Jasmina Wood on learning to take creative risks

The writer/director of Dinner Date discusses her unconventional route into filmmaking, and why she’s set on building a career on her own terms

Jasmina Wood grew up in south-east London, but she spent her childhood summers in the Czech Republic, where her mother would send her and her siblings to stay with their grandparents. From around the age of nine, Wood started making films with her friends – horror shorts, music videos and fashion films, most of which were never shown to anyone.

“We had a tiny crap little camera,” she recalls. “My friend would film it, I’d direct it and be in it, or make my other friend star in it. In the Czech Republic you have these communist-style lace curtains, and my grandma’s a bit of a hoarder, so she’d have piles and piles of them. We’d wrap ourselves in them and make these extravagant dresses, then run around in the fields filming ourselves. There was really nothing else to do. It was just a form of entertainment.”

That formative childhood experience came full circle when, during lockdown, Wood’s boyfriend asked her what she loved doing as a kid. It was a question intended to jolt her out of her malaise – having dropped out of university, she wound up in the corporate world, eventually working in project management at AKQA. When Covid hit, she quickly realised she was on the wrong career path. “I was really lost. In my early twenties, I had no idea who I was or what I wanted to do. I said [to my boyfriend], making films. He said, ‘Why don’t you just do that?’”

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