Beyond Borders

It’s not often that an established film director goes directly from shooting an ambitious, effects-driven sci-fi movie to adapting his book trilogy for cable television, but for Guillermo del Toro, it was a conscious shift.

“I wanted to make it a point to go from the biggest movie I ever shot, which was Pacific Rim , to a 20-day-schedule pilot,” says del Toro, whose FX series The Strain began production on its second season in November.

But the challenge of a tighter shooting schedule wasn’t the only reason he wanted to see the horror novels he cowrote with Chuck Hogan get the small-screen treatment. The director was attracted by the longer-format storytelling as well as the greater creative freedom offered by the network.

“It was a full-on creative choice because the economics are really very different [from film],” he explains. “My meeting with [president] John Landgraf at FX was perhaps one of the most perfect meetings I’ve had in my career. He was both articulate and astute about why he wanted the books to land on FX, and [showrunner] Carlton Cuse and I came out of there walking on air.”

Unlike the movie business — which increasingly focuses on the box-office reliability of comic-book material and franchises — cable and streaming services work with smaller budgets and are willing to take chances on new material.

“It’s a smaller bet, financially,” says Nick Grad, FX’s president of original programming. “You’re not talking about a $100 million negative. There is a relationship between what things cost and how much leeway and elbow room you get.” The leeway TV can offer is leading to an overall increase in directors like del Toro taking on series work. Consider just a few recent projects of some bold-faced names:

• Steven Soderbergh, who famously retired from moviemaking in 2009, produced, directed and edited Cinemax’s early-twentieth-century medical drama, The Knick , which has been picked up for another 10-episode run.

• Cary Joji Fukunaga directed the first season of HBO’s True Detective — and picked up an Emmy for his efforts.

• David Fincher — who had a huge hit this year in Gone Girl — is producing and directing the first season of HBO’s conspiracy thriller, Utopia, with his Gone Girl screenwriter, Gillian Flynn. He is also an executive producer of Netflix’s House of Cards and directed the first two chapters of season one, also earning an Emmy for outstanding directing in the process.

• Jonathan Demme, who won a best- director Oscar for 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs , helmed two episodes of the final season of The Killing for Netflix.

• Marc Forster, whose big-screen credits include World War Z and the Bond outing Quantum of Solace , directed the Amazon Studios pilot Hand of God, about a call girl who has a religious epiphany.

• David Lynch, after years in film, is bringing his ABC series Twin Peaks back to television, now for Showtime. He is writing, producing and, of course, directing the update of the iconic mystery.

• Steve McQueen — director of this year’s best-picture Oscar winner, 12 Years a Slave — has signed on as writer, producer and director of a drama pilot for HBO, Codes of Conduct, about a young African-American man who enters New York high society.

For Michael Apted — an industry veteran of big-budget films and documentaries and winner of a DGA Award for directing television (HBO’s Rome) — today’s TV landscape is reminiscent of the golden age of American cinema of the 1970s.

“The safe days of network television are over, and the floodgates have opened,” says Apted, a producer of Showtime’s Masters of Sex and the director of a half-dozen episodes. “All sorts of things can be discussed on television that hitherto would have been banned or rated out of existence.

“Movies contracted their ambitions, and television expanded theirs,” adds the Englishman, who has served as president of the DGA. “In the ’60s, British television was like cable television is now — it was bold. So, in some ways, I’m reliving those times now.”

Jason Reitman, a four-time Oscar nominee whose credits include this year’s Men, Women & Children as well as executive-producing the 2015 Hulu comedy series Casual, agrees that the current shifts are creating engaging content.

“We’re in the midst of this enormous change in the business,” he observes. “What does it mean to make a television show? What does it mean to make a miniseries, a web series, a movie? All these lines are being blurred. I’m seeing compelling, crazy things on TV, which gets me really excited.”

The migration of film directors to television — and the resulting buzz — is by no means a new phenomenon. Recent forays include Neil Jordan’s Showtime series, The Borgias , and Martin Scorsese’s Boardwalk Empire, which concluded its run on HBO this year. But the line between film and TV is growing ever more permeable.

Though broadcast networks remain somewhat hindered by their mandate to appeal to a wide audience, cable and streaming services are embracing niches, which is giving directors a greater role in the creative process, even if they come in partway through a season.

“The work I’ve done on [broadcast] network television, I feel you have very little input into that,” Apted says. “You really are for hire, which is fair enough. But [in cable television], there’s more interest in what directors have to say about material. You’re a bit more involved in the process than you were before.”

