An Australian director who has spent his career setting the look of other people's series, from Line of Duty to The Tourist. The work is careful and handsome; you cannot tell where his episodes begin, which is the skill and why he is rarely named.
Fi1m perspective
The interview scene in Line of Duty is a test of nerve for a director. Somebody sits down, a recorder beeps, and three officers read documents aloud for as long as it takes, sometimes twenty minutes. The temptation is to cut, to move the camera, to find something for the eye to do. Daniel Nettheim, one of the directors who took turns on the series, does what the best of them do, which is nothing: he holds on the faces and lets the words on the form close the trap. We sat through one of those scenes without shifting on the sofa and noticed afterwards that nobody had left a chair.
That patience was learned in Australia. Nettheim trained at NIDA, made shorts in the mid-1990s, and directed his first feature, Angst, in 2000 with a young and largely untested cast. The film that got him noticed abroad was The Hunter (2011), a wilderness picture admired for its landscapes and its mood; it led directly to British television, starting with Whitechapel. From there came Broadchurch (2013), blocks of Line of Duty in its second and sixth series, and Doctor Who between 2015 and 2017, including the Zygon two-parter and Extremis. He has directed Sam Neill twice.
What he has become, in the last decade, is a set-up director: the one who shoots the first episodes of a new series, has a say in the casting, and decides what it will look like before handing it on. He did that on The Tourist (2022), and on The Twelve and The Messenger at home. He has said that opening a series is closer to making a feature than directing its middle episodes, "because there’s more creative input in the casting and setting the style and tone", and that is where his interest plainly lies. He looks for a script he would watch himself, and he says he wants each actor to own the character rather than take dictation.
The difficulty in writing about him is the difficulty of television. On Line of Duty the grey open-plan offices, the strip lights and the identical dark suits belong as much to Jed Mercurio and to four cinematographers as to any one director, and we could not honestly point to a frame and say that is Nettheim's. That is not a complaint about the work. It is a description of the job, and he seems to have chosen it with his eyes open. The one place his hand is easiest to see is at the start of things, before the style has been fixed by anyone else.
So the recommendation is a slightly odd one. Watch The Hunter if you want to see what he does when the whole film is his. Otherwise, when a new series arrives already sure of how it looks in its first two hours, check who set it up. It will quite often be him.
Biography
Daniel Nettheim is an Australian film and television director. Born in Sydney, he began his career with short films in the mid-1990s, including The Beat Manifesto and The Third Stroke, before directing his debut feature Angst (2000).
He is known for the feature The Hunter (2011), which he also adapted, and for directing episodes of series including Doctor Who (2005), Broadchurch (2013), Line of Duty (2012), Ash vs Evil Dead (2015), Humans (2015) and The Tourist (2022). His uncle was the actor David Nettheim.
