Three Day Millionaire

Jack Spring introduces Three Day Millionaire

New film Three Day Millionaire follows a group of fishermen in Grimsby who set about spending their wages in three days. But it's only after spending it all that they discover they're not going to be re-boarding their ship to head back out and earn a fresh pay packet. Director Jack Spring introduces the project in this article.

Aah, British Comedy Guide it is good to be back. It's been a hot minute but here we are with Three Day Millionaire about to hit the big screens, how exciting.

Where to start on this baby? Let's start with the finished film. It's something I'm extremely proud of and undoubtedly my best work to date. The utter joy of working with this team day in, day out on set was the genuine privilege of my career, to the extent that I found myself crying my eyes out on wrap day knowing we'd probably never have the honour of another day all together again. Little did I know just four months later we'd be back doing the coupe days of pick-ups I knew we had to do with the same cast and crew, but the sentiment was there.

It's a real hoot of a film; it's fast paced, exciting, characterful, emotional, political, tense, joyous, sad, feel good and topped off with a wonderful soundtrack from The Waterboys. It's got bollocks and I'm confident it'll be well received.

It's all about, set, and shot in my family's hometown of Grimsby, a town which I know inside out, so it's got the grit and undeterred masculinity of an ex-industrial town whilst never fading into one of these depressing grey films about the 'drab' north of England.

The start of my journey with Three Day Millionaire began in 2017. A writer named Paul Stephenson dropped me a script of the same title. It was really rather good and I signed up almost immediately. It had the bravado I craved, broke the fourth wall almost every other line and the characters and dialogue were to die for. Being the one who has, until relatively recently, been the one responsible for finding all the cash for my films, I set out straight away. It was a bit of a nightmare getting something about 'little old Grimsby with all its preconceived stereotypes' funded from folks in London. It was only a year or two down the line did the penny drop that I needed to turn my sights on Ole Grim itself to raise the million plus that I needed to bring this sexy script to screen.

It didn't take too long once that penny had dropped for us to be pretty much over the line with the cash, within about 9 months we'd gained the support of some wonderful investors with links to Grimsby and a host of corporate sponsors in the town. Getting Three Day funded was undoubtedly the biggest challenge of my career. Coming out of Destination: Dewsbury with a £150k budget, you're kinda starting again when you're dealing with numbers this big. Investors that can put in £10,000 aren't much use on Three Day when they were on Dewsbury, as bell-endy as that sounds. But funded we were and away we were with the project.

It's my first where I've worked with 'big names' as such. A brilliant experience and one that felt like a natural development in my directing career. Each actor on the film I cast myself, even going to the family home of James Burrows in an effort to convince him to do the film. The initial signs were positive, so I took him to Grimsby vs Chesterfield the very same day to give him a sense of what Grimsby means to its population.

Everyone I wanted said yes, we did some cracking work and I'm buzzing to share it with the world. I feel like I've been in labour for the last four or five years and I'm about to leave my afterbirth all over cinema floors throughout the land. Glory to cinema, thank you to the wonderful people who lent me their talent (and finances) to make this film. I hope we do Grimsby proud.