Stephen Daldry
Theatre came first and it still shows. Daldry holds three Tony Awards for his Broadway work and an Olivier for the West End, and he arrived in film already knowing how to stage a scene around an actor rather than around a camera move.
His features are delivery machines for performance, which is a description rather than an insult: he finds an emotional structure, casts it exactly and shoots it cleanly. Billy Elliot (2000) is the one that works best, partly because dancing gives the sentiment somewhere physical to go, and partly because the miners' strike behind it supplies stakes the family cannot argue their way out of. The Hours (2002) cuts three timelines around Mrs Dalloway and holds them together through acting rather than technique. The Reader (2008) is the most uncomfortable and the most argued over, a film about complicity that a good number of viewers find morally evasive. Those three brought him three Academy Award nominations for Best Director.
The later features are weaker. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011) applies the same emotional engineering to the aftermath of 9/11 and is the clearest case of the method showing without material strong enough to justify it. Trash (2014), set among children scavenging a Brazilian landfill, went out quietly. He has since worked in television, where he holds a Primetime Emmy for directing a drama series, and returned to the stage; he appears here in a documentary about the Stranger Things stage production, billed as its director.
Movies (7)
Where to start with Stephen Daldry
Billy Elliot is the correct first watch and the film most likely to outlive him: a boy, a boxing gym, a ballet class and a mining town in the middle of a strike, with every emotional beat earned rather than assumed. The Hours is the more ambitious piece and the better showcase for what he draws out of actors; if you have read Woolf it gains a great deal, and if you have not it still works as three portraits of one very bad morning. The Reader is the difficult one, and worth your time precisely because the argument about it has never settled. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is where the same technique overreaches. Trash is the film almost nobody saw, and its obscurity is roughly fair.