The film has an origin in "Ray," a single-screen video artwork that premiered at Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Wales in 2015. Prior to that, its origins lie in Billingham's mid-1990s snapshots of his alcoholic father Ray, chain-smoking mother Liz and younger brother Jason, collected in the book "Ray's a Laugh" (1996) and included in the art exhibition "Sensation" that premiered in 1997.