‘The Crown’ Director Benjamin Caron Flexes “A Different” Filmmaking Muscle On Accomplished Feature Debut ‘Sharper’

Director Benjamin Caron says that he was “yearning to flex a different muscle” and go from the “historical period drama” that is The Crown to the thrills and spills of Andor and on to the delicious deceit at the heart of his accomplished first feature film Sharper, starring Julianne Moore, Sebastian Stan, John Lithgow, Justice Smith and Briana Middleton, giving a star-in-the-making performance.

His excitement over Sharper, which is highly praised in a review by my Deadline colleague Pete Hammond, is palpable when we meet for a cuppa tea, which he prepares, in Pimlico, London.

One of the first things to learn in the TV and movie world, he advises, is how to ”make the best cup of tea you can possibly make so they remember you through your tea.”

Caron has plenty of other skills that he’ll be remembered for. He certainly gets high grades for his work as a director on an array of productions that includes Wallander, Sherlock, TV specials with illusionist Derren Brown, TV movie Tommy Cooper: Not Like That, Like This, plus the crowning achievements of The Crown for Left Bank Pictures, Netflix and Sony Pictures Television and Andor for Disney+.

It has taken a long time to finally make a feature film, he tells me. The opportunity to make a feature was never there, he says, “and maybe I didn’t try hard enough.”

I tell him to quit saying that because he was already producing feature-caliber work for the small screen.

“What really happened,” he explains, ”was the landscape of television changed so remarkably that the scope and scale and the quality and people that worked traditionally in movies suddenly were working in television, so I was looking over there.”

And what was happening in front of him “was things like The Crown,” which, with all of the episodes’ high-end casts and production values, are the equivalent of one-hour movies.

He balks at such a statement “because people get a bit snotty about it, like, ‘No, no. It’s television.’”

Peter Morgan, he says, “was writing stand-alone, brilliant pieces of television which, in a way, had the same DNA as films.”

Caron has Moore to thank, he tells me, for enabling him to make his first feature.

Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka’s Black Listed Sharper screenplay found its place in the sun after Moore read it.

“Ultimately, [Moore], by the way, is the one that gave me the job,” Caron says of the Oscar-winning actress celebrated for her performances in films such as Safe, The Big Lebowski, Magnolia, The Hours, Far From Heaven and Still Alice.

How come? “Well, you know how Hollywood works,” he shrugs.

Moore’s a producer of the film, “but this movie wouldn’t have happened had she not read it; it was on the Black List, it was out there,” Caron says.

“Had she not read it and gone, ‘I want to make this movie,’ then Apple and A24 would not want to make this film,” he argues.

Moore would have been intrigued by the role of Madeline, a woman of confidence and daring, living by her wits in New York.

He reckons that part of the process would have been Moore telling the studios, “There’s a great part here, and I want to play that.” “Then they’ve gone, ‘OK, we’ll make the movie.’ And then it was a process of like, “OK, let’s find a director who shares the same sensibility to that,’” says Caron.

Smiling warmly, he says, “So I owe a lot to her in terms of getting that movie up and going, and then also being part of that conversation about me coming onboard.”

Early in pre-production, executives and creatives from A24 and Apple held a Zoom call to discuss the script and schedule.

Toward the end of the presentation, Matt Dentler, head of Apple Original Films, asked how Caron would run his set.

Caron’s swift, tongue-in-cheek response was, “With a whip.”

The 50 other participants couldn’t study his delivery and body language, and there was silence. He saw his sister and producing partner, Jodie Caron, cringe. “I saw Julianne Moore laugh, and I was like, ‘OK.’ But most people were like, ‘I can’t believe you just said that.’ And I said it generally as a joke because often when I’m probably nervous, I laugh or make a joke. 

“It couldn’t be further from the truth. I don’t have a whip,” he explains, “and I don’t rule by iron fist. I’m a collaborator. As a director, I’m a filter of everyone’s brilliant ideas.”

By now aware that his humor hadn’t traveled well, “I was like, ‘Oh no, I mean with hugs.’ And then I was like, ‘Oh no, not with hugs either,’ because obviously you can’t hug people either,” he says.

Then he saw people laughing “and I think they knew I was joking,” he says.

He makes clear that he gives people permission to fail on set “because if they come with fear, they’re not going to do their best work.”

Sharper is set in the world of scam artists — ace grifters capable of removing the clothes off your back with remarkable often spectacular ease. And for a while, you’re never quite sure exactly who’s being played by whom.

Just who exactly is Tom, played by Justice Smith (Franklin Webb in the Jurassic World movies)? Is he friend or foe?

What about Briana Middleton’s Sandra, a drug addict who’s given a Pygmalion-esque makeover by Stan’s smooth-talking Max. 

