Jim O’Hanlon is a writer and director of television, theatre, commercials and film. Films as a director include 100 Streets, starring Idris Elba and Gemma Arterton; Your Christmas or Mine and the forthcoming sequel Your Christmas or Mine 2, featuring Asa Butterfield, Harriet Walter, Alex Jennings and Danny Mays; Of Two Minds, starring Kristin Davis; and the hard-hitting Channel Four Film All in the Game starring Idris Elba and Ray Winstone. Jim’s work for TV includes directing the first two series of the acclaimed comedy-drama series Trying for Apple TV; the final BAFTA-nominated series of Catastrophe for Amazon and Channel Four; House of Saddam (BBC/HBO, nominated for four Emmys and a BAFTA for Best Drama Series); and an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma for the BBC starring Romola Garai, Jonny Lee Miller and Michael Gambon, which was nominated for a Golden Globe and four Emmys, winning one. Other television directing credits include Undercover, Inside Number 9, In the Flesh and Quirke, starring Gabriel Byrne and Michael Gambon, all for the BBC; the Season 1 finale of Marvel’s Helstrom for ABC/Hulu; plus all three feature-length films in the Charlie Brooker-scripted comedy series A Touch of Cloth starring Suranne Jones and John Hannah for Sky (Winner RTS Award for Best Comedy).
Jim’s work as a writer includes the stage plays The Buddhist of Castleknock (Fishamble Theatre Company); Pilgrims in the Park (also Fishamble); My Bonnie Lies and Ready or Not (both nominated for Best New Play at the Manchester Evening News Theatre Awards); and the radio plays Even the Olives are Bleeding (BBC Radio 4, starring Andrew Scott) and The Boy Who Became Prime Minister (BBC Radio 3). He has written episodes of shows such as Casualty and Coronation Street, and his poetry and prose have both appeared in the New Irish Writing page of the Sunday Tribune. He recently directed Tourism Ireland’s major worldwide campaign featuring Sharon Horgan and Derry Girls’ Saoirse Monica Jackson and Jamie Lee O’Donnell.
When did you know you wanted to be a director?
I knew I wanted to be a director from the moment I directed my first play at university. I’d acted a lot in school, and always thought that was what I’d do professionally once I left college. I’d done a couple of TV ads and short films as a child actor and loads of plays at my after-school drama club. I absolutely loved the experience of being on set and backstage, though at that point I definitely wanted to be an actor rather than a director. But I struggled to get parts in my first year in UCD (University College Dublin), so I thought I’d try my hand at directing instead, and immediately loved it. The first show I ever directed was God, a surreal and funny Woody Allen one-act play set at the Athenian drama festival. I had a blast. I loved being in charge of the overall creative thrust of the show, from set, to costumes, to lighting, as opposed to just waiting in the wings for my turn to come on and do my bit. Especially as the parts started getting smaller and the ‘waiting in the wings to go on’ bit commensurately longer! I especially loved working with the actors – having acted myself, I felt like I was fairly, instinctively in tune with what actors wanted and needed to hear from a director, and I got a huge buzz out of helping them to shape their performances in the service of the piece as a whole. Watching an audience full of students having a great time and laughing their heads off at a show I’d put together was a huge thrill, and in truth I think I abandoned the notion of becoming an actor after the very first performance of God, though I continued to act for another couple of years alongside directing.
I followed God up with a one-act Victoria Wood musical called Talent, which was also great fun – not least because Victoria Wood had apparently lost the sheet music for all but one of the songs, so I had to rope some of the cast into writing the music for the printed lyrics, which again was great craic and a fantastic learning experience. From that point on I was sold on the notion of becoming a director – though at that point my focus was on becoming a theatre director – the idea of directing for film and TV only came later, once I’d left university.
At the time, the notion of being a film director in Ireland was nothing short of ludicrous – the year I graduated there was literally one feature film made in Ireland, so it just really wasn’t an option. So, the decision to become a film and TV director came later – after I’d moved to the UK and finished a Masters thesis in English (on the plays of Brian Friel).
Once you knew you wanted to pursue a career as a director, what where your first steps in achieving this goal?
Once I’d made the decision that I wanted to be a theatre director, I carried on directing plays throughout my time as an undergraduate in Dublin and then as a postgraduate here in the UK, where I was doing a Masters thesis on the Irish playwright Brian Friel.
I ended up taking one of those shows – Dermot Bolger’s one-man play about an Irish football fan at the 1988 European Championships – to the Edinburgh Fringe, where it did pretty well, and transferred to the sadly now-defunct Man in the Moon theatre in Chelsea and the Boston Centre for the Arts in Massachusetts. At the time, my Dad’s Uncle ran a small professional summer stock theatre company in the US, and I spent a couple of summers with him working at his theatre, first as an Assistant Director, then directing productions of my own, which was an amazing experience and brought me into contact with professional actors for the first time. But although I was doing lots of interesting things, and getting fantastic experience, it was hard to make a living directing fringe theatre, so I applied for – and got – a half-time job teaching on the Performing Arts degree at the University of Hertfordshire which, I thought would be a good way of giving myself at least some kind of guaranteed income – however small – while still giving me enough time to direct plays on the side.
