James Griffiths directs so that you notice the actors and forget the camera. After years launching American network pilots he came home for The Ballad of Wallis Island (2025), and the modesty that suits a pilot suits a small, damp comedy just as well.
Fi1m perspective
Charles has offered Herb a cup of tea before Herb is out of his wet clothes, and the camera in The Ballad of Wallis Island (2025) does nothing about it. It does not push in on Tim Key's face or cut to Tom Basden's for a reaction; it stays roughly where a person standing in the hallway would stand and lets the line land. That is James Griffiths's method, and he has said as much: "With comedy I have always tried to be as simple as possible in terms of the blocking and how I go about shooting." Most directors say that. He means it.
He started in music videos and then in British television, directing every episode of Free Agents (2009) and the whole first series of Episodes (2011), before a first feature, Cuban Fury (2014), a salsa comedy with Nick Frost. Then he went to America and became the person networks call when a pilot needs to be shot so that the show gets picked up: black-ish (2014), A Million Little Things (2018), Stumptown. It is skilled work and it is invisible by design. A pilot director's job is to set a tone and hand it over, and Griffiths did it often enough that it became his reputation.
Wallis Island is the film he had been carrying since 2007, when he shot the short with Basden and Key that it grew from, and you can feel the eighteen years in how carefully it declines to show off. He gives the two of them 100 minutes without padding. The script has one engine, Charles cannot bear a silence and Herb cannot bear Charles, and Griffiths trusts Key to run it. We laughed at Charles narrating his own walk to the kitchen, and then, when the film got round to what lives in the gaps he keeps filling, we found we minded far more than we had expected to. Nothing in the direction announces that turn. That is the point of it.
The limit is the same as the virtue. When the chatter wears, as it does in stretches, a director this deferential does not step in to rescue it; the songs and Carey Mulligan do that instead. On Sharon Horgan's Bad Sisters (2022), where he directed, the series is sharp, warm and, in Claes Bang's JP, properly frightening, and it is also ten episodes for a story that wanted eight, and we could not point to a scene and say which of those things was Griffiths. He would probably take that as a compliment. On a pilot it is one.
The film sat unmade for eighteen years while he shot other people's first episodes. We would rather he did not wait that long again. There are more writers in Britain with a short that wants to be a feature, and Griffiths has shown he is the man to get out of their way.
Biography
James Griffiths is a British film and television director and producer. He began his career directing music videos before moving into television in the United Kingdom, where he directed every episode of the series Free Agents and the first season of Episodes.
His first feature film was Cuban Fury (2014). He had previously directed the 2007 short film The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island, which received a BAFTA nomination; he later directed its feature adaptation, The Ballad of Wallis Island (2025). Griffiths has directed numerous episodes of American series including black-ish, Stumptown and A Million Little Things, and maintains a production company, Fee Fi Fo Films.
