Peter Kosminsky

Peter Kosminsky
Occupation	Film director Actor producer

Biography

Born in London, Peter Kosminsky attended Oxford University as a chemistry major. He spent much of his time at the university in theater, where he was a lighting designer for the Dramatic Society and where he ultimately produced a successful touring production of Twelfth Night, co-starring fellow student Hugh Grant. The production's composer and accompanist was another young student named Rachel Portman (now an Oscar-winning composer and three time Oscar nominee). Following school, he worked at the BBC as a graduate trainee before becoming a documentary director.Kosminsky, his wife Helen and two daughters, reside in Wiltshire, England."

Position of TV- directors

On the question of how TV directors might improve their position, Sam Miller suggests that they need to align themselves more with development and cites Peter Kosminsky as an example to follow. “He’s found out the two niches where he works which are poles apart,” says Miller. “[They are] Hollywood and a very interesting area of British TV – and he’s mining those areas really effectively.”

Where the American screenwriter William Goldman has been an eloquent advocate for the too often neglected movie scriptwriter, perhaps Kosminsky is the man to perform the same role for the TV director. His career has traced a similar trajectory to Miller’s, with occasional forays into feature films, including 2002’s White Oleander. Indeed, he has to a degree managed to straddle both genres, with a particular strand of politically charged, factually based films made for TV such as The Government Inspector and The Project.

“The role of the director in television is increasingly marginalised and there are complicated reasons for why that is,” says Kosminsky. “The main one... is that directors in television have never had a unified representational body. As a result directors’ fees have remained stationary over the last five or six years.”

He points out that directors in the UK have never been able to negotiate the kind of rights that the Directors’ Guild of America (DGA) has negotiated in the US. These include guaranteed editing rights or time in the cutting room. (However, both Kosminsky and Miller note that directors working in episodic TV in the US are highly remunerated while having no involvement whatever in the editing process.)

“Increasingly in television, with one or two notable exceptions, it’s become a producer-driven medium,” Kosminsky adds. “The key creative relationship is generally between the producer, often the executive producer, and the writer.” Directors, he says, tend to come in quite late in the day and get little access to the cutting room.

“I would say that the position of directors in television compared with their position in feature films is pitiful, that their rights are virtually non-existent and, aside from a few exceptional cases, their artistic contribution is very marginalised as well.”

Kosminsky calls for the establishment of a unified body such as the DGA to protect the rights of British directors, one with the muscle to withdraw labour and to fight for its members’ artistic and financial rights. Unlike writers, composers, actors and indeed their American counterparts, British directors typically get no residual payments on their work.

Echoing Miller, Kosminsky argues that directors must “roll their sleeves up” and get involved in production or at least the development of their films. And a key factor in the whole problem, he says, is simply that directors are underpaid and so are valued accordingly: “They’re held in such low esteem in the broadcasting hierarchy. If you’re having to pay a lot of money for somebody you want to get your money’s worth out of them.”

It will take a lot for things to change but one day TV directors may be as widely respected as their scriptwriting counterparts. But some people are hard to impress. As McGovern points out: “Many writers don’t deserve respect. Lazy bastards, some of them."

Filmography

• • Britz (2007)) (Filming)

1] The Government Inspector (2005) (TV)

2] The Project (2002) (TV) ... aka Années Tony Blair, Les (France)

3] White Oleander (2002) ... aka Weißer Oleander (Germany)

4] Innocents (2000) (TV)

5] Warriors (1999) (TV) ... aka Peacekeepers

a] Walking on the Moon (1999) (TV)

b] No Child of Mine (1997) (TV)

6] Wuthering Heights (1992) ... aka Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (USA: complete title)

7] The Dying of the Light (1992) (TV)

8] Shoot to Kill (1990) (TV)

9] Afghantsi (1988) (TV)

10] The Falklands War: The Untold Story (1987) (TV)

Producer - Filmography

1] Walking on the Moon (1999) (TV) (executive producer)

2] No Child of Mine (1997) (TV) (producer)

3] 15: The Life and Death of Philip Knight (1993) (TV) (producer)

4] The Dying of the Light (1992) (TV) (producer)

5] Afghantsi (1988) (TV) (producer)

6] The Falklands War: The Untold Story (1987) (TV) (producer)

Writer - Filmography

1] The Government Inspector (2005) (TV)

Self - Filmography

1] "HBO First Look" - White Oleander (2002) TV Episode .... Himself