Toby Haynes: From Graphic Design To Doctor Who

Falmouth University recently welcomed back one if its most successful alumni – television director Toby Haynes.

During an evening a year and a half in the planning, Haynes recalled his career path all the way from arts school to calling the shots on some of the BBC’s biggest shows, including Doctor Who and Sherlock.

After studying for a foundation degree at Falmouth (back then Falmouth College of Arts), he moved on to study graphic design at Kingston University before earning a place at the National Film and Television School.

“When I was growing up I wanted to be a filmmaker, or work in films, ever since I knew that Star Wars was actually made by people and didn’t just happen,” he said. “It can be quite mystifying going into film and TV and how you make that leap from one thing to another and, because I don’t particularly like doing public speaking, I thought the best way of illustrating this is by showing you the films that I’ve made along the way. For me, this will be like when you drown and you see your life flash before your eyes.”

After spending the day with students on the BA Film course Haynes spoke for nearly two and a half hours about his journey. He played a number of trailers and scenes from short films and episodes that he’s directed to an audience who listened with rapt attention throughout.

The first few short films he played were those he made as a student. The idea for his first one, ‘Nam, came about during a summer holiday in Falmouth.

“I was in Kimberly Park and it was a really hot summer and I was looking across Kimberly Park at the, kind of, there’s a pond, I don’t know if you know it, and there’s some palm trees and I remember saying to my friend ‘if you squint, and do this’,” he said, holding up his hands to make a frame with his fingers, “‘it looks like the beginning of Apocalypse Now over there’. He turned to me and said ‘yeah, it’s like…it’s like ‘Nam!’”

It was evident watching the films that he had an eye for directing. However, he explained that the transition he faced from making fun videos with his friends to attending film school was a struggle.

“The weird thing was having come from art school, film school seemed like a very sort of straight place. You know, there was less experimentation going on there than there was at art school, more, kind of, learning the rules and ‘this is the way you do things’ and I found that quite difficult to deal with at the time. I was still desperate to make crazy films.”

After finishing film school, Haynes found himself facing nine months of unemployment. Desperate for any kind of work, he accepted the offer of a Channel 4 programme that no one else wanted due to its focus on suicide bombers. In the space between 9/11 and 7/7, he directed The Baader Meinhoff Complex, starring Olivia Colman and Eddie Marsan.

Following on from this, he was invited to work on Hollyoaks. He claimed that the experience he gained working on an established television programme was paramount to his development as a director.

“I’d suddenly been thrown into this microcosm of the film industry, or the TV industry. You learn very quickly what the right and the wrong things to do are and where you can push it and where you can’t.”

The production company Kudos came calling, and he was asked to take the directing job on a new CBBC progamme called MI High. The story of a group of children who are secretly spies operating in a school, MI High provided Haynes with the chance to flex his talents as a director of a more action-based script. Being a BBC programme, his work was noticed by other production teams and he soon found himself working on what would end up being two rather ill-fated shows (Holby Blue and Spooks: Code 9) before getting his big break on BBC3’s supernatural comedy Being Human.

It was his work on that show and the BBC One drama Five Days that led to Haynes getting the script that every director wants – Doctor Who.

“Being asked to make a Doctor Who episode was a really exciting prospect and it wasn’t just any episode, it was The Pandorica Opens, which was the season finale of the first season with Matt Smith.”

The success of his work on the two-part finale meant he was asked back to direct not only the 2010 Christmas special (starring Michael Gambon), but the first two episodes of Matt Smith’s second series, The Impossible Astronaut and The Day Of The Moon. Obviously impressed with his work, Doctor Who head writer Steven Moffat kept him in his phone book and Haynes found himself directing another finale, this time for the second series of Sherlock.

After playing the scene from The Reichenbach Fall where Sherlock Holmes jumps to his apparent death, Haynes explained his joy at being involved with such a successful show. Being careful not to give anything away, he teased the Sherlock fans in the audience with a little hint.

“It was a great thing to work out because we knew that we had to do, I don’t know if this is giving away spoilers for any of you who may or may not have seen the episode, but we do see Sherlock again in that episode. There is something going on in that scene. There’s not a lot I can say! It was really important that we worked all these aspects out for it to pay off in series three. It was great just being at the genesis of all of that and being at the meetings and being able to put input into that.”

Before finishing, he was able to play an exclusive clip from the third series of Wallander, where he’d been directing Kenneth Branagh as the eponymous police inspector.

Haynes delivered an insightful and inspiring evening’s discussion, proving that Falmouth University students have the potential to be incredibly successful. It was a fantastic opportunity to get a first-hand account of what it’s like to work in television.

If you want proof of the talented individual who has helped to create some of the best television of the past few years, watch Andrew Scott’s BAFTA acceptance speech. He thanks one Toby Haynes.