EXCLUSIVE: Jamie Lloyd, director of the Broadway-bound Sunset Boulevard musical led by an incandescent Nicole Scherzinger center stage as Norma Desmond, is making a move into the world of movies and reveals to Deadline that his London-based Jamie Lloyd Company “will set up a separate film division and work with new partners from the film world.”
Lloyd met with us as he prepared to fly to New York this weekend to oversee rehearsals for Sunset Boulevard which begin on Monday.
He was also concerned about a fire that ripped through the roof of the west wing of the landmark Somerset House, a might 18th century palace that stretches from the Embankment to the Aldwych, where the Jamie Lloyd Company keeps a small suite of production offices. The fire was contained although it’s not yet known how much smoke and water damage the JLC offices sustained.
The step into filmmaking seems a natural progression for the 43-year-old who has become adept at taking classic works and shaking them up on stages in London’s West End, Broadway, Australia and Argentina.
We broke the news in late July of Lloyd’s limited run Shakespeare season starring Sigourney Weaver as Prospero in The Tempest and Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell playing Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, beginning this winter at the Andrew Lloyd Webber-owned Theatre Royal Drury Lane, an historic venue in Covent Garden. The plays run eight weeks each, starting with The Tempest from December 7 through February 1, and Much Ado About Nothing from February 10 until April 5, 2025.
Lloyd also recently announced that he will direct Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter in a Broadway revival of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in fall 2025.
A production of Romeo & Juliet starring Spider-Man’s Tom Holland and Francesca Amewudah-Rivers ended a sold-out ten-week run at the Duke of York’s on August 3. And it was just the latest in a series high octane, stripped down shows Lloyd has directed.
Tom Holland and Francesca Amewudah-Rivers in Romeo & Juliet. (Marc Brenner)
Marc Brenner
The showman and his Jamie Lloyd Company split from a 10-year partnership with Ambassador Theatre Group Productions last January although Lloyd says that the two entities will work together on other shows in the future, and that ATG Productions will continue its involvement with Sunset Boulevard at Broadway’s St. James Theatre, along with Lloyd Webber Harrison Musicals – the company established by composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and West End impresario Michael Harrison.
Gavin Kalin Productions are also producers but it’s significant that Lloyd’s eponymous production company is the lead producer.
Lloyd has been interested in directing movies for some time and tells us that that “people have always asked me to do movies for the last 10, 12 years. And there’s a few things that I’ve considered.”
His independence from ATG Productions has, he says, allowed him more freedom to take JLC in whichever directions he chooses. “It’s a new way to dream,” he adds, taking a line from Sunset Boulevard’s ‘New Ways To Dream’ number.
“We are looking for the right story for a film, but I am keen to direct my first feature soon,” he says with a sense of urgency in his voice, and body language.
To that end, he reveals that “JLC will set up a separate division and work with new partners from the film world. We have been meeting various people from the film world.”
He cautions, however, that it’s “all early stages.”
Lloyd gives no clues as to what kind of genres he would seek to tackle. However, during our conversation he expresses again his delight about working with Weaver on The Tempest. He notes that he’s a “massive fan” of Ridley Scott‘s Alien film series and that he’s watched the films “countless” times.
But he refuses to be pinned down as to whether a sci-fi thriller would mark his entry into feature filmmaking. His cinema tastes are varied, and he observes that he’s also interested in making documentaries.
Sigourney Weaver attends ‘L’Art De James Cameron – The Art Of James Cameron’ exhibition at La Cinematheque on April 3, 2024 in Paris, France. (Marc Piasecki/Getty Images)
Asked if he has any desire to, perhaps, direct a big screen version of the musical Sunset Boulevard. “I have no idea what’s happening with that,” he says, referring to a much-talked about version starring Glenn Close, which has now been put to rest.
However, he does not dismiss the idea of taking a fresh look at a “new” Sunset Boulevard film. “I dunno, I mean, I love this show so much and I love this score and yeah, I think I’d consider it if asked.”
But, it may not be the first film out of a JLC film division.
Lloyd sits back in his chair and comments “what is so interesting is that I can direct say, three, four plays a year. And I love the variety of that. And I love being really, really busy and telling different stories and working with different groups of people. And there’s something kind of energizing about that.”
But he makes a point about the time it takes to develop and shoot a film and “finding a story that I want to live with for two years of my life or more, finding that one that I’m happy to dedicate that time is going to be interesting.”
Clapping his hands, he adds with brio, “But we’ll find it!”
Lloyd will join a long-ish list of theatre directors who have made the jump into filmmaking.
One of the earliest proponents was Laurence Olivier who parlayed his love of performing Shakespeare on stage into making his screen directing debut making, and starring in, Henry V. The picture received four Academy Award nominations. Olivier won an Honorary Award, the citation read that it was for his “outstanding achievement as actor, producer and director in bringing Henry V to the screen.”
Olivier’s next movie, Hamlet, won four Academy Awards at the 1949 Oscar ceremony including Best Picture and Best Actor.
