Phillip Noyce

Phillip Noyce has been directing since 1977 and has more than nineteen features behind him, which is a career long enough to contain two completely different filmmakers. The Australian one made Dead Calm in 1989: three people, two boats and open ocean, an exercise in how much tension you can generate with almost no locations and barely any dialogue. It is still the purest demonstration of what he is good at.

Hollywood hired him on the strength of it. He directed the Jack Ryan adaptations Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger, then Sliver, The Saint and The Bone Collector, and became one of the reliable studio thriller directors of the 1990s. These are efficient, handsome, slightly anonymous films, and the anonymity was clearly starting to bother him.

In 2002 he released two films that had nothing to do with any of that. Rabbit-Proof Fence took him back to Australia for a story about the forced removal of Aboriginal children, and The Quiet American adapted Graham Greene's novel with a restraint the thrillers never asked for. Catch a Fire followed in 2006 with a similar political seriousness. Since then the balance has tipped back toward genre and toward smaller scale, from Salt in 2010 to The Giver, Above Suspicion, The Desperate Hour and Fast Charlie. The late work is modest, and the 2002 pair remain the argument for taking him seriously.