jacket. Ami Paris
t-shirt. Rokit Vintage
trousers + trainers. Sandro
Between the ages of 18, 21, and 23, George Jaques wrote, shot, and released ‘Black Dog.’ By then, he’d already said his USP as a director was simple: he was young, and he was writing about what it actually feels like to grow up right now, in real time, without the benefit of hindsight. Three years and one film later, that line still holds — mostly. “I feel older, and I’m definitely clinging onto that USP,” he says, “but what I love is that the films, TV shows and theatre I’m making are growing up with me.”
‘Sunny Dancer‘, his sophomore feature, is the proof. He wrote it at 23 and shot it at 24, following the same age-adjacent trajectory as ‘Black Dog’ before it — except this time, growing up meant writing outward as well as inward. “I think the big change is I just want to make work that makes you laugh and makes you cry,” he says, having spent this film writing not just teenagers but also parental roles for Neil Patrick Harris, Jessica Gunning and James Norton, with what he calls real detail and accuracy. He’s proud of that in a way that feels distinct from the pride he has in ‘Black Dog’ because it is less about getting something out of himself and more about getting somewhere on purpose.
Jaques has always been candid about the gap between the person who writes a script and the person who eventually directs it. Who he is when he begins writing a project is entirely different by the time the premiere comes; a different person, by his own account, arriving to finish someone else’s homework. ‘Sunny Dancer’ closed that gap, a little. “When I went into ‘Sunny Dancer’, I went in knowing how to make a film, but also knowing what I wanted to do and how to get there, and I think that was the real difference,” he says. “With ‘Black Dog’ I poured a lot of love into it and hoped for the best, whereas this one felt a bit more deliberate in places.”
Still, distance accumulates. Between writing the script and watching it play in cinemas, Jaques picked up a lead actor he hadn’t had when he first put pen to paper. “I didn’t have Bella Ramsey attached to play Ivy, and now I do, and now it’s coming out, and I’m so proud of that,” he says. What he holds onto, across both films and the ten years of running his own company that sit underneath them, is a kind of internal consistency: “It was always the film I wanted to make, and I’m proud of myself because in these past ten years we’ve never fucked anyone over, and we’ve always stayed true to who we are, and that feels really special.”
jacket. Oliver Spencer
shirt + shorts. MITHRIDATE
loafers. Grenson
opposite
jacket. Ami Paris
t-shirt. Rokit Vintage
trousers + trainers. Sandro
None of that consistency has made imposter syndrome go away — if anything, ‘Sunny Dancer’ intensified it. “The step up from ‘Black Dog’ to ‘Sunny Dancer’ was such a leap that I don’t think I’ll ever have to make a leap that big again,” Jaques says, citing access to music, to a stacked ensemble cast, to genuine scale for the first time. He tried to counteract the vertigo of that leap by flattening the hierarchy on set: identical trailers, shared cars to work, the same accommodation for everyone. “That made it feel like we were all one, so you sort of forgot about the imposter syndrome,” he says. It crept back anyway, on the day he found himself on set with James Blunt, James Norton, Jess Gunning and Bella Ramsey all at once. “I was like, holy fuck, how have I done that?”
It resurfaced again at Berlin, where ‘Sunny Dancer’ opened the festival and made Jaques one of the youngest directors to do so. It resurfaced while the cast shot a ten-page spread for British Vogue. It will presumably resurface again in September, when the film reaches Canada and the US. “This is something I wrote in my kitchen, and now the world is seeing it,” he says. “I don’t really think about that that often, but that is pretty mad.” The way he manages it, mostly, is by refusing to let the outcome into the room while he’s working. “If you’re thinking too much about that when you’re making it, and you’re so worried about reviewers, or box office, or all those things, it can be really challenging,” he says. “There’s a place where you finish the film creatively, and then you need to start thinking about the marketing. But up till that point, you’ve just got to focus on the movie.”
The origin of ‘Sunny Dancer’ sits in two separate places that happened to meet in the edit suite. The first is Jaques’ own life: his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer when he was 15, and he’d wanted to write about it for years, on the condition that he could do it in a way that didn’t look like every other cancer film. The second is an offhand comment from his editor, Caitlin, while they were cutting ‘Black Dog’. “I said to Caitlin, I’ve always wanted to write a film about cancer,” he recalls. “At the same time, I also wanted to bring back those 80s and 90s ensemble films we don’t really get to make anymore, like The Breakfast Club, and I knew the cool young actors from growing up that I wanted to put in one spot. Then Caitlin was like, oh, I used to go to these summer camps, and I was like, no way, that’s the film.”