Observing the multi-layered shenanigans from a swanky Central Park lair is Moore’s icy Madeline. And what does she see in billionaire Richard Hobbes, played by Caron’s old friend John Lithgow, who won an Emmy for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in an episode of The Crown that Caron directed.

It’s the one where Graham Sutherland paints a controversial portrait of the legendary statesman.

“They’re not who they say they are,” Caron cautions about folk in Sharper.

The film resonates because it arrives at a time when we’re all on our guard, fearful of being conned.

Is that WhatsApp from my son seeking emergency funds real? And why is my mother, who died decades ago, asking me to transfer her money to pay for a first-class ticket to visit Nigeria?!

“Being played is as old as time itself,” the filmmaker says. ”But I guess I’m aware of just how pervasive cheating and lying has become … but listen, I like to believe most people are trustworthy,” he adds.

But he doesn’t want us all to behave. Life would be dull. “I like good people that do bad things, and I like bad people that do good things,” he says. “And that’s sort of what I love about our characters in Sharper.” 

You can get away with anything, he muses, ”as long as you do it convincingly, full of confidence,” he says.

Caron wanted to understand “what sort of a thrill” is to be experienced when you’re doing a confidence game,” and he wanted to “try something that I’m not going to get arrested for” to help him when talking to his actors about why their characters lie and cheat.

The Tom Ford boutique in Manhattan became his mark, with him managing to obtain a massive discount when buying some shirts by claiming he was related to someone on a special rates list. “It’s like the most famous people in the world are on this list,” he explains.

His heart was pounding as the server at the Tom Ford store wrapped up his bundle. “I got the fear, the immense fear, like, ‘Oh my God — Tom Ford is friends with Julianne Moore. If he finds out about this ,he’s going to ring her up!”

“Every minute I thought I was going to get busted,” Caron recalls. But as he walked back to his hotel he had a “crazy buzz” in his head over what he’d pulled off.

A full disclosure was made to Moore. ”She laughed and she said, ‘I’m going to tell him.’ I don’t know whether she did tell him or not,” adding that Ford can send a bill for the rest of the money, which he’s happy to settle.

“I’m probably going to feel embarrassed I’ve told you that story,” he tells me. ”I would say it was down to research in terms of this movie to study how if you’re confident and convincing enough, you can convince someone of something.”

He remembers landing his first job, at 21, at Princess Productions with Henrietta Conrad and Sebastian Scott.

When he went in for an interview, Scott looked at him and asked him to find 10 druids for a live TV show the following day.

Where will he find them? he was asked. This was pre-internet days. ”You think on your feet. I was like: ‘I phone a pub in Stonehenge, and once you’ve found one, you’ll find the other nine druids.'”

He got the job.

I have watched Caron on set, observed his ease with cast and crew. It all clicks into place when he tells me of his upbringing, with his sister, at a pub near Stourbridge in the West Midlands, a pub, restaurant and hotel that his father has been licensee of for 55 years. 

He started washing glasses, then vehicles in the car park, eventually progressing to a location behind the bar.

”The thing I really remember is that all walks of life came into that pub. I’d be talking to a barrister, but then I’d be talking to a teacher, and then I’d be talking to someone who was a welder. One of the great things about my mum and dad was their ability to be able to move between all of those social backgrounds and find the connections. No artifice, just the love of people and listening to people and engaging with them and their stories. And I guess growing up in that environment, you just take that on by osmosis,” he tells me.

Caron says that he never feels intimidated by actors ”because I just see them as collaborators. I know this sounds mad, but I see them as human beings, and I see them as brilliant at what they do.”

He continues: ”But I also see all the other people that make a movie, and that goes from the grip to the sound recorders to the prop master.

“It’s like they’re all from different tribes. And I can almost instantly tell you what departments they’re from,” he boasts.

He says he loves making everyone feel that they’re all in it together. ”That’s where you get people’s best work. And so I guess you could argue that has possibly been as a result of growing up in a pub.”

There were other advantages to living on the premises of a popular boozer. 

Teachers from various schools in the area were attracted to the pub during happy hour. ”They’d be on their way home and my dad would give them free drinks if they’d help me do my maths homework. It was stuff he probably wasn’t great at, and he was like, ‘But I’ll help you do this,’” he says fondly.

The place became a nightclub on Mondays and Thursdays, and it would be packed. ”It was a very colorful upbringing,” he says, smiling.

The pub was Caron’s playground. When he was 8, he says, “I used to tie cushions to my body and throw myself down the stairs.”

He’d torment the babysitter by pretending to be injured. ”I’d be at the bottom of the stairs and have a blood capsule in my mouth and the sitter would freak out, run to the telephone and I’d jump up and and go, ‘I’m fine.’”

He wonders now whether the hijinks were a cry for attention.

