who went on to style films and commercials, and then checked in with their bank. “And I said to the bank, ‘If we give you everything that we’ve got, can we leverage a loan to pay for the film one hundred percent?’And they said, yes, they could make it work. So after dinner one night in the kitchen, I pitched it to my wife and she took about three seconds to literally say the most incredible words, which were: “If you feel really strongly about it, if you believe in it, then let’s do it.” So we financed the film for one hundred percent.”
After making movies for 30 years, especially in America, “where there’s always an army of people wanting to tell you what to do, how to do this, we don’t agree with this. Can you change this? Can you make them fall in love? Can you make it more happier? After 30 years of that, I finally got to make a film with an incredible crew, an incredible cast, and with just me on my own. And because the crew knew the situation and how invested my wife and I were in it, it was the most incredible shoot we all knew. We were there for John Davidson. And to tell John’s story. “
Asked why he has kept silent on the subject of financing I Swear until now, Jones observed that “the trouble is when people know that a director has put their own money into a film, it usually means that no one else wants to put money in. But on this occasion, we never went to anyone. We had one brief conversation and then thought, you know what? Let’s just do it ourselves,” he declares.
However, Jones declined to reveal the name of the sales executive he was in communication with. “They basically said, ‘Look, we love it, but in its current form, we don’t think we can take on because people are going to have trouble with the swearing.’ And by then I was so invested in Tourettes and John, I knew that the swearing wasn’t an issue. And the film, if you look online, there must be thousands of people who have commented on the film. Luckily, most people like it. I haven’t seen one single comment about the swearing, because as soon as the film starts, you understand that it has no meaning at all. It’s not said in malice, it’s not vicious, it’s not violent. It’s a medical condition,” he states.
The film shows how Davidson, with the help of friends played by Maxine Peake and Peter Mullan — the latter who is nominated in BAFTA’s Supporting Actor category — learned how to try and control his outbursts.
Shrewdly, Jones opens the film with Davidson, as portrayed by Aramayo, attending a reception, where the late Queen Elizabeth II presents him with an honor, and the ceremony is accompanied by the sound of profanities issued from Davidson’s mouth. Her Maj takes it in her stride, which is a subtle signal for the audience to just go along with it.
“And that [scene with Queen Elizabeth] was real, all those stories, everything in the film was real,” Jones notes.
“I still have a view that when left alone, writers, directors and crew can make some really, really special films. They will also make some huge turkeys and they’ll make huge mistakes. But you cannot tell me that every film that studios turn out are massive hits and successes with critics and audiences. So it feels really good that we committed to it. We did it on our own. And you look at that budget, I think One Battle After Another was something like $170 million budget. We wouldn’t even pay for their craft catering” from our entire budget. We feel great, he suggests.
“That it’s so low budget and it’s a purely British film is just great,” he adds.
So far, I Swear has taken around $8.2 million at the UK box office. Sony Picture Classics is due to release the film in the U.S. in April.
Jones admits there were a few occasions during the shoot when he’d look around the set “at the lights, the trailers, the toilets, the catering, the crew, the trucks, everything, and thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is like, I’m paying for this with my wife.’ And I think on the second day we were rained off in the afternoon and we were all stood under a tarpaulin sheltering from the rain. And Cindy, my wife, called me and said, ‘How’s it going?’ And I said, ‘We’ve lost half a day because it’s raining and I’m just sat here.’ And I was even looking at how much tea and biscuits people were eating. Do they need that much? But do you know what? Once we got going every single day, I came back to where I was staying and I didn’t have a single regret since the day we decided to finance the film. I have not had one second of regret. We have yet to see a single penny come back to us. But I’m told that if we’re patient, then in a year or two or three, we should at least get our money back and anything else would be a bonus.”
When asked to clarify, Jones says: ”And everyone of course thinks I’ve got some massive share of the box office and this, that and the other. But absolutely nothing has come back to earth. We have to pay down the debt of the film that’s still very large. And then with marketing and stuff, StudioCanal did an incredible job, a brilliant job. But that all has to be paid off. That’s offset against the film.”
