Dan Attias directs for the actors, giving pauses and small details room to register. His work on The Wire and The Sopranos gives us good reason to value that patience.
Fi1m perspective
Beer cans scattered through a scene in The Wire (2002) are a useful place to start with Dan Attias. His attention to these ordinary objects helps make the surroundings credible, rather than somewhere freshly prepared for actors to deliver dialogue. It is a small contribution to a programme we recommend even to people who avoid police dramas. We found its departmental wrangling exhausting at times, because the programme gives it the weight usually reserved for gunfire. That attention also helps us understand the pressures on the people doing the work.
Silver Bullet (1985), a Stephen King adaptation, remains his only theatrical feature. He moved into episodic television in the mid-1980s, working on network series before becoming a frequent director of cable drama. Six Feet Under (2001) and Deadwood (2004) belong to that later stretch, alongside the two programmes that most inform our view of him. We would not treat the lack of further features as an artistic shortcoming; his interest in actors has ample use in a continuing ensemble.
Attias directed ‘46 Long’, the second episode of The Sopranos (1999), and returned for later instalments. In David Chase’s series, James Gandolfini makes Tony recognisable enough for the humour and the menace to work together. Attias’s work on what actors leave unsaid makes him well suited to that material. We recommend the programme without hesitation, although its indulgence of Tony’s grievances sometimes goes on too long. An attentive director can make those complaints convincing without making us need quite so much of them.
Neither series belongs to one of its episode directors, and we would not credit Attias with everything we admire in them. What we value in his approach is the practical attention to performance, from the length of a silence to the pace at which a scene develops. He works to serve the showrunner’s vision while finding something personally meaningful in the material, without insisting on an overtly recognisable style. Start with The Wire or The Sopranos, but watch the actors before looking for a directorial flourish.
Biography
Dan Attias is an American television director and producer. Born in Los Angeles in 1951, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California, Berkeley, studied acting in Los Angeles and earned an MFA in film production from UCLA. He completed the Directors Guild of America's assistant directors training programme and worked as an assistant director on feature films including E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982).
Attias began directing in the mid-1980s. His credits include episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997), The Sopranos (1999), Six Feet Under (2001), The Wire (2002), Deadwood (2004) and many other series. He also directed the feature film Silver Bullet (1985). He has received a Directors Guild of America award for outstanding direction of a dramatic series for an episode of The Wire and Emmy Award nominations for directing episodes of Entourage.