What followed was a lot of research with a dose of imagination. Jaques began working with Teenage Cancer Trust and meeting young people who’d effectively grown up on hospital wards. “What you realise is cancer is the least interesting thing about them,” he says. “They’re feral, they’re full of life, they’re mental, they’ll tell you about their first snog.” That observation became the film’s entire organizing principle — a remission story with no hospital scenes, about a club nobody asked to join, and the joy its members find in each other anyway.
jacket. Oliver Spencer
shirt + shorts. MITHRIDATE
opposite
jacket + trousers. David Koma
cardigan. Ami Paris
loafers. Grenson
Ivy, the character everyone will eventually clock as the closest thing to a self-portrait Jaques has written, wasn’t the role he had the clearest picture of. Ironically, that belonged to Ella, written specifically for Ruby Stokes. “I never could really picture who’d play Ivy — which is very rare for me,” he says. It was his casting directors who suggested Bella Ramsey, fresh off ‘The Last of Us’ and stepping into a story with no zombies, no dragons, nothing they’d built a career on yet. “I was so excited, but I was nervous too — that they wouldn’t do it, and that if they did, it would be totally new territory for them,” Jaques says. “When they signed on, I was like, wow, we get to go make this thing together, and that was so exciting.”
The film’s dialogue — chemo camp virginity jokes, pill-snorting, “cancer ghosted” — reads like it arrived intact, but Jaques describes something closer to a controlled improvisation. Every actor gets a script pass written specifically for them, and every scene gets what he calls a “feral take”: once the scripted version is in the can, he lets the cast go feral. “That’s where you get a lot of genius stuff,” he says. “You also get a lot of crap. A lot of the time they’ll try a joke and it won’t land, but the reaction to the joke might be incredible, and that means they trust you.”
That same appetite for texture shaped the world outside the dialogue. Jaques and his cast built out full “files” for each character — A-level results, hobbies, Spotify playlists — that fed directly into costume and production design, down to the tennis racket packed in someone’s camp bag because the actor had mentioned liking tennis. Jaques wrote the entire fictional history of the camp itself: when it opened, how it was refurbished, its slogans, its cheesy songs. His production designer, Pat Campbell, turned all of it into signage and set dressing Jaques would stumble across on set. “Our budget wasn’t huge, but the attention to detail was so specific, because whatever we put on screen had to feel authentic, real and lived-in,” he says.
Even the film’s big fight scene, staged to The Cranberries after a trip to an amusement park, was fully choreographed rather than improvised — though Jaques snuck in one piece of casting he’s particularly proud of. The “local yobos” heckling the group are played by young cancer survivors in their first roles. “I thought that was a fun, cheeky nod,” he says, “making the bullies the ones who’d actually had cancer.”
suit. Alexander McQueen
vest. CDLP
loafers. Grenson
bracelet. The Great Frog
opposite
cardigan. Jil Sander
jewellery. The Great Frog
HAIM’s Este Haim and musician Zachary Dawes co-composed the score, and Jaques wanted their involvement to do more than supply mood. “I wanted to make a film that felt transatlantic, that didn’t just feel like a small British indie — proudly independent, but with scale,” he says. His brief to them was blunt: don’t make background music. Make the score tell a story, work alongside the dialogue instead of competing with it. The film’s needle-drops — The Cranberries, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Olivia Dean among them — are a mix of songs Jaques listened to while writing, songs from his own adolescence, and songs Haim and Dawes brought in. What he’s proudest of is subtler: several of those songs play quietly underneath a scene before they’re allowed to fully arrive, as in the tampon scene and again in the forest, where Jamie xx sits low in the mix until it suddenly isn’t. “I really love that language we developed,” he says.
