The Choral and Rye Lane producer Damian Jones is a one-man band with a knack for backing UK stories that have global reach
Need to know: Damian Jones set up DJ Films in 2004 and has continued to fly solo ever since. He built the company producing UK stories that travel commercially, with a track record that includes 2012 Oscar winner The Iron Lady ($116m worldwide) and The Lady In The Van ($41m globally in 2015).
In recent years he has produced debut features for rising UK talent, such as Raine Allen-Miller’s 2023 romantic comedy Rye Lane with Searchlight Pictures and two films with fellow Brit 50 producer Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor’s Joi Productions, Rapman’s Blue Story for Paramount in 2019 and Aml Ameen’s Boxing Day, released by Warner Bros in 2021.
He maintains ties with his early collaborators. Having first teamed up with Nicholas Hytner, writer Alan Bennett and producer Kevin Loader on The History Boys in 2006, they reunited on The Choral, which played at Toronto this year and is being released globally by Sony.
Jones sometimes uses his veteran status to lend support as an executive producer, particularly for projects with first-time directors or producers, such as Jim Archer’s 2022 feature debut Brian And Charles. This can include helping with late development, getting talent agents’ attention, smoothing out what he terms the “shitshow” that can be closing a production’s financing and, ultimately, “hoping to give comfort to the filmmakers, and the financiers”.
While keeping overheads low as a primarily one-man band, Jones has turned to various first-look deals along the way, including Fox Searchlight, Pathe and Film4. Currently, however, he is a free man.
“The irony of those deals is, back in the day, you ended up making more films outside of them than you did within them,” he says. “Having resource available is never a bad thing, but it’s not as quick – your project is tied up, it can take time to unravel and set it up elsewhere.”
Key personnel: Damian Jones, founder.
Incoming: Jones is in post–production on Allen-Miller’s sophomore feature, London-set heist comedy The Roots Manoeuvre produced alongside Plan B and Amazon MGM Studios’ Orion Pictures. In development he has features with See How They Run writer Mark Chappell at Searchlight Pictures; Slow Horses scribe Sean Gray at Amazon UK; and the long-gestating Alexander McQueen biopic, nearly a decade in the works, with Oliver Hermanus attached to direct.
Damian Jones says: “Audience habits have changed, you have to pivot. It’s always been tough to make independent British films, and BFI, Film4 and BBC Film are crucial to that. If you don’t get their financing, it’s tricky.
”There’s a big dearth, sadly, of UK distributors. It ends up being about the material, and the filmmakers, and the cast. How can you get to the top of the pile, how can you turn heads, at the right price? It seems even harder than it’s ever been for film… But standout films still standout, and it’s about finding one.”
Contact: djfilms.co.uk
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