Quick pop quiz. Who created the Bafta-winning series The Street? Who wrote the Bafta-winning film The Mark of Cain? Who wrote the recent BBC adaptation of Sense and Sensibility?
Top marks if you were able to correctly identify Jimmy McGovern, Tony Marchant and Andrew Davies. Some very well-known names in the world of television.
Now for the supplementary question: who directed each of those dramas?
Chances are, unless you’re really well up on your production credits trivia (or have taken a sneaky glance at IMDB) that you have no idea. When it comes to giving recognition for a quality television production, we’re more likely to give credit the actor or the writer — the director’s name rarely gets an acknowledgement.
Indeed, there are very few TV directors who have become household names on the merit of their direction alone. Some of the most well-known names in television direction — Paul Greengrass, Mike Leigh (both of whom now concentrate on film), Peter Kosminsky — are names because they write the material they direct rather than just on their direction abilities alone.
Peter Kosminsky has spoken up for the role of director, arguing that the creative control of drama production is now too much in the hands of executive producers. Speaking at the launch of new trade body Directors UK, Kosminky told The Stage’s Matthew Hemley:
Executive producers are commissioning writers, not getting together with producers and directors and thinking about which writer to commission, as used to happen. The exec producers are then working with writers, often to second and third draft, then tend to appoint a designer to decide where to shoot the film [and] a casting director is appointed to bring on the main cast.
I know an example of two well-known directors on our board who have had that exact experience in the last six weeks — brought on after writer, designer, location manager and casting director. Often directors’ contracts involve them doing a very quick director’s cut and then going on, [at which point] execs retake control.
Directors are being brought on as what we call ‘shooting directors’, just there to shoot and carry the union card, as in the bad old days of the ACTT — where directors were often just there to carry a card for another creative force.
We have to get execs to understand that yes, it might make them feel more comfortable and more secure [to have this control], but it is not going to get them the best programmes.
The best programmes will come from the earliest establishment of the triumvirate - and by that I mean a writer, producer and director. Get those three together as early as possible, working together and trading ideas, and you will get the best programmes.
A good director can help make a good project into a great one. Just thinking of the two drama series that made Kudos’ name, Spooks and Hustle, the visual flair of Bharat Nalluri’s direction of each series’ opening episode added a lot to two shows which otherwise could have looked run-of-the-mill and indistinct. As long running series, many directors have since worked on each show, but all have followed Nalluri’s original lead. I doubt whether his work would have been so successful if he hadn’t been an integral part of the production process from early on. And that’s Kosminsky’s argument: directors are increasingly being commissioned late on in the project, resulting in an unbalanced creative team.
A case in point, I suppose, is today’s exclusive story in The Stage about actress Suranne Jones’s latest project for ITV1, Unforgiven. We know that it’ll be written by Sally Wainwright, and executive produced by Nicola Shindler for Red Production Company. At the moment, though, I understand that no director has yet been contracted.
The names the project already has attached at this stage (Jones, Wainwright, Shindler) fill me with optimism for the drama anyway. How much better, though, if the director who would be realising the production on screen could be one of the names to get excited about too.
Oh, and if you were stiil wondering: The Street was directed by David Blair and Terry McDonough, The Mark of Cain by Marc Munden and Sense and Sensibility by John Alexander.