Theatre director Sam Mendes‘ first foray into movies, 1999s American Beauty, scooped five Academy Awards including Best Picture and a Best Director honor for Mendes.
Stephen Daldry, who also made the switch, has win acclaim for his pictures including Billy Elliot and The Reader, for which Kate Winslet was the recipient of the Best Actress Academy Award. Daldry also collected Emmy Awards for his work on The Crown.
Kenneth Branagh garnered a New York Film Critics Circle honor for Best New Director for his film version of Henry V, he was also nominated for two 1990 Academy Awards for that movie. Branagh later won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar in 2022 for Belfast.
Tony Award winning director Marianne Elliott (War Horse, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Company) has completed her first feature, the exquisitely calming and healing movie The Salt Path, which has its world premiere in September at TIFF.
Lloyd nods and says that he’s “excited” about the prospect of joining such a prestigious list.
Until that happens, he will continue to abide by the ethos for JLC, which he describes as being “about doing adventurous productions seeing how we can move theatre in different directions.”
Jamie Lloyd in London. (Baz Bamigboye/Deadline)
“That’s the aspiration,” he declares.
“Staying open to new ideas, new possibilities,” he continues.
“That’s what I always ask actors to do and everyone involved. If everyone can come open-minded and open-hearted,” he adds,noting how he encouraged the Sunset Boulevard company in London to embrace using video as a technique for storytelling.
The moment in Sunset Boulevard when live images of Tom Francis playing Joe Gillis, were beamed onto a screen showing him walking along London’s Strand boulevard and into the Savoy Theatre through its labyrinth of backstage passages and onto the stage, became one of the show’s many electrifying moments.
Lloyd has plotted the route Francis will take into the St.James. “That’ll be interesting in a blizzard in New York, wouldn’t it? As we get into winter,” he laughs.
But he promises that there’ll be “contingencies” in place to handle rotten weather. “We did it when it rained in London. Every single shot was completely live in the rain,” he attests.
In fact, one night as I ran along the Strand during a torrential downpour, I was amazed to spot Francis being filmed by a crew as he sang into a microphone.
“What I love,” Lloyd interjects, “is that every single person is involved in that walk-around, the video, lighting and sound teams. It’s literally doing a shoot in a movie. A set up of one shot in a movie can take hours and we are doing it in minutes in a live show. So of course you are really dependent on everyone backstage to make it happen. You’ve got people with transmitters, wardrobe, makeup and stage management,” he explains as he adds that “we’ll have to increase our security personnel” to cope with crowds of onlookers who’ll, undoubtedly, want to be part of the street action section of Sunset Boulevard on Broadway.
“You’re offering it up to the audience and they’re experiencing something unique together,” he says.
He agues that “we get so fixated with London’s West End and New York’s Broadway,” but now he’s in discussions about collaborating with theatres and producers in Japan, Australia and “other countries because there’s a whole world out there and I’m excited to think on an international scale.”
He cites working with the Olivier Award-winning Argentine actor Elena Roger on the Pam Gems musial play Piaf which he directed at the Donmar Warehouse in 2008 when he was an associate director there.
They recreated the production in Buenos Aires in 2009. “It was the kind of homecoming of the greatest Elena Roger,” he tells us. And then thirteen years later they remounted the show at Teatro Liceo Buenos Aires where it recently completed its run.
Lloyd’s first play directing in his own right was a production of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre in 2006 with David Bradley, Con O’Neill, and Nigel Harman. It later transferred down to the Tricycle Theatre, now called The Kiln, which is where we first met.
Would he ever want to run a theatre building of his own? Shaking his head emphatically, he responds, “No, no. That is the main thing. I love working in different places, different cities.”
Lloyd has recently bulked up JLC by hiring Katy Eynon, formerly of Playful Productions, as general manager, and Sarah Jordan Verghese, a producer of For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy, as production coordinator. And he continues longtime relationships with Freya Cowdry at Jo Allen PR in London and the indefatigable Rick Miramontez head of Broadway’s DKC/O&M.
He’ll be mega busy in NYC. Sunset Boulevard, of course. Studying The Tempest with Weaver. And he hopes there’ll be time to check in with Reeves and Winter about Waiting For Godot, which is a year away from its first performance at an ATG house on Broadway.
They first started discussing it two years ago.
“It was Keanu’s idea,” he says still marvelling that it’s “happening.”
While he’s happy to work with major stars “because stars often can make plays more accessible to people who, perhaps, haven’t thought about going to see a live play before,” he’s “fascinated” about the idea of bringing in a play that, among other things, “is about our fear of isolation, our loneliness. It’s about the characters’ interdependence, their need for each other.
“They take solace in their companionship in the face of extreme pressure. That gives them courage,” he says.
“So it’s great to be working with two people who have a great friendship themselves – one that has endured for decades,” he enthuses.
“It will be interesting to see how their own long companionship will inform the play anew,” adds Lloyd.