Element’s Rachel Dargavel On Hot Akinola Davies Film ‘Delta Force Six’

EXCLUSIVE: Element Pictures’ Rachel Dargavel, producer of Akinola Davies’s My Father’s Shadow, Nigeria’s first Cannes entry, tells Deadline that she and the filmmaker are in early growth for his sophomore characteristic, Delta Force Six, which might be filmed on areas within the huge southern area of the West African nation.

The producer is raring to get the movie rolling inside two years. “You know how hard it is to get a second feature up and away and to make it great. And many people fall on the second feature. And I want for us to not be those people,” she insists.

Delta Force Six, a step up when it comes to imaginative and prescient and finances, is being written by Davies and Wale, his Lagos-based sibling (collectively they penned the screenplay for his or her freshman hit), and is ready within the oil-rich Niger Delta badlands the place rebels kidnap overseas employees and sabotage pipelines.

The movie, each a thriller and a morality story, is being developed by Dargavel at Element and can discover the battle between native militia and oil executives whereas additionally specializing in the journalists who report on them. The panorama has been ravaged, Dargavel explains, “by the need for oil, or the greed for oil, whichever way you look at it.”

My Father’s Shadow, which is able to play on the BFI London Film Festival within the fall, screened in Un Certain Regard, changing into some of the mentioned movies within the 2025 choice. Even Nicole Kidman had gotten wind of it and at one level thought of rolling as much as the movie’s rollicking post-premiere get together on the seashore with me in tow, however, alas, the Oscar winner was unable to interrupt away from an official operate. Turned out to be the get together of Cannes.

During the competition’s closing ceremony, Camera d’or jury president, the director Alice Rohrwacher (La Chimera, Happy as Lazzaro), introduced a “Special Mention” for My Father’s Shadow. It was marked by an unforgettable second. Davies arose from his seat within the Grand Lumière, his handsomely bleached hair making him instantly obvious amidst the black-tie crowd.

He was already being courted by the likes of Plan B, and others who wished to be within the enterprise of tying up his second film. Davies says the whole lot has to undergo Raxana Adle, his longtime rep at Lark Management, and Dargavel.

There’s no motive, Dargavel tells us, why Delta Force Six and Davies’s future options can’t be supported at Element in the identical method that Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe, the corporate’s founders and high executives, stepped as much as produce a lot of Yorgos Lanthimos’s movies.

 “Element are committed to storytelling and they’re committed to talent and nurturing talent and growing talent,” Dargavel says with ardour throughout an interview not too long ago over breakfast on the Dean Street Townhouse in Soho. I used to be eager to know the way her profession in footage started, how she turned one of many trade’s main lights, and why Nigeria, in each senses of the phrase, has grow to be one of many hottest locations to make motion pictures, regardless that the nation’s film manufacturing infrastructure is comparatively nascent.

 “It’s a serious business having taken on a responsibility of truly being someone’s producer,” Dargavel states. “You are not just in it for the money. It’s like you’re in it because you care about the person, you care about the films that they’re making… I’m committed to making Akinola’s next film and making it a success …and making it not too slowly to have  people go, ‘Oh, what happened to that guy that made that very promising film My Father’s Shadow?’ We know how the industry works,” she sighs.

Good that the British and Nigerian movie trade can dangle on to him, I say. Dargnavel nods. ”Akinola is a really gifted director and he tells tales with conviction. That’s a high quality that not each director has: telling tales that resonate.”

I point out the utter simplicity of an early scene in My Father’s Shadow the place the 2 brothers central to the story, performed by children Godwin Egbo and Chibuike Marvelous Egbo, squabble over the dimensions of their potions of breakfast cereal, whereas they await the arrival of their father, an outstanding Sopé Dìrísù (His House, Gangs of London, Slow Horses).

“Maybe it doesn’t resonate with everybody in terms of the setting,” Dargavel cautions, ”however everybody who’s obtained a sibling or has even seen siblings argue, understands that dynamic…” 

Dargavel laughs and says that filming in Nigeria just isn’t “for the faint-hearted”, however she’s happy to be returning there “with Akinola, Wale and Funmbi,” the latter identify being that of Lagos-based Funmbi Ogunbanwo, who produced the movie with Dargavel and who can also be an government at Wale Davies’s Fatherland Productions, a music video and commercials producing home.

Ogunbanwo and Dargavel met through the filming in Lagos on Akinola Davies’s BBC Film-backed quick Lizard, and Dargavel had been impressed with the Nigerian lady’s persistence in getting issues completed.

But she needed to woo her as a result of Ogunbanwo hadn’t been positive that she wished to stay within the trade. “I can hold your hand through it,” Dargavel remembers telling her. ”And all of the issues that I’ve realized throughout the years, I might help convey that to Nigeria. But I don’t know Nigeria. I don’t dwell there. You do,” she recollects saying. “In the same way that  I’ve had people throughout my career support me,” she wished to do the identical for Ogunbanwo.