A quote in the film — “there was a time when you weren’t sick once, and you would’ve wanted to be this girl at this camp more than anything” — is the moment ‘Sunny Dancer’ briefly remembers it’s a film about cancer, after nearly forgetting. It’s the line Jaques says that changes everything after it, pushing the group from friendship into something closer to love. It came out of a talk he gave at one of these camps, where he felt, in his words, like the influencer character from his own film. “It was clear to me those spaces are so important, because they give people who’ve been treated as ‘other’ a place where that becomes the norm, and so it becomes nothing,” he says.
The idea behind the line reaches past illness, into something closer to a working philosophy: that people in the middle of a hard thing dream of the other side of it, and then forget the hard thing the moment they arrive, because there’s already a new hard thing waiting. He applies it to himself without much prompting — to finishing GCSEs, to surviving a brutal shoot, to being interviewed by the same journalist a few years apart. “I think we all need reminding sometimes that the version of yourself you’re talking to today is the version the you from a couple of years ago would have dreamed of being,” he says. “Which is why I love doing repeat interviews with people — it feels like we’re on that journey together.” At ‘Sunny Dancer”s premiere, a few of his oldest friends — the same friends who came to his first play when he was 16 and were at a film premiere when he was 26 — called him the next day, struggling to understand how he’d written the film’s more personal scenes. “I told them, it’s just my job,” he says. “Like my mate who’s a doctor saves people, and I write lines about it.”
suit. Alexander McQueen
vest. CDLP
loafers. Grenson
bracelet. The Great Frog
opposite
t-shirt. ICECREAM
Without spoiling it, there is a reveal at the end of the film that is equal parts shocking and obvious. It recontextualises just how young Ivy is to be carrying what she’s carrying. “I always knew it was going to be there,” Jaques says. “Everyone goes into a cancer film knowing someone’s going to die — that’s a given because of the subgenre — but I really wanted to flip that on its head, to have no hospital scenes, to make you forget about the cancer, and then have it come back and hit you hard.”
Underneath the structural swing is research he carried from his own family and from Teenage Cancer Trust: that chemotherapy and radiotherapy are only the beginning of a much longer story, one that includes weight gain from medication like tamoxifen, decisions about freezing sperm or eggs, and long-term damage to the heart. “In my head, this is the first bit of a really long story for some people, and sadly the last bit of a too-short story for others, and that’s hard to fathom,” he says. He describes real fear in balancing that weight against his instinct to be outrageous and funny throughout. “For some people it’s the end of their life, and for others it’s the start of a really changed one, and that’s a delicate thing I felt I needed to protect.” The ending, brutal as it is, was non-negotiable — but so, he insists, was the feeling underneath it. “I think you still leave the cinema dancing, and you know she’s going to be okay, and you leave thinking, how lucky are we to be here.”
The film’s final gut-punch — Ivy watching Ella’s camcorder footage, the “ella explores” vlog — came from handing an actual camcorder to Stokes, who’s credited as camera operator. Jaques and his editor ended up with an hour of behind-the-scenes footage as a byproduct, most of it the cast simply messing around out of character. “I didn’t think a camera operator tagging along with the gang would be able to get that intimacy — it would be too invasive, too performative,” Jaques says. “I didn’t want to just show you the whole film again with a shittier camera. I wanted to give an intimate look at a different bit of every scene, and all the bits you might have missed.”
Jaques traces the film’s emotional center back to a single moment at the Berlin premiere, watching his mother sit a few rows behind him. “There was a version of this movie where she wasn’t sitting in that audience,” he says. It’s the thought underneath everything he hopes the film does for the families it’s made for: gratitude for health that’s easy to take for granted, and a reminder that roughly one young person is diagnosed with cancer every seven minutes in the UK — rare enough not to define the culture, common enough that it shouldn’t be treated as foreign. “People shouldn’t treat them as ‘other,’ but should still show them love,” he says. “I want people to remember times when they felt ‘other’ and found their tribe, and to feel like they can take on the world.”
cardigan. Jil Sander
trousers. MITHRIDATE
jewellery. The Great Frog
opposite
jacket. Rokit Vintage
t-shirt. ICECREAM
trousers. Oliver Spencer
‘Sunny Dancer’ is in theatres across the U.K. now.
photography. David Reiss
fashion. Rosalind Donoghue
talent. George Jaques
grooming. Bjorn Krischker @ The Wall Group using Hair by Sam McKnight + ANUA
production. Clara La Rosa
interview + editor. Kelsey Barnes
