The Inbetweeners star Simon Bird is set to make his feature film directorial debut with Days of The Bagnold Summer, an adaptation of Joff Winterhart’s Costa shortlisted graphic novel of the same name, to be produced by Matthew James Wilkinson of Stigma Films.
Bird will direct from a screenplay by Lisa Owens, author of the acclaimed novel Not Working.
Days of The Bagnold Summer is part-funded by Creative England with support from BFI.NETWORK and is seeking additional funding ahead of its summer production start date. The film is being cast by Robert Sterne of Nina Gold Casting (Game of Thrones, The Crown).
Winterhart’s sublimely funny and perceptive tale was shortlisted for the 2012 Costa Award for Best Novel and tells the story of an idle summer in the lives of a shy fifteen-year-old heavy metal fan and his librarian mother. It perfectly captures the ennui, tension, pathos and affection of a mother-son relationship.
Simon Bird’s first film, Ernestine and Kit, based on the short story by Kevin Barry, was produced by Stigma Films in 2015 and was nominated for Best Short Film at the 2016 Irish Film and Television Awards. It premiered at revered film festival South by South West in Austin, Texas. As an actor, Simon has starred in four series of the award-winning sitcom Friday Night Dinner, but is perhaps best known as Will McKenzie from Channel 4’s multi-award-winning sitcom The Inbetweeners, and The Inbetweeners Movie, which is the highest-grossing comedy film ever in the UK.
In addition to producing Bird’s first film, Wilkinson’s previous credits include thriller feature Kaleidoscope starring Toby Jones and Inseparable starring Benedict Cumberbatch.
Joff Winterhart, the Bristol-based illustrator and film-maker’s new graphic novel Driving Short Distances will be published in August by Jonathan Cape. On the making of the film of Days of The Bagnold Summer, He said: "I met Simon Bird and Matt Wilkinson and they were very nice, very positive and excited about the whole possibility of making a film of my book. I think it will be a strange experience to see two people I first scrappily drew in the back of an old notebook in 2005 end up, over 10 years later, as actual, real humans on a cinema screen!"
