International Disruptors: Riff Raff Entertainment Co-Founders Jude Law & Ben Jackson On Returning To Venice With Competition Title ‘The Order’ & Ambitions To Build A “Diverse & Eclectic” Production Slate
Welcome to Deadline’s International Disruptors, a feature where we shine a spotlight on key executives and companies outside of the U.S. shaking up the offshore marketplace. This week, we’re talking to Riff Raff Entertainment, the company founded by Jude Law and his longtime creative partner Ben Jackson. The London-based production banner has a big U.S. presence and European reach (the latter thanks to a recent deal with French outfit Newen). Law and Jackson walk us through the inception of Venice competition title The Order and their greater production ambitions for the company.
High-end drama The Young Pope took the Lido by storm when two episodes of the Paolo Sorrentino-directed series starring Jude Law as the unruly fictional Pope Pius XIII premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2016. While Law was no stranger to the festival circuit – Sleuth premiered on the Lido in 2007 and that same year he starred in Cannes Competition title My Blueberry Nights – The Young Pope was one of the first projects developed and produced by Law and his longtime colleague-turned-producing partner Ben Jackson.
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Eight years later, the Riff Raff Entertainment co-founders are returning to Venice with the world premiere of their newest production The Order, which is competing for the prestigious Golden Lion. The 1983-set crime-thriller, which is directed by Snowtown and Macbeth helmer Justin Kurzel and penned by Zach Baylin, sees Law star as an FBI agent convinced that a domestic terror group is behind a spate of robberies in the Pacific Northwest. Nicholas Hoult and Tye Sheridan also star in the title, which will have its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. Vertical is planning a December 6 release in the U.S. for project.
The project marks Law and Jackson’s third production to launch on the Lido following the 2021 premiere of Ruth Wilson and Tom Burke starrer True Things from British director Harry Wootliff and is, say the pair, reflective of the ambition of the burgeoning company that has been steadily building up its portfolio and positioning itself as a talent-friendly and “genre agnostic” home for both film and TV productions.
“It’s such a tricky market and tricky landscape out there so any kind of early recognition is so gratefully received,” Law tells Deadline from the set of Black Rabbit in New York, the Netflix limited series that he is currently starring in alongside Jason Bateman and exec producing with Jackson and Bateman. “These festivals are championed by film lovers, so it just feels like such a win to be there and share that company with great filmmakers.”
In 2021, CAA matched Riff Raff with screenwriter Baylin and his script for The Order and both Law and Jackson were immediately drawn to the story. “I thought the script was fantastic – brilliantly written and an incredible story that I wasn’t really aware of and obviously has a huge relevance today,” says Jackson. “And there was this character in the middle of it and I thought it was a role that I hadn’t seen Jude do before. I passed it to Jude, and he read it and thought much the same.”
Both were huge fans of Kurzel’s work and the Australian helmer was, says Law, “the best person to direct this film and he’s taken it in a direction that we had hoped for and surpassed it in every way.” Kurzel is also directing the last two episodes of Black Rabbit, which is also penned by Baylin and Kate Susman, and sees Law star as the owner of a New York City hotspot who allows his turbulent brother (Bateman) back in his life, only to realize he’s opened the door to escalating dangers that threaten to bring down everything he’s built.
“It was clear that Justin was the right person for The Order because the subject matter was complicated,” says Law. “It was political and delicate and controversial in certain areas. But he has this barometer to go to those dark places and approach dark subject matter with a very level head and a non-judgemental perspective. He also combines cinematic realism with cinematic scale.”
Jackson adds: “We really wanted this to feel like a big film, but we knew that we also wanted it to feel very real and of its time.”
Law said that he and Hoult were kept “very, very separate” from each other during filming. Hoult, who plays the chilling cult leader Bob Matthews, is the villain of the story. “I don’t know whether Justin planned it or not, but the two casts were kept very, very separate – we didn’t really intermingle at all,” adding that the first time he and Hoult met “was in the scene where we meet and see each other on camera.”
Meanwhile with Sheridan, who plays a young detective, Law said they had a completely different experience on set. “Justin has a lovely way of working from the inside and he wrote out these whole guidelines, one of them was taking Tye under our wing and developing a real paternal relationship.”
London beginnings
It’s been 25 years since Law’s Oscar-nominated performance as Dickie Greenleaf in Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley catapulted him to A-list status and his relationship with Jackson spans nearly as long. The pair have been working together for nearly two decades, with Jackson starting out as Law’s assistant, accompanying him across various international film sets throughout his early career.
“We met through family, and we spent a lot of time in the same parts of North London in the 1990s and drinking in the same pubs,” recalls Law. “But it was really the time we spent together where we watched and experienced filmmaking – fortunately because of my acting career – with some really extraordinary filmmakers, and those times in between, sitting in a hotel bar or an airplane, or regrouping at home over my kitchen table that bonded us. It was a natural way to talk about our own hopes and visions of what filmmaking and storytelling could be. It just felt like a very natural process. We both read a lot and we both share a lot of ideas for stories.”