Jones is happy to still be renting in Bristol. “We’re very happy. It’s a nice house. It’s not like we’re living in a caravan, but it was a decision and we just put everything into the film. Had it not worked, if it had been a disaster and I hadn’t even finished it and we couldn’t have sold it, I would’ve lost pretty much everything and my wife. So that was the level of the commitment. But fortunately, StudioCanal bought it on the back of the trailer. They hadn’t even seen the film. We’ve sold it to most territories around the world, pretty much everywhere, actually. So we’re going to be okay. We know we’re going to be okay,” Jones says in a relaxed manner.
I’m impressed by his calm demeanor, but surely there were some sleepless nights, I ask?
“There’s not been one sleepless night,” he insists.
“And it’s because every day and every scene we shot, and every time we moved on, I looked and I thought, ‘I am so glad that we have decided to finance this film because I could see it was working.’ I didn’t know. You never know until the whole film’s put together really what you’ve got. But every single day I could see that it was working. And every single day I asked myself that question: If I could change my mind now, would I, and suddenly bring a financier on board and get my money back? And not once did I think I wanted to do that. I could see it was something special.”
Jones says that basically “I’ve worked for free for three years. I haven’t even been paid a penny because it didn’t make sense if I paid myself anything.“
The crew were extraordinary, he says. Some worked “completely for free and a lot of crew agreed to cut their fees in half and then defer their payments if and when the film went into profit. So it was a very unusual project,” Jones explains.
Suddenly, Jones starts chuckling as he works out how much other films like Marty Supreme and Hamnet cost to make. “And it’s why when I look at the awards, and I mean, we’re a million miles away from those kind of movies.”
Yet, I Swear is BAFTA-nominated for Outstanding British Film, Original Screenplay, Casting, Supporting Actor, Rising Star, and Aramayo is like a Shakespearean hero (let’s say Henry V) completely surrounded by rivals Timothée Chalamet, (Marty Supreme), Leonardo DiCaprio (One Battle After Another), Ethan Hawke (Blue Moon), Michael B. Jordan (Sinners) and Jesse Plemons (Bugonia) in the Leading Actor race.
Jones has no worries about Hollywood pictures dominating the top categories. ”I guess everybody wants to be judged on the world stage, and that’s what happens. And I don’t think it helps the British film industry if the nominations are swamped by American candidates. But having said that, I think this year’s pretty good. It was quite a good year actually,” he reasons.
He reckons that the idea of Best British Film is a “real showcase” for UK cinema, adding that he’s a fan of the British film The Ballad of Wallis Island. “It’s beautiful,” he says of the movie that’s also BAFTA nominated.
I push him again about the reasons behind him and his wife financially underpinning I Swear.
He admits that prior experiences, particularly in the U.S., left him “frustrated” by the feeling that “the politics can even overrule the quality of the finished film. You would think that everyone in the room just wanted the very best version of the film that scored the highest with audiences and was the most rewarding and interesting and funny and moving. And I realized at one point that even that is not true, that the politics overrule that and don’t always deliver the best version of the film.”
There was another consideration, he tells me. “I turned 60 a year ago, and I thought, ‘Well, how many films have I got left in me?’ And do I really want to go to America and have all that stress and all those politics? And all I want to do now is make essentially British films. And you are very welcome to write about me or ring me up if you see me going off to America to doing something. Because as I sit here at the moment, I’ve really got no interest. I just want to focus on the UK and UK crew and UK stories.”
He’s working on an another movie project that he describes as “a complete change of direction” from I Swear. Jones declines to reveal any detail of the new film because “the contracts are being talked about” this week.
Jones insists he won’t be using his own money to fund the next picture.
“Never again. Because even if we get our money back, and even if I actually get a fee out of it, which I would normally have done, I literally think it’s putting money on a horse. And we might’ve been lucky enough to put it on a horse that actually survives the race and comes through the end. But next time we could easily put it on one that falls at the next first hurdle.”
Jones and Aramayo spoke just a few moments today ahead of our chat on Zoom.
“I said I’ll talk to him later and he just said, ‘”’What the absolute f*ck, what the f*ck?!’”
Which is, when you think about the film’s subject matter, a wholly appropriate response.
English (US) ·