While TV has long been considered a writer’s medium — particularly in an era that nurtures distinctive voices — the influx of film directors accustomed to pursuing their own vision doesn’t mean writers are getting knocked down a notch. Quite the opposite, says House of Cards creator and showrunner Beau Willimon.

“When people say film is a director’s medium and television is a writer’s medium, it’s a pretty reductive way to think about those two mediums,” Willimon notes, “especially now that there are very few differences between film and television. The creation of characters, the way that they evolve, that is a collaboration with the actors and with all the directors that come and lend their own style and voice to each episode.”

And the collaborative spirit of television is being further enhanced by the high quality of material, Apted says.

“The amount of material that goes through the system is huge, and writers have tended to control that,” he allows. “Always have and always will. But when you get into these miniseries like True Detective, because the material is a little more challenging, there’s more collaboration between directors, writers, actors. The material is more interesting and that bonds together the creative elements.”

For writer-directors who are used to editing down several months’ worth of shooting to a tight 120 minutes, series TV offers a more leisurely way to tell a story, albeit with a shorter shooting schedule.

“It’s a medium that allows the most delicious long-arc form,” del Toro says. “You can have a series of episodes where little things happen, but you don’t have to play them off until the end of the season. And you can really play with character and the timing of your series in a way that is close to reading a novel. It’s not in a hurry. I love that.”

And the malleability of episodic TV, which allows for plot changes along the way, can enhance the storytelling, he adds.

“We had a character that would have lasted all season, but we killed that character near the end because of the way it was evolving. The show was asking us to do that. You felt it. You take the cues from the organic process.”

Providing time to develop characters that audiences want to spend a full season with is key to attracting top-tier artists, says FX’s Grad.

“Really talented people want to tell great stories with great characters,” says the exec, “and they realize TV can offer a much longer look at a character. That’s appealing to every type of talent, not just directors. Look at the actors that are coming to TV. Look at the writers. Everybody’s motivated by great characters.”

But the serialized style of most premium series can require some adjustment, depending on where a director comes from, says Roy Price, head of Amazon Studios.

“If you’ve been a TV writer-producer, perhaps you’ve been doing stories that are not as serial,” Price notes. “And on the film side, people have been telling big stories that are 100 minutes long.” He suggests that both kinds of directors have to make an adjustment when considering how a longer story develops over time.

“There is an advantage to working with a writer-director,” Price continues, “in that with any show, taking it from the script to pilot to series, there is a series of communication and translation challenges. You have to get new people on board with the same vision, and if you’ve chosen well and the stars align, then it all goes well.”

While some directors are taking on entire seasons of series, del Toro chose to direct just the pilot of The Strain , setting up the visual aesthetic and basic tone of the show, then left the rest to other directors.

“I would absolutely love to [direct a whole season], but I was really afraid of facing an episode in eight days,” he says. “It was tight coming back from Pacific Rim , but I enjoyed it so much that I did a couple of second units on the show. I like the pacing. I like that no one is sitting down or chatting around catering — you have to move really fast.”

Even if a high-level film director is only in the chair for the first episode or two, Willimon says a new series can benefit greatly in terms of its overall look and tone.

“Fincher did an amazing job [on House of Cards] in establishing the visual aesthetic and the performance aesthetic,” Willimon enthuses. “It was a great template for all subsequent directors to work off.

"We were highly respectful of each director’s voice and vision, so they’re not bound to follow all of those guidelines. Many of them do, because it works for the show and it’s a way to maintain a certain aesthetic core. But each of them handles their episodes in a different way.”

Though Fincher is known for multiple takes and a keen eye for detail in every shot, adjusting to the rigorous pace of episodic TV was relatively seamless.

“David works almost as fast as all the other directors who’ve come since,” says Willimon, who’s seen other directors — from Jodie Foster to Carl Franklin to James Foley — take on episodes of Cards .

“We typically shoot two episodes at a time, and it takes about a month to shoot [both]. David had six weeks as opposed to four, which is very typical for the first episode or two because you’re establishing the show. But he worked incredibly fast, compared to his typical film pace.”

With so much talent coming from the film business, episodic television is clearly reveling in a sweeping, cinematic appeal that was once strictly the domain of TV movies and miniseries.

“It’s not about how much money you pour into it — it’s about the rigor and depth of vision,” Willimon concludes. “A lot of filmmakers gravitate toward television because they realize they can still accomplish all of their aesthetics, but also have the opportunity to dig into these wonderful characters and stories.”