There are many outsiders who wish to work in Nigeria now. Others have made movies there over time, consider Half of a Yellow Sun with Thandiwe Newton and Chiwetel Ejiofor, for example. But there’s undoubtedly renewed curiosity due to Akinola and Wale Davies. Their voice has a vibe that travels additional.

However, Dargavel warns that the relationships between foreigners and Nigerians “just can’t be business and transactional.” Continuing her level, she means that there should be an actual dedication to “why you want to tell the story there.”

Her time in Lagos on My Father’s Shadow was spent on set. She ate the native meals. After all, “Lagos is a cosmopolitan city. That side of Lagos, going to restaurants, is pretty easy, really. Working there is different. The heat and the traffic; insurance was incredibly complicated when we were there; the currency was moving all over the place. We locked in a rate, which had doubled by the time we’d left.”

Ogunbanwo needed to renegotiate a locked-in contract on the financial institution, which, says Dargavel, finally “went in our favor.”

Some 13 worldwide HoDs, from South Africa, the UK and the US, joined the manufacturing in Lagos, partnering with Nigerians who shared the identical disciplines. Various administration and manufacturing account methods that the Nigerian crew had by no means labored on earlier than had been put in, which required coaching throughout the entire departments. Dargavel’s wanting to work with most of the identical crew Nigerian crew members as a result of they labored “so incredibly hard. They just didn’t stop.”

Lucy Drury, one of many co-producers, who’d been with  Dargavel at Potboiler, and can also be now at Element, “was absolutely integral,” says Dargavel. The movie was primarily financed out of the UK with main help early on from BBC Film and, in a while, from the BFI. In truth, Dargavel has developed shut ties with the admirable Eva Yates at BBC Film and the BFI’s outstanding Ama Ampadu. There was no Nigerian funding.

Originally, Dargavel developed My Father’s Shadow “at my own company” Cry Baby, and was thrilled when Element agreed to throw their hat in. She calls Cry Baby “a place where I’m incubating my own projects as a producer because I wanted to be developing projects that were owned by me, that I’d put my own time and investment into.”

Her bread and butter, she provides, comes from her producing position at Element, which she describes as a “fantastic company to work at” including that Element had been “very excited about Akinola,” and very happy to help her as a producer “in the next bit of my career.” 

She knew Lagos a bit of from when Potboiler’s Andrea Calderwood and Gail Egan despatched her there on a recce for the HBO restricted sequence primarily based on Americanah, the variation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s bestseller. HBO later determined to not proceed with Americanah. Maybe that’ll get going once more?

Whilst Dargavel was within the neighbourhood, because it had been, the producer, who’d already befriended Akinola Davies after discovering his music movies, produced his 18-minute movie Lizard there, which went on to win the  2021 Sundance Short Film Grand Jury Prize. Lizard’s success additional cemented her ties to Davies and Ogunbanwo at Fatherland and with Eva Yates, who championed the quick.

Dargavel remembers the searing Lagos humidity hitting her as she travelled across the metropolis. “Your senses are overwhelmed, but it doesn’t affect me. I didn’t find it impossible. I just thought, ‘Okay, we’ve got to just really pull together here, and I need to use the experience that I’ve culminated over all these years,’” she says.

Lizard was shot in a single location at a big church advanced. The shoot went nicely should you don’t rely the day native authorities switched the date of a city-wide marathon that meant the closure of a key bridge, which might make it inconceivable for native crew and background artists to get to the set. The resolution was to arrange bunks on website for all involved to make sure filming may proceed with all current and proper.

On the again of Lizard, Dargavel and Akinola met with Yates to debate the My Father’s Shadow undertaking. It’d been written by Wale Davies as a brief movie a number of years earlier than. After studying it, all of them determined to remodel it as a characteristic. Dargnavel’s view is that for a primary characteristic, certainly for any film: “You need to know the story and why you’re telling it.”

There’s added, pointless stress should you go in in your first movie “making something about which you’ve got no clue about. My Father’s Shadow is inherently their story. It’s a film that has elements of their late father in it, plus the movie’s also about Nigeria,” she explains whereas observing that in growth one other layer was added in order that the story of a father and his two younger sons journeying to Lagos can be set towards the backdrop of civil unrest over the the nation’s controversial, June twelfth, 1993 presidential election.

Dargavel was raised in Matlock, on the River Derwent, in Derbyshire. Later, throughout her time at Nottingham University, she used her pupil mortgage to purchase a digital video digicam and spent three years filming ”anybody, something, and all people.” She and a burgeoning filmmaker joined forces to shoot music movies and shorts, though she now concedes that it was extra “bodies on screen” moderately than precise filmmaking.