I was lucky that same year to get an Irish Arts Council grant to work as an Assistant Director at the Gate Theatre in Dublin on their production of A Christmas Carol, where again, I learnt a huge amount working with professional actors on my first large scale production. So, I continued to direct plays for the next couple of years – and indeed to write and direct my own plays – at places like the Battersea Arts Centre and the Edinburgh Fringe. But as much as I loved working in theatre, I was starting to get more and more interested in directing TV and film as well – not least because they held out the possibility of earning a living wage, as well as appealing to a much larger audience than even the most successful theatre production could ever hope for.
I was also starting to become interested in telling stories on a bigger canvas, rather than ones which were confined to a single physical space as they are in a theatre. So, I applied for a Graduate Trainee scheme at Granada TV in Manchester, where you got to spend a year moving around working on all kinds of Granada productions from news, to drama, to magazine programmes with a view to eventually becoming a TV Producer. It was a great scheme. Assuming you got on it. Which I didn’t. But I got down to the last ten, and one of the Producers who’d interviewed me offered me a job opening application forms for Stars in their Eyes, a TV talent show which Granada made at the time. It didn’t feel like an obvious step to becoming a director, but it was a means to an end, and it got me into the building, where I handed my CV around to various drama producers and ended up being offered a job as a storyline writer on a completely bonkers late-night melodrama called Revelations, written by some chancer called Russell T Davies. No idea what happened to him, but he was clearly going nowhere. Russell, if you’re reading this and you’ve fallen on hard times and need a leg up, give me a shout. Because I definitely owe you one.
What obstacles or set backs did you face in becoming a director?
For me, the biggest obstacle I faced was making the leap out of directing continuing drama series such as Bad Girls and into what you might call more authored shows. I loved working on shows like Bad Girls, Casualty and The Bill and learnt a huge amount about cameras, and working with actors, and the work of all the different departments by directing them week in week out over a number of years. I’ve no doubt I wouldn’t be the director I am today if it hadn’t been for the experience I gained directing those fast-turnaround, hour-long single camera shows. I always tried to approach every episode as if it was my big break, and to make the best possible episode in terms of the truth of the performances particularly, but also in making my episodes look as good as possible, and be as dynamic and fresh and alive as I could make them within the parameters of the particular show in question, and without disrespecting the established style and the audience’s expectations of it. However, having directed those kinds of shows for five or six years, I was desperate to do something which, I could put my own stamp on as a director, and I found that leap the most difficult one to make.
This was partly, to be fair, because I was still alternating directing a couple of episodes of something like Casualty or The Bill with spending months at home of my own volition writing plays; but partly also because I hadn’t been to film school and I didn’t have any short films which might have set me apart from other directors coming out of continuing drama and making producers more open to taking a chance on me. All I had was the plays I’d written, a huge interest in performance, and some – I hope – really strong episodes of a variety of continuing dramas. And of course there was only four or five channels when I started out in the mid-nineties – there was no BBC 3 or E4, so there were no shows like Being Human, or My Mad Fat Diary or Skins or Secret Diary of a Call Girl which, offered amazing opportunities for the directors coming up after me to really show what they could do – all we had was more straight-down-the-middle procedural shows like Casualty and The Bill. And great though those shows were in terms of learning the nuts and bolts of directing, and giving me experience working with a huge variety of actors at different stages of their careers, it was hard to put any real directorial stamp on them.
So, having done them for a number of years, I was desperate to do something a bit more authored. In the end, it was sharing an agent with Sue Johnston which led to my break out of continuing drama, because Sue was in Waking the Dead at the time, and when they lost a director late on, my agent got word of it via Sue and luckily I was free and ready to step into the breach once I got a chance to speak to the Producers. Since then, and although there have been loads of jobs I’ve gone for and haven’t got over the years, I’ve been incredibly lucky in my directing journey. As a white, male director coming up in the early 2000s, I never experienced the kind of setbacks or obstacles which female directors or diverse directors have encountered since time immemorial (though hopefully that’s now at least starting to change). But there are always jobs you don’t get, or jobs you do get that don’t end up being the success you’d hoped for. I remember applying for a short film scheme run by the Irish Film Board early on in my career, while I was still directing The Bill, and again, I got down to the last ten but didn’t get chosen as one of the five films made that year, and that was devastating because I knew that not having an authored short film was one of the things holding me back in terms of getting ahead in the industry. And although I’d written several other shorts, I’m not a film producer – I hate asking people for money and favours – and I didn’t know any producers or have the money to fund those films myself. So, I just had to keep plugging away, going to interviews, doing meetings, trying to persuade people to take a chance on me. And eventually it paid off, and I’m hugely aware of how lucky I’ve been that I’ve managed to keep working for the best part of a quarter of a century now. But, if I had my time again, I’d tell my younger self to make those shorts I wrote, however I managed it. Because without those, it’s very difficult to showcase what you can do as a director.
