We rate David Yates for making complicated stories readable without making the people in them dull. His patience with actors is worth valuing, though the demand to follow every detail can occasionally crowd out feeling.
Fi1m perspective
Bill Nighy's Cameron Foster can sound thoroughly fed up in State of Play (2003) without making the conversation a chore. We took particular pleasure in that impatient delivery, because Nighy finds dry humour in a drama with a great deal of information to get through. David Yates gives him time to do it. Across Paul Abbott's six-part thriller, explanation is allowed to be interesting, and the actors are allowed to make it their business. It is a strong reason to trust him with a complicated story.
The television breakthrough led to Sex Traffic (2004) and The Girl in the Café (2005), before he took on the final four Harry Potter films, from 2007 to 2011. His work with young actors in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) suggests that attention to performance survived the change of scale. He then directed the Fantastic Beasts films between 2016 and 2022, before Pain Hustlers (2023) returned him to social-issue drama.
In State of Play, John Simm gives Cal McAffrey enough urgency to carry us through the accumulating detail, while David Morrissey's less readable Stephen Collins benefits from Yates's patience. Kelly Macdonald, as Della Smith, gives the exchanges a welcome directness. Yates is good at keeping these distinct temperaments in view as the investigation develops. There is a cost: we sometimes find ourselves keeping track when we would rather stay with a character. Yates makes the concentration worthwhile, but this is not a programme to half-watch.
Chris Seager's cinematography keeps the ensemble scenes readable, so the people delivering the information remain worth watching. Nicholas Hooper's music supports the suspense without swamping the conversations. The pacing gives a revelation force by letting us follow the reasoning that leads to it. The restraint matters: these conversations would be exhausting if every exchange had to announce a crisis. Start with State of Play, and give it the attention its cast has earned.
Biography
David Yates is an English film and television director. He was born on 8 October 1963 in St Helens, Merseyside.
Yates trained at the National Film and Television School. Early television credits include episodes of The Bill and the miniseries The Way We Live Now (2001). He directed the six-part political thriller State of Play (2003), for which he received the Directors Guild of Great Britain Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement.
He is best known for directing the final four Harry Potter films (2007–2011) and the Fantastic Beasts prequel trilogy (2016–2022). Yates is a founding member of Directors UK and has maintained a long association with Warner Bros. He established his own production company, Wychwood Media, around 2022.
