John Patterson makes long, painful conversations hold our attention. We rate his unobtrusive direction of The Sopranos highly, though his skill with an argument cannot always justify the time the programme spends on Tony’s grievances.
Fi1m perspective
In Whitecaps (2002), John Patterson makes an extended marital argument hard to stop watching. The camera placement is precise and unobtrusive, keeping our attention on the people speaking. We found the episode exhausting because the sustained anger in those exchanges is hard to sit through. We rate Patterson most highly in scenes like these, where he lets dialogue take its time without allowing the direction to become idle.
He began directing episodic television in the mid-1970s, working on police shows and crime dramas before directing the pilot of Law & Order (1990). He also made more than a dozen television films, mainly thrillers and crime stories. The Sopranos (1999) gave that experienced television director sustained opportunities to work with difficult, talkative characters. He later directed The Foot for Six Feet Under (2001). The move into these character-led programmes rewarded his patience with scenes that had plenty of words and little need for action.
On The Sopranos, he directed 13 episodes, including the first five season finales. That repeated responsibility matters: the programme kept asking him to handle the point at which a season had to justify the hours spent on it. David Chase was the creator and writer, and Patterson’s collaborators included cinematographers Phil Abraham and Alik Sakharov. We would not credit Patterson alone for the programme’s force, any more than we would overlook James Gandolfini, whose Tony is funny, frightening and painfully recognisable. Patterson’s particular skill was to make room for such acting while keeping a confrontation tightly controlled.
That does not make every long argument worth its running time. The Sopranos sometimes gives Tony’s grievances more attention than they deserve, and a finely handled confrontation can still leave us wishing the programme would move on. This is a reservation about the series, not something we can fairly charge to Patterson alone. Watch it from the beginning, rather than treating his finales as a collection of directorial highlights.
Biography
John Patterson was an American television director. He directed thirteen episodes of The Sopranos (1999–2004), including the first five season finales, and one episode of Six Feet Under (2001).
Born in Buffalo, New York, Patterson graduated from the University at Buffalo and earned a master's degree from Stanford University in 1970. He directed episodes of numerous series including CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Carnivàle, Law & Order, Providence, The Practice, CHiPs, Magnum, P.I., and Hill Street Blues, as well as more than a dozen television films.
Patterson received two Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series for his work on The Sopranos and won a Directors Guild of America Award in 2002 for the episode "Whitecaps". He died in Los Angeles in 2005.
