Paul McGuigan

A man's wrist, a tan line, and beside it, in plain type, the word for where he got it. That is the first thing Paul McGuigan gives us in Sherlock (2010), and it is the thing every director who followed him on the show kept. The words appear as Holmes thinks them, so we see the clue and the conclusion at the same moment he does. We felt, for a few minutes, cleverer than we are, and that is the trick: Charlie Phillips cuts the deductions fast enough that we believe we kept up, and the flattery is deliberate. McGuigan has said the device began as a way to avoid filming people staring at phones, and to put us inside the character's head instead. It works better than almost anything else on British television of its size.

He did not start there. He came to drama from photography and documentary, and his first feature, The Acid House (1998), adapted stories by Irvine Welsh. Gangster No. 1 (2000), with Paul Bettany, made his name at home, and The Reckoning (2004) followed. Then Hollywood: Wicker Park (2004), Lucky Number Slevin (2006) and Push (2009), the last shot handheld in Hong Kong. After four early episodes of Sherlock, between 2010 and 2012, he went mostly to American television, directing pilots and episodes of Scandal, Luke Cage and Designated Survivor, then Dracula (2020) and Inside Man (2022). Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool (2017), with Annette Bening and Jamie Bell, is the one later feature.

What holds it together is a habit from the documentary years. He likes to run whole scenes in long takes and let the actors set the rhythm. "I like for the actors to make their own close-up, basically for the camera to be moved by the actors, not the actors to be moved by the camera," he said in 2004, and he has kept the same cinematographer, Peter Sova, across five films to make that possible. On Sherlock the team was different but the principle was the same. Steve Lawes shot London from above at night, orange light on wet tarmac; Arwel Jones built 221B with a skull on the mantelpiece and paper on every surface; Sarah Arthur put Holmes in the long coat and Watson in the jumpers. McGuigan gave those people room and then let Cumberbatch and Freeman drive.

The complaint about the films is that they think when their genre wants them to move. Push was the clearest case, a thriller with a cerebral tone inside a commercial shape, and the reviews said so. The complaint about Sherlock is not his; the show fell in love with its detective after he had gone. A director who found his best idea in a flat with a skull on the mantelpiece has spent much of the time since directing other people's pilots, and we would rather see what he does with a room of his own.