James Norton and Kitty Kaletsky On Rabbit Track Pictures

EXCLUSIVE: Like the name of a band or title of a great album, the moniker given to a production company can come loaded with meaning.

“I wanted to make it something personal, rather than just cool-sounding and generic,” James Norton explains when asked about Rabbit Track Pictures, the film and TV production company he runs with Kitty Kaletsky. “I went through all these halcyon films and stuff, but actually, the rabbit track, for me, was somewhere as a child at the back of my garden. From the moment I can remember, it was the place where we were allowed to roam, and adventures would happen. It was fun and wild and feral.”

The name was chosen before Kaletsky came on board, but the production company has since been a joint enterprise. Kaletsky — formerly of Number 9 Films, Archery Pictures and Black Bear — often handles the day-to-day operations, notably when Norton is filming. As we speak, Norton is about to end the first block on House of Guinness, the Netflix drama series from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight about the family behind the famous stout. But there are two sets of fingerprints over the projects they have under their belts and on those to come.

The story so far encompasses a Netflix movie, Rogue Agent, the upcoming period epic King and Conqueror and Playing Nice, an adaptation of the JP Delaney novel. Rabbit Track’s offices are on London’s iconic Carnaby Street. The piles of books around the place give a clue to the next chapters, a handful of which the indie company founders will reveal for the first time here. There will be adaptations of some of the buzziest literary offerings of recent times, including Elizabeth Day’s Magpie and Suzanne Heywood’s Wavewalker, and projects with an array of in-demand writers and directors, including Jack Thorne, Sally Wainwright and Aoife McArdle.

On Track

Kaletsky and Norton met through a mutual friend in LA while she was based on the West Coast and he was doing press for a movie. They bonded over Catan, a trading and empire-building board game. “It really does bring out your true colors,” says Norton. “You have to be incredibly charming and ingratiate yourself with everyone around the board… and also be f*cking ruthless. The way Kitty played Catan was obviously indicative of how she produced.”

Suitably impressed, Norton played a move of his own, calling his now-business partner to ask if she had ideas on who he could buddy up with as he launched a production house — “I just knew I was never going to be able to do it on my own,” he says. Kaletsky picks up the thread: “And then at the very end of the telephone call, after I was thinking about who I might be able to recommend, he went: ‘Oh, you could do it? OK, bye.’ That was when the seeds were sown.”

The newbie company was launched in 2019 with the creative and financial backing of The Artists Partnership and that agency’s MD Robert Taylor and CEO Roger Charteris. Great Point Media also became a backer. Its boss Jim Reeve, the seasoned financier, passed away earlier this year and both Rabbit Trackers pay tribute to the late exec. “There’s no way that we would have the company we have without Jim. He had real faith in us when, really, he had no right to,” says Kaletsky.

If that’s the start-up tale, the backstory is that after a successful decade building an acting career, Norton also hankered for something else. “There’s a difference between the way you’re treated as an actor and the actual responsibilities you have — people get this sense of importance because you’re indispensable. And it’s true, the work is important — the actors bring a very important piece of the jigsaw. But the more you do it, the more you realize the size of that jigsaw.”

“I wanted to be in the conversations earlier,” he continues. “I was turning up on set being told what to wear, where to stand, what to say; the tone of it was all dictated to me, and I also started to feel like I didn’t necessarily agree sometimes with the ways in which the story was being told. I could see producers having conversations and I wanted to be part of them.”

With the company established, the next step was getting content made. What did the pair want the signature of a Rabbit Track series or movie to be? Kaletsky looks at Norton: “I think when I call you in the middle of the night to say, ‘Let’s get on a Zoom,’ or vice versa because we’ve read some book or article, it tends to be that we are excited because we’ve been shocked by something; we’ve been genuinely caught off guard by our delight in reading something that we therefore want to make. There isn’t an invisible thread that binds everything in terms of genre or subject matter or a particular type of character. It’s about our response to the thing.”

Tastes have aligned for Magpie, which Rabbit Track is working up as a series. From author Elizabeth Day, the psychological thriller was a Sunday Times bestseller and billed as “Single White Female with a maternal twist,” by the New York Times. For Kaletsky, it is “a story about fertility, pregnancy, motherhood, and what it is to exist in the world where you can or you cannot conceive your own child. It’s propulsive and really moving in equal measure.”

