When he first got into the business, there’s little chance David Yates imagined he’d spend the bulk of his career directing blockbuster movies that came at no small expense, with Netflix’s Pain Hustlers marking the first time in 25 years that he’s helmed a feature with a budget of less than $180 million.
In fact, small-scale drama The Tichborne Claimant was the only feature on his filmography before he was drafted into cinema’s biggest franchise to wield the megaphone on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, where he evidently became a favorite of Warner Bros. after taking the reins on not just the final three chapters of the saga, but the entire Fantastic Beasts trilogy and The Legend of Tarzan, too.
That makes him the sixth highest-grossing director in the history of cinema as a result, but as he revealed to Entertainment Weekly, going smaller in scale and directing Chris Evans and Emily Blunt as warring pharmaceutical reps that snowballs into a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy was exactly what he needed.
“I spent such a long time on green-screen studios creating these massive environments and these crazy creatures. So, it was really going back to my roots. It’s going way back. There wasn’t a visual effect in sight. So the beauty of Pain Hustlers for me was to come back to those roots, to come back to where the most exciting thing in a scene is an authentic moment between two actors rather than a big special effect. It was a welcome return to doing things that I’d done a lot of previous to entering the Harry Potter world.”
With an October 27 premiere locked in, we’ll be interested to see how Yates fares having left CGI behind for the time being, but the presence of Blunt and Evans in the lead roles coupled with a strong central concept certainly paints the picture of it being a well-merited comeback to the world of small-scale cinema.