Jackson adds: “I’ve been so fortunate to work with Jude along the way and learn the craft and the world of those film sets with such brilliant filmmakers and talent, that setting up a production company was really a case of osmosis for us.”
Staying true to this organic approach, Riff Raff was born in 2017 from a desire for both Law and Jackson to get involved in projects across a “broader landscape”, and not solely as vehicles for Law to act in, but rather for them to both work on creatively. Initially a self-financed entity, the duo began making a conscious effort to option books around 10 years ago before formally launching Riff Raff.
While Jackson admits “it took us a while to get moving”, the pair were determined to grow the company at a pace that made sense for the demands of the current market. Jackson describes the company as “genre-agnostic” and says that “if there’s an interesting story to be told and we can see a very smart way of telling that story, then we’re interested in finding the right writer and right filmmaker.”
Law adds: “We looked at people we knew and admired from a talent perspective to see what they wanted to do. Ben is very good at maintaining relationships and has a good way with people – I’m always aware that people are going to want to steal him because he gets on with people so well. But maintaining these relationships with writers, directors, other producers and actors is absolutely at the heart of what we hope to build with Riff Raff.”
A good example of this manifesto is True Things, which was born out of Law’s relationship with Wilson after he starred alongside her in a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s 1921 play Anna Christie in 2011. At the time, Jackson had read what he describes as the “fantastic, although brutal book” called True Things About Me by Deborah Kay Davies. It follows a young woman living on the fringes of society who becomes intoxicated by a stranger who overwhelms her quiet life. Riff Raff optioned the book and Wilson then came aboard to bring a female perspective to the story. They developed it with Wilson for a number of years before Only You helmer Wootliff boarded to direct. The project premiered in Venice’s Orizzonti section in 2021.
“That was an example of us not just working with people that we already know, or Jude already knows but being turned on to new people who have interesting voices,” says Jackson.
He adds: “When you’re a talent-led company people may think we’re just a vehicle for Jude but that’s not the case for us. Jude’s across everything we do – he’s aware of every project we’ve got. He brings projects in, and we bring projects to him, but they’re not always for him to act in.”
Law admits that “it made sense” at the beginning to use his name to kickstart the production banner. “It was the quickest and easiest way to get the whole thing moving,” says Law. “But the vision, of course, is that we broaden it out as quickly as we can because it’s the name of the company we want to be remembered. This was never a company that I was developing just to source material for me.”
Next steps
In 2022, Riff Raff secured a “multi-million dollar” investment from Calculus Capital, arranged by CAA Media Finance. The deal enabled Riff Raff to bring on key hires, buy and develop material and attach writers in the Europe and the U.S.
“We needed to keep the momentum going and also wanted to have a broader outlook and broader reach and sense of what was available from other perspectives,” says Law. “It was important for us to bring women aboard the team so we could have a 360 perspective. Teaming up with Calculus was a really big decision but has been nothing but a really great decision because we now have this very tight but very focussed and ambitious team.”
The company hired former media attorney and film and TV investor Stephen Fuss as CEO and, shortly after, brought aboard former Blueprint Pictures development exec Katie Sinclair as Head of Development and Lionelle Galloppa from Studiocanal as Development Executive.
Fuss, says Law, has been “instrumental in putting things together strategically and driving us forward.”
“He knows the balance of finance and keeps us safe and is aware of what’s ahead and how to maintain economic momentum, which is so vital and enables us to be free to have more creative conversations,” says Law.
Since the trio joined, Riff Raff has gone from having 10 projects in development to a slate of “around 30”. Having completed The Order and with Black Rabbit currently in production, further projects in development include a Sharon Horgan-scripted contemporary comedy set in London and a historical-drama feature film penned by Challengers writer Justin Kuritzkes.
Earlier this year, Fuss was instrumental in landing Riff Raff a lucrative TV first-look deal with France’s Newen Connect, which gave the company a cash injection to develop a slate of TV projects while also giving Riff Raff access to Newen’s extensive European distribution pipeline. The first project in development out of that partnership is political thriller Foreign Desk, starring Law and written by Marek Horn.
For both Law and Jackson, the key is to remain “diverse and eclectic” in their offerings. “We’re not just going to take things on to make this company big – it’s about doing what is right for us and the company,” says Law. “This isn’t some kind of ‘pet project’. We’re giving it our all and we’re considering everything very seriously, but equally we don’t want to make stuff just for the sake of it. We want everything to be really high-quality.”
He adds: “We’re in a very exciting time but there’s also excessive choice and audiences are more sophisticated than ever, so it’s really about embracing that and letting writers follow their creative impulse and then pairing that sometimes with contrasting directorial visions in order to create exciting relationships. That’s something I always found really stimulating from an acting point of view. What stimulates us now is finding the material, elevating it and empowering the writer to tell it in a very true and original way.”
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