Stars of Tomorrow 2023: Jack Benjamin Gill (writer-director)

In the summer of 2021, Jack Benjamin Gill was trying to expand one of his short films into a feature-length screenplay, but the grind of meetings, treatments and loglines was “killing me, killing the spontaneity”, so he bashed out a new screenplay, from beginning to end, in six weeks.

Rob The Joint (or Beef, as it was originally called, until a Netflix series swiped that title) is a politically charged, Dog Day Afternoon-style siege thriller, in which a teenager tries to break his mother out of a supermarket security office after she is caught shoplifting a joint of meat. Gill’s first draft was compelling enough to secure him an agent, a deal with Film4 and a finalist’s place in this year’s Bafta Rocliffe New Writing Competition. He hopes to shoot the film “on a redbrick street in the north” next summer.

Gill’s make-it-happen attitude dates back to his youth in a “Happy Valley-esque” town in the Yorkshire Dales where “everybody is a welder, groundworker or farmer”. It did not occur to him that he could have a career in film until he took an A-level in media studies, then studying film at Manchester School of Art. He worked in camera shops after graduating in 2012, and devoted his weekends and holidays to self-funded shorts.

“I’ve always thought that I want to write and direct my own material, and the way to do that is to write and direct your own material,” he says. Gill went on to make shorts Lambing Season (funded by the BFI and Creative England) and Doggerland (funded by the BFI and Intermission) with producer Loran Dunn of Delaval Film. Dunn, a 2017 Screen Star of Tomorrow, is now producing Rob The Joint.

Gill wants his films to have the explosive “art-meets-commerce” energy that powered the early careers of some of his influences, Lynne Ramsay, Ben Wheatley and Danny Boyle. “I’m into the collision of genre and my working-class background,” he says. “Putting very real, human, flawed, idiosyncratic and often northern people into genre situations.” Or, to phrase it another way: “I’m never going to write a film about a fleeting romance between a sculptor and bassoonist.”

Contact: Catherine Goldstone, Peach House