Turns out it was time nicely spent. Without realising it, she was kinda producing.

Post college, she put her time, as she places it, ”within the trenches as crew,” working as a runner, third AD, whereas at evening she stored her hand within the music video and quick movie world.

Around the identical time, she noticed Shane Meadows’ Dead Man’s Shoes and found that it was filmed at  Riber Castle, a spit away from her hometown. “All of a sudden something clicked for me,” she says. Seeing a panorama that she was intimately aware of on an enormous display screen was vastly significant.  “You can tell these fantastic stories in any environment,” the whole lot native is common, she realized — some extent that hit residence when she was in Nigeria taking pictures My Father’s Shadow. 

The now defunct EM Media fund had a bit of pot of cash for movies being shot within the East Midlands area by which low-budget motion pictures corresponding to Nicolas Winding Refn’s Branson, Paul King’s Bunny and the Bull, and This is England had been co-financed. It’s how Dargavel met producer Tristan Goligher (Lean on Pete, 45 Years), who employed her to line produce Andrew Haigh’s (All of Us Strangers) early characteristic Weekend and to provide Harry Wootliff’s debut characteristic Only You, starring a youthful Josh O’Connor.

“So we were all sort of kicking around in Nottingham at that time and trying to understand what stories we wanted to tell,” she recollects.

Soon after she was juggling between making the music movies, producing commercials whereas additionally now working for director Paul Andrew Williams (London to Brighton) and producer Ken Marshall (Filth) at their Steel Mill Pictures firm serving to them produce Martin Radich’s Norfolk, Williams’ Unfinished Song (launched as Song for Marion within the UK), with Vanessa Redgrave and Gemma Arterton, and Jon S. Baird’s Filth with James McAvoy and Imogen Poots

Moving right down to London, considered one of her jobs was to line produce Sebastián Lelio’s Disobedience, starring Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams, for Element. Pregnant along with her second baby, Dargavel was after a job that will pay a daily earnings. After chatting it by with Ed Guiney, he went on to introduce her to legends Calderwood and Eagan at Potboiler the place she was to spend over 4 years as head of manufacturing. 

After our breakfast, I spent some time mapping out Dargavel’s timeline and I discovered myself taking place a little bit of a rabbit gap as I criss-crossed Dargavel’s many credit, pondering over all the people she’d interacted with who had gone on to assist her throughout her rise. 

“I loved the intimacy of those sorts of relationships and friendships that can develop over the years,”  she says, citing Tristan Goligher, Ken Marshall, Andrea Calderwood, Gail Egan, Anna Griffin (Sister Midnight), Emily Morgan (I Am Not a Witch), and lots of others, who had been greater than “meaningful” to her.

I marvel on the tenacity of all really artistic movie producers. They run by a metaphorical line of fireplace each day. But, it appears to me, the perfect ones, by sheer expertise, are in a position to deal with the whole lot that’s thrown at them. 

Will Nigeria grow to be a brand new film frontier? It’s actually attainable, simply so long as outsiders don’t swoop in like white saviours, one thing which Dargavel most undoubtedly just isn’t.

Locals are keen to interact, it appears. Dargavel tells the story of cows – the mooing form – that had been late to the My Father’s Shadow set as a result of the van transporting them had damaged down. But 4 hours later, they arrived in a automobile, a few them travelled within the trunk. “That’s the reality of what we did,” Dargavel shrugs. “The guy needed the money, the van broke down, so he put them in the car and drove. He got paid, and we got to film the cows.”

The cows had been under no circumstances harmed.

So, sure, she’s greater than prepared for no matter erupts from the oilfields in Delta Force Six.

With her Cry Baby hat on, Dargavel’s a minority co-producer of Karim Aïnouz’s forthcoming Rosebush Pruning with Elle Fanning, Pamela Anderson, Riley Keough, Jamie Bell, and Callum Turner.

Another Cry Baby undertaking is with Caleb Femi (Industry, Giraffe), a poet, creator, and movie director. 

The deliberate movie relies on Femi’s 2024 novel The Wickedest, which is ready one evening at a South London intergenerational house-party. It’s a girl’s coming-of-age story “about choices in life,” Dargavel says. Femi will write and direct.

Other tasks embody: August Ham set in Jamaica, written by Courttia Newland (Small Axe–  the Red, White & Blue, Lover’s Rock movies, The Woman within the Wall), and Dargavel has bagged author Daisy Haggard’s (Back to Life) as but untitled debut characteristic.

“I’m not going to be like, Mrs.Nigeria only,” Dargavel says, chuckling.

We joke that maybe Akinola Davies would possibly in the future make a film set within the Derbyshire Dales the place she grew up.

Actually…