Rupert Sanders builds worlds the way other directors build sets: enormous, dark and wet. The difficulty, film after film, is finding a person in them worth following.
Fi1m perspective
The first hour of Foundation (2021) is a fair sample of what Rupert Sanders does. It is built on a scale television rarely attempts and lit like a cathedral, and it is slow, solemn and short of people to care about until Lee Pace's cloned emperor arrives to give it a pulse. That is our review of the pilot, and it will serve as a review of the career.
Sanders came up through art direction under Tony Kaye and spent the years from 1999 making commercials and music videos, which is where the habit of the immaculate frame was formed. His feature debut, Snow White and the Huntsman (2012), was a dark fairy tale on a large scale; Ghost in the Shell (2017) followed, a live-action cyberpunk adaptation of the manga he took on after turning down the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean; then the Foundation pilot, and The Crow (2024), a gothic reimagining of the graphic novel. Dark fantasy, cyberpunk, gothic: he has not strayed far, and he prefers to reimagine a source rather than remake it. Of The Crow he said, "This is not a remake. It is wildly different... It's my version of that text."
What he is good at is plain. Effects-heavy set pieces with atmospheric production design, a fondness for water and liquid running through the images, and a preference for telling the story through pictures and mood rather than talk. What he is less good at is equally plain, and critics have said it of nearly every film: the scripts are thin, the characters underdeveloped, the pacing uncertain, the tone wandering. Ghost in the Shell was faulted for leaning on its visuals; The Crow for much the same. We have only reviewed the Foundation pilot, and we would not judge the films at length unseen, but the complaint made about them is the complaint we made about it.
We admit to sitting through those opening episodes impressed by the size of everything and slightly lonely in it, waiting for someone on screen to want something we could understand. Pace, when he came, felt like rescue. That is the Sanders experience in miniature: the frame arrives long before the feeling does, and sometimes the feeling does not arrive at all.
He is a designer who directs, and there is honourable work in that. The next film worth waiting for is the one where someone hands him a script as carefully made as his sets.
Biography
Rupert Sanders is an English film director. He was born on 16 March 1971 in Westminster, London, and studied graphic design at Central Saint Martins after a foundation year at Kingston School of Art.
Sanders began his career directing commercials before making his feature debut with Snow White and the Huntsman (2012). He later directed Ghost in the Shell (2017) and The Crow (2024). In 2021 he directed the pilot episode of the Apple TV+ series Foundation.
