‘The Crown’ Director Benjamin Caron Flexes “A Different” Filmmaking Muscle On Accomplished Feature Debut ‘Sharper’
11.02.2023 - 17:05
/ deadline.com
Director Benjamin Caron says that he was “yearning to flex a different muscle” and go from the “historical period drama” that is The Crown to the thrills and spills of Andor and on to the delicious deceit at the heart of his accomplished first feature film Sharper, starring Julianne Moore, Sebastian Stan, John Lithgow, Justice Smith and Briana Middleton, giving a star-in-the-making performance.
His excitement over Sharper, which is highly praised in a review by my Deadline colleague Pete Hammond, is palpable when we meet for a cuppa tea, which he prepares, in Pimlico, London.
One of the first things to learn in the TV and movie world, he advises, is how to ”make the best cup of tea you can possibly make so they remember you through your tea.”
Caron has plenty of other skills that he’ll be remembered for. He certainly gets high grades for his work as a director on an array of productions that includes Wallander, Sherlock, TV specials with illusionist Derren Brown, TV movie Tommy Cooper: Not Like That, Like This, plus the crowning achievements of The Crown for Left Bank Pictures, Netflix and Sony Pictures Television and Andor for Disney+.
It has taken a long time to finally make a feature film, he tells me. The opportunity to make a feature was never there, he says, “and maybe I didn’t try hard enough.”
I tell him to quit saying that because he was already producing feature-caliber work for the small screen.
“What really happened,” he explains, ”was the landscape of television changed so remarkably that the scope and scale and the quality and people that worked traditionally in movies suddenly were working in television, so I was looking over there.”
And what was happening in front of him “was things like