The commercial reality of indie film is that it’s harder to get made than TV, but features are on the agenda. There is a project with Northern Irish filmmaker McArdle, who directed several episodes of Severance. Details are scant but Kaletsky teases some specifics: “It’s a little bit anarchic, quite darkly comic and has a really specific tone. It’s not unlike Severance actually: It bridges that gap between horror and comedy, with a very particular aesthetic.”

On the TV side, there is a Scottish crime drama that will mark the writing debut of Lynsey Miller, whose directing credits include The Boy with the Topknot and Deadwater Fell. Again, it’s early days, but it is expected to be in the Happy Valley space of multi-faceted and thought-provoking crime series. Norton, of course, starred in Happy Valley with a memorably psychopathic turn as Tommy Lee Royce. Squaring that circle, Rabbit Track is also working with Happy Valley scribe Sally Wainwright on her first feature.

There’s also an Effie Woods (Trigonometry) rom-com series that Reggie Yates is directing. Another last breadcrumb trail the pair lay is for a Freddy Syborn (Bad Education) drama series that they are developing.

Banijay Backing

When Deadline meets Norton, he is fretting about whether giving Banijay UK’s Executive Chairman Patrick Holland a bro-hug on their last meeting might have been overly familiar. It’s a lighthearted anecdote, but also reveals something about the relationship between Rabbit Track and Banijay, the production and distribution giant that invested in the indie in 2023.

Norton and Kaletsky are a bankable duo. With three projects away and development work with partners including Sony, the BBC and Fifth Season, they had a good story to tell and weren’t short of suitors when thoughts turned to getting other investors on board. Kaletsky takes up the story that resulted in them sitting down with Holland in Soho House: “We met with a lot of other people who would have potentially been great homes for Rabbit Track, but there was a chemistry with Patrick, and a kind of a promise about what Banijay could provide and what James and I could be doing with our company, and which would never dilute its DNA. Banijay would only offer support. That has been true to the nth degree.”

The investment came out of Banijay’s UK Growth Fund and the deal means international sales of future Rabbit Track projects will go through its distribution division, run by Cathy Payne. The new backing meant the indie could staff up, get a slightly roomier office, and roll the dice on more projects.

Norton says Rabbit Track now has greater capacity to back ideas, but the company principals have no desire to sit in a corner office, removed from the nitty gritty of the business. “One thing we say to every writer who comes into the room is, ‘We don’t want you to feel like you get lost.’ I think that’s one of the reasons why we successfully pulled some of those projects out of the bag, because we were able to guarantee people our attention and that Kitty and I would be over it.”

Talk of working with writers moves quickly to things that are percolating. “We’ve just brought Jack Thorne onto a project, and it’s really exciting. We have the Sally Wainwright project, which is in the works. We’re stepping up.”

Thorne is on board Wavewalker, by Suzanne Heywood, which will be adapted as a series. It tells the real-life story of how her parents took her, aged seven, and her brother on a trip sailing around the world. What should have been a three-year voyage became a grueling decade-long journey during which Heywood was desperate to return home.

Kaletsky says having read Wavewalker, Rabbit Track “pounced on the rights” and quickly took it to Thorne. “He was as taken as we were with this wild, around-the-world adventure, where sky-high waves and shipwrecks are the backdrop to a painful and moving family drama.” Thorne was the perfect person to take on the project, she adds, “because of how beautifully he can balance intimate and complex relationships with the grandiosity, joy and drama of epic adventure.”

Deadline’s time on the Rabbit Track has run well over, and the sounds of Friday evening Soho are filtering into the office. Norton correctly predicts the payoff question.

“The next question is, obviously, how big do we want to get? We want to be able to work with the best [people] without compromising this atmosphere we have,” is his big picture answer. Kaletsky adds her take: “If you get too big you don’t have access to your writers anymore and you’re making promises you can’t deliver on. There’s a sweet spot in the middle. We want to be at a scale that is large enough where we’re working with the best and can also continue to support newer voices.”