David Lynch once told me that as a kid he used to wonder what strange things might be occurring outside, just beyond his backyard. Such thoughts, Lynch believes, helped foster his sense of the macabre.

Caron has an “outside” of his own. He remembers looking out a pub window around chucking-out time and seeing a punch-up going on. A chair would fly through the air. ”I didn’t see it hit someone, but then I just saw the blood coming back the other way. I really remember that as an image, but I almost see it as a shot in a film,” he tells me.

Or he’d watch Noel, the massive bouncer employed by his dad, bend a can of baked beans with his thumb. ”I’d be like, ‘Wow, you’re a real hardman.’”

He wonders now whether filmmaking for him has become a form of therapy that enables him to revisit his childhood through his work “to see how it plays out.”

His father has remarried and runs the pub with a cousin. Their proudest achievement, he says, was winning the Channel 4 reality show Four in a Bed. “My mum is single and she’s currently traveling around South America on a ship,” he says.

As a young kid he loved doing magic tricks, a fact that helps me understand why he was so attracted to working ,early on in his career, directing several television specials with the illusionist Brown, beginning with Derren Brown: The Heist in 2006. Caron has worked with Bruce Forsyth (Bruce Forsyth: A Comedy Roast) and directed episodes of Casualty, Hollyoaks, Scott & Bailey, Skins, Beaver Falls, Sherlock, My Mad Fat Diary\ and Wallander.

By now he was ready for royal duty on The Crown.

Caron says he’s proud of Morgan and the work they did together. He describes The Crown as a “long-lasting cultural legacy.”

Caron worked under the reigns of Claire Foy and Olivia Colman, both portraying the late Queen Elizabeth. He’s glad of the part he played in helping to cast Emma Corrin as Lady Diana, and we both rave about their commanding presence in Michael Grandage’s production of Orlando at the Garrick Theatre.

“They’re magnetic,” he says of Corrin.

Some of The Crown’s best moments feature the doomed union of the then-Prince Charles and Diana as portrayed so powerfully by Corrin and Josh O’Connor — performances that radiated heat.

Caron ponders that word: heat. “I think they vibrate,” he declares. “I think Emma vibrates. Josh vibrates and those two together were very vibraty, and I think going back to Claire [Foy] and Matt [Smith], they were very vibraty.

“I don’t think that’s a proper term, but let’s go with that for the moment because it sounds funny,” he says, as he laughs in between taking a bite from a sandwich.

“I think as a director you are just yearning for that from your actors – and also that unison that happens when you put them together,” he says.

Musing about “the truth of acting”, he theorizes that we communicate on so many different levels in terms of not just the words that we say. “But I think there’s all this amazing depth underneath there and that’s when I think great acting is happening.”

He feels the same way about Brianna Middleton in Sharper as he does about Corrin. Both of them “popped” on screen, he says.

Finding Middleton as she’s starting her career was a “real stroke of luck” coupled with the fact that the camera loves her, he says.

“I think she’s a natural movie star. This might be a weird thing to say. I was thinking back to Pretty Woman and Julia Roberts, and I was thinking there was something about [Middleton] and the charm and the effortlessness,” he tells me as I nod in agreement.

Before he embarked on Sharper, Caron was enticed by Tony Gilroy to direct three key episodes of the exciting Star Wars prequel series Andor. ”I’ve really enjoyed making a piece of fiction, having worked on a show for such a long time, you know, inspired by real people. I just was yearning to flex a different muscle, to just go from a historical period drama into an action adventure that was about as twisty and about-turn as you could possibly go,” he says. He then notes that he was asked by Gilroy to return to the Disney+ show but was unavailable to do so because he was committed to Sharper.

He’s clear about Sharper being a work of fiction and he’s sure The Crown is too, even though it’s about real people.

“Of course it’s drama, it’s fiction,” Caron insists. “You know [Morgan] is not in those rooms with those people. It’s like a portrait; it’s his impression of that world, but in many ways these are archetypes that he’s playing around with. It goes back to Greek mythology.”

He admits, though, that “something happens in your psychology when you read that something is ’based on real events.’ I guess it’s sort of natural, you think, ‘Did that really happen?’”

Everyone has found different ways of writing a disclaimer, “but there is that kind of thought bubble that happens at the beginning of that, where you go, ‘Wow, real life is just as mad as fiction.’” 

Caron was “dumbstruck” when Queen Elizabeth died in September. He remembers being with his wife, author, freelance journalist and former Vogue writer Charlotte Sinclair, and their two young sons, and he felt, with her majesty’s passing, that a “stabilizing force” had gone too.

“I’d spent so much time — not with her, but with other versions of the Queen, with Claire and obviously with Olivia — that I couldn’t not be affected in some way. She’s been there from the beginning of my life all the way through 46 years of my life,” he says poignantly.

Caron remembers watching the funeral, looking for moments and