Since joining Mike Goodridge’s outfit Good Chaos in 2019, James Bowsher has risen crisply through the ranks of producing — he was the UK line producer on Baltasar Kormakur’s Touch, production manager on Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson’s Northern Comfort and associate producer on Jessica Hausner’s Cannes 2023 Competition entry Club Zero.

Bowsher’s first fully fledged producer credit was Santosh, the north India-set crime drama directed by 2023 Star of Tomorrow Sandhya Suri, which premiered earlier this year in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard. “It was a 43-day shoot, and we were trying to film it sequentially. We were filming at the end of the monsoon, our sets were [unintentionally] underwater,” he recalls of the epic shoot. “It was just very big, but we had the most wonderful crew.”

Bowsher caught the film bug through visits to his local DVD shop in Barnes, west London. Gary Golding, now head of film programming at Olympic Studios cinema, ran the shop and allowed him to borrow anything from the cult or classics sections for free, so long as he agreed to come back and debate the films.

“To this day, my aspiration with most of the movies I’m across is that they will end up in some sort of nominal cult or classics section, somewhere down the line,” says Bowsher, who is currently in Macao and Hong Kong serving as associate producer on Good Chaos’s The Ballad Of A Small Player, which stars Colin Farrell and is directed by Edward Berger for Netflix.

He studied drama and Portuguese at the University of Bristol, graduating in 2014. The following few years saw him try to etch his way into the film business, to little avail, until he began the MA producing course at the National Film and Television School in 2018. Here he first encountered Good Chaos, wrangling the internship that “changed my life”.

Bowsher is now partner and head of production at Good Chaos, where he is building his own “esoteric” slate. This includes The Wise Woman, the feature debut of Nomadland cinematographer Joshua James Richards, about the origins of witches; a Zambia-set project from Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese; horror Locked directed by Lesley Manning; and a project from Anna Biller set in Britain during the Middle Ages.

Contact: James Bowsher

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