Ian Sharp is the man who made the fights and the stunts work: on Minder, on The Professionals, on the opening of GoldenEye. Give him a helicopter and he is at home.
Fi1m perspective
The opening of GoldenEye (1995), the jump off the dam and later the tank chase, is Ian Sharp's work. He is credited as second unit director, which is where his name sat for a good part of his career, and it tells you what he was for. He stages big, practical action, with soldiers and stunt crews brought in to get it right, and those sequences are the parts of his films that people still mention. We sit up at that dam every time, because it is one body and one drop done for real, and the film lets us feel the difference.
He came to it sideways. He made documentaries at the BBC until 1979, and a short called The Music Machine, shot on a sabbatical in 1978, turned him towards drama. His first directing credits were two episodes of Minder in 1980, "All Mod Cons" and "You Need Hands", and a fight in one of them got him three episodes of The Professionals the same year. Our review of Minder gives the credit to George Cole and Dennis Waterman, as it should. That is the lot of a series director: you set up the punch and the stars take it.
Who Dares Wins (1982) was the first feature, an SAS thriller with Lewis Collins for the producer Euan Lloyd. The climax is the thing it is remembered for. The rest, the plotting and in particular the way it draws the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, was argued over at the time. Then came the job he says he jumped at: the pilot and first six episodes of Robin of Sherwood (1984), which he took on because of the scripts, and which brought him the second unit work on Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and eventually on GoldenEye.
The later features are thinner. RPM (1997) he regrets himself, for its script and its stunts. Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War (2002) is a comedy that was found short of laughs. Against them sits Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1998) for television, Hardy without a helicopter in it, which he has said was like directing Robin Hood again: "I was whistling to work." Tracker (2010) was the last feature, and he has largely stopped since.
If you want the measure of him, watch the opening of GoldenEye and then the first episode of Robin of Sherwood, in that order. The first is what he was hired for. The second is the one he talks about.
Biography
Ian Sharp is a British film and television director. Born on 13 November 1946 in Clitheroe, Lancashire, he read Psychology at Durham University before joining the BBC in 1968. He worked there on documentaries, including contributions to Arena and Omnibus, until 1979.
Sharp moved into drama in 1980 with episodes of the ITV series Minder. He followed this with work on The Professionals and made his feature debut directing Who Dares Wins (1982). He directed the first series of Robin of Sherwood (1984) and later served as second-unit director on GoldenEye (1995). His later credits include Tracker (2010).