How did you develop your voice and hone your craft?
By just keeping on directing. One of the great pearls of wisdom I remember Russell (Davies – remember him?) offering me on Revelations was that you never learn how to write a script, you only learn how to write this particular script. I feel like that applies to directing too – you never learn how to direct a film or TV show, you only learn how to direct this particular film or TV show. And, as no two films are the same, you’re always learning something new and developing new skills. Obviously, there are transferrable skills and experiences which you draw on in every film or TV drama you direct; but equally, every project throws up particular challenges that you haven’t faced before, so you’ve got to be prepared for that and always open to learning and to not knowing all of the answers all of the time.
I’ve been incredibly lucky over the years to have been able to jump between dramas, thrillers and comedy, and learnt a huge amount from each of them. Having essentially come out of directing theatre via Coronation Street, Bad Girls was my first real experience of working with cameras and directing large scale set-pieces for the screen. By the end of the ten episodes, I directed across the first four series I’d staged large-scale riots and fires and bomb scares, worked with a multitude of actors of varying levels of experience, and learnt how to use cameras, cranes and Steadicam – the works. Bad Girls really was my film school. However, the really big leap for me in terms of the craft of directing TV drama and developing my own voice as a director was getting the job on Waking the Dead, because that was shot on 16mm film, and each story consisted of two self-contained, one hour episodes and had a whole flashback strand peculiar to its own story where you saw what had happened in the original case the team were investigating. So, that gave me something to really get my teeth into visually, because part of the point of the series was that no two episodes treated the flashback strand in the same way, so although the central spine of the team investigating the cold case remained the same, every episode had a very different look and feel in its treatment of the flashback element. I absolutely loved it – loved coming up with the style of the flashback episode and loved working with Sue, in particular (my episode flashed back to Sue’s character’s life as a rookie detective and involved casting a young Sue Johnstone which was really exciting!).
Ever since then, I’ve jumped from dramas to thrillers to comedies, honing my voice and developing my style, albeit largely unconsciously, just by doing it. Whilst I’ve sometimes worried about becoming a Jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none, I’ve just always found myself drawn to directing something diametrically different to the thing I’ve just done. So, I’ve often followed a thriller up with a comedy, and then done a drama after that before going on to direct a sci-fi or even a horror. It’s partly about just wanting to always do something I haven’t done before, to keep challenging myself both in terms of style and subject matter. But I’ve also always been interested in shows which cut across genres and look to blend the tonal and stylistic elements from one or more different genres (like In the Flesh, which I always used to describe as ‘Ken Loach does Zombies’!).
In the last couple of years, I’ve found myself doing more and more what I might call grounded comedy, which looking at the plays I directed in university and the kind of stuff I’ve been watching and reading since I was a teenager, feels like coming full circle. But I also have several feature films in development which anything but comic, so I definitely feel like I’ll want to keep stretching myself and doing new things, even if lots of the stuff I find myself being offered at the minute tends to be on the more comedic end of things (though I met a friend yesterday who I hadn’t seen in a couple of years and he asked me which I was doing now – ‘Comedy or Violence. Those are your things, right?’ I’ll have to take his word for it …). But no matter the style or genre, the most important thing for me has been finding the human truth at the core of the story. And making sure the performances and the characters are as real and grounded or as truthful as possible. Because, if you can get an audience to believe in the characters in a film or TV show, and to empathise with them – even if they don’t like them – then you’re 90 % of the way there to making a compelling film which will keep them glued to their screens. That’s a lot easier with certain scripts, and indeed in certain genres, than it is in others. So, whether it’s a drama or a comedy, a sci-fi or a thriller, it’s always been character and emotion that have drawn me to a project; if there aren’t real and believable characters or real emotions in a script, I find it hard to find a way in. But as to how I’ve developed my own voice and honed my craft, I guess it’s just been about keeping on doing it, over and over again, across a range of different genres and styles of both drama and comedy. And I feel now that it’s the very fact of having directed all sorts of different styles of films and TV series that has contributed the most to whatever my voice as a director is.
How did you get your first break?
I suspect, like most directors, my career has been a series of breaks rather than one big break. Getting to direct a couple of episodes of Waking the Dead when a director dropped out late on; being invited to direct House of Saddam by producer Steve Lightfoot. I’d worked with him on Casualty this led to me getting an American agent; Emma, my first big period drama for the BBC which came off the back of my episodes of House of Saddam; 100 Streets, my first feature, which again came when Michael Caton Jones dropped out five weeks before the start of the shoot – thanks Michael!
Actually, now I think of it, many of my breaks came when someone else dropped out and the Producers needed a director at short notice; sometimes it’s handy not to be working and to be up for the challenge of taking something on with very little prep!).
My very first break though, and the one that gave me a foot in the door to eventually becoming a director was actually not as a director at all, but as a storyline writer. Paul Marquess, who had produced Revelations, had moved on to become Story Editor of Coronation Street and he invited me to apply for a job as a storyliner on the show. I still had no real idea what a storyliner did, or how they did it, but I figured it would stand to me as both a writer and a director to learn about stories and how to tell them in a way that keeps millions of viewers coming back night after night, so I sent off my sample Coronation Street storyline, got the job and I was up and running in TV drama. Albeit as a storyliner rather than a director, which was the ultimate goal. But I knew that in those days, lots of great directors had come up through Coronation Street – the likes of Mike Newell, Michael Apted, Martin Campbell, Julian Jarrold, Julian Ferino – as had numerous amazing writers from Paul Abbott to Frank Cottrell-Boyce and indeed Sally Wainwright, who was on the writing team when I joined. So, I figured if I could follow in any of their footsteps, I wouldn’t be doing too badly. And I did indeed learn a huge amount about storytelling and story structure from my time as a storyliner on Corrie, stuff I never would have known if I hadn’t been in the room where it happened as we put Deirdre Rachid in prison, and introduced Hayley, the Street’s first transexual character amongst hundreds of other stories. One of the carrots Paul used when he offered me the job was that I’d have the opportunity to apply for the Granada TV Director’s training scheme, a scheme which was only open to Granada employees, and after a year and a half of writing storylines for Coronation Street, I got my first big break as a director as I managed to get a place on the Director’s Training scheme run by the late, great Gareth Morgan (TV writer Abi Morgan’s dad, fact fans!). The course was only six or seven weeks long, and it covered everything from cooking programmes to news programmes to directing a short drama. I didn’t have much interest in the non-drama stuff, but I loved learning about cameras and lighting and how the various departments contribute to the telling of a story – even on a magazine or cookery show – and by the end of the six weeks I was hooked.
I was extremely lucky that once I finished the course Brian Park, the Producer of Coronation Street at the time, offered me the chance to shadow some of the show’s most experienced directors with a view to eventually directing an episode of my own. I started out just shadowing them, watching and learning and absorbing as much as I could, before being given the opportunity to direct a scene of my own in Rita’s shop, where there were really only three angles and no movement available, and graduating to directing scenes in the Rovers, which tended to have a number of elements and much more movement and which were therefore a great deal more complicated in terms of blocking and camera moves. I was gradually given more and more scenes to direct across multiple episodes (we shot four a week in those days), until I remember noticing on one particular block that the eleven scenes, I’d been allocated were all, coincidentally, from the same episode. So, I grabbed the opportunity to suggest that as each episode averaged 14 scenes, sure I may as well direct the other three scenes as well, so I’d have a full episode of my own. To my surprise, Brian agreed, and I had my first full episode to direct, alternating in the chair with Laurence (Moody) the director of the other three episodes that week. Within a couple of months, I was directing my own four-episode block of Corrie every five weeks and rolling from one block into the other – my first credit as a director of TV drama. It was an amazing experience, albeit the hardest thing I’ve ever done just because it’s so fast, and you’re shooting so many scenes a day and trying to make it as feel as grounded and real and truthful as possible. But I learnt so much from my time on The Street – there’s nothing like having fifteen minutes to direct three multi-camera scenes last thing on a Friday evening to focus the mind and teach you to shoot fast when you need to.
So, when Brian left Corrie to set up his own company a year or so later and offered me a couple of episodes of a new series they were making for ITV called Bad Girls, I took the plunge of leaving Granada to launch my career as a freelance TV director (to my mother’s horror – she couldn’t understand how anyone would want to leave Coronation Street – which at the time was a salaried job with an actual pension! – to go freelance. Sorry Mum). That was almost 25 years ago now, but I’m still working, still directing, and still having enormous amounts of fun. And I still don’t regret giving up the pension. Not yet at least …
TV Credits: Trying (2020 – 2022), Helstrom (2020), The Punisher (2019), Inside Number 9 (2018), When Bowie Met Nolan (2018), Marcella (2018), Sleepy Hollow (2017), Undercover (2016), Hemlock Grove (2015), Chasing Shadows (2014), Quirke (2014), In The Flesh (2014), Of Two Minds (2012), Touch of Cloth (2010-2012), The deep (2010), Emma (2009), Mutual Friends (2008), House of Saddam (2007).
Film Credits: Your Christmas or Mine 2 (2023), Your Christmas or Mine (2022), 100 Streets (2016).