Saul Metzstein is a television director whose name you do not notice, and on Slow Horses and Doctor Who that is the job done properly. He makes other people's programmes look like themselves; what a Metzstein film looks like is harder to say.
Fi1m perspective
Watch the third season of Slow Horses (2023) straight through and try to spot the director. You will not. Gary Oldman's Jackson Lamb is the reason the series works, the office is the show, and the thriller plot underneath is ordinary and gets away with it; nobody behind the camera is asking for credit. Metzstein directed all six episodes and has described the task as shooting "a slightly too-long film", which is exactly what it feels like. We watched it without once wondering who was in charge, and on a series whose pleasure is its people rather than its pictures we mean that kindly, though we know it is the kind of kindness directors tire of.
He came in at the bottom, as a runner on Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, and got out of it quickly. Late Night Shopping (2001), a small British comedy-drama, was the debut; Guy X (2005) followed, then Micro Men (2009) for television, and then, for a stretch, other people's films: second-unit work on Dredd (2012), Suffragette and The Snowman. From there it has been television, and good television: five episodes of Doctor Who series 7 (2012–13), including the Christmas special The Snowmen and the finale The Name of the Doctor, then Ripper Street, The Musketeers, Brassic, and Slow Horses for a second full season in 2025. He has made two films with the writer Jack Lothian.
What he is good at is plain from the list. Doctor Who changes its setting and its tone every week and its effects budget with them, and a director who can move from a Victorian snowfall to a grounded spy office without the join showing is worth having. He gives actors room and tells them clearly what he thinks, and casts as large as Herron's or Davies's need someone who can do both. He gets a difficult, expensive shoot finished. Our review of Doctor Who found peaks as high as anything on television and troughs that were real; a programme like that leans on its directors precisely because they cannot save a bad script and must not get in the way of a good one.
The cost of all this is that there has been no theatrical feature since Guy X, and the run of second-unit jobs in between suggests a director who was, for a while, being used rather than heard. Twenty years in television have made him fluent and made him hard to describe. If you want to see what he does, the third season of Slow Horses is the place, all six hours, because it is the one thing on his list that is entirely his. We would like to see what he does with ninety minutes and nobody else's furniture.
Biography
Saul Metzstein is a Scottish film and television director. He was born on 30 December 1970 in Glasgow and is the son of architect Isi Metzstein. He studied architecture at Robinson College, Cambridge, before working in production roles on films including Shallow Grave (1994) and Trainspotting (1996).
Metzstein directed the feature films Late Night Shopping (2001), for which he received the British Academy Scotland New Talent Award for best director in 2002, and Guy X (2005). He has directed episodes of series including Doctor Who (2012–2013), Ripper Street (2014), The Musketeers (2014), Brassic (2019–2020) and multiple seasons of Slow Horses (2023–2025). He has also worked as second unit director on films such as Dredd (2012) and The Snowman (2017).