Norton: Actor & Indie Boss

Having looked under the hood of film and TV production, Norton has a new perspective and bristles when performers get over-involved. “I grimace now when actors say, ‘Do you know what, I don’t really like this scene. I want to rewrite it.’ I’m like, ‘You have no idea how many people, and how long, it took for us to get to this. You know that word you’re just throwing away? We’ve agonized over it.’”

It’s also about understanding the creativity that runs right through the process, whether that’s securing IP and developing it, finessing a script, or work done in the edit. “There’s the call: ‘Artists to set.’ [As an actor] you get this sense of being part of ‘the creative community.’ Then you have the producer community, which is considered much more, you know, just nuts and bolts. Bullsh*t. It’s such an important creative part of building this world.”

As an actor, Norton has been on many sets, including Agnieszka Holland’s on her movie Mr. Jones and for series including Happy Valley, War & Peace, McMafia and Grantchester.

The latter comes up when he was asked which experiences he will draw on now he is an indie boss. “I did Grantchester early on with Kudos. Emma Kingsman-Lloyd produced, [actor] Robson Green was a delight, and there was just something they created, [then Kudos boss] Diederick Santer and his team, a [great] workplace environment. It was tough because we were making a procedural series back-to-back, but we just wanted to be at work, and I give Kudos the credit.”

He also namechecks Nicola Shindler who founded Happy Valley prodco Red and now helms Quay Street Productions. “Nicola is one of the best and gave me an example of a great producer doing it right, I just loved working with her.”

Run Rabbit Run: Three They’ve Got Away

The initial business plan was for a slate spread evenly across film and TV and with Norton acting in about half of the projects. TV is currently 2-1 ahead and Norton is on-screen across the trio. Having an actor of his stature attached made getting greenlights easier and gave the company momentum in its earlier days, but as it becomes more established, the plan is he’ll appear in a smaller proportion of what gets made.

Norton and Kaletsky wanted Playing Nice, the JP Delaney thriller. Having gotten in the room with the author, he liked their creative plan, but ahead of getting financing from Great Point, they were stretched and needed a partner. They shared the idea with Joe Naftalin, SVP of Global Production at StudioCanal and he went for it. A partnership was formed and with the added firepower, rights were duly secured. It will play on ITV in the UK and Canal+ in France, with StudioCanal handling distribution. “We were able to up the option to a reasonable amount, but that was still nowhere near some of the American competition,” Kaletsky says.

The book tells a baby-switch story, setting up a horrific dilemma for the parents involved. Norton plays one of the dads, Pete, opposite Niamh Algar as his partner Maddie. The other couple, Miles and Lucy, are played by James McArdle and Jessica Brown Findlay. “It’s a psychological thriller, and more psychological than thriller,” Norton says. “With our writer Grace Ofori-Attah and director Kate Hewitt, we all shared that desire to go as deep as we could with these four individuals and throw them in the middle of it and just see how they react.”

The Battle of Hastings, meanwhile, is a staple of school history lessons in the UK King and Conqueror will go behind the arrow-in-the-eye headlines and bring Harold, Earl of Wessex (Norton), and William, Duke of Normandy (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), to life.

“It’s about kings and queens, says Kaletsky, “But what appealed to us about that epic, iconic William and Harold story was the domestic sphere, the central marital relationships between William and his wife, and Harold and his. Those relationships are the glue that bind the epic scale with the intimate.”

Icelandic helmer Baltasar Kormákur directs the series opener, with his RVK Studios one of the producers, alongside The Development Partnership, Rabbit Track, Dave Clarke and Richard Halliwell’s Shepherd Content and CBS Studios, whose sister outfit Paramount Global Content Distribution will handle sales. It was made in association with the BBC, which scooped UK rights.

Based on the shocking true-crime story of Robert Hendy-Freegard, a conman who, in the fake guise of an M15 agent, tricked people out of their life savings, Rogue Agent was snagged by Netflix for the UK Norton stars as Freegard opposite Gemma Arterton as Alice Archer, the woman trying to take him down.

“It was the lead characters that excited us most — two chaotic compelling souls — and the knotty dance that they go on,” Kaletsky says, adding this was a movie consciously of its time. “We put together and shot the film during Covid, so we wanted what we felt the world at that point wanted — a gripping, moving, and almost old school Friday night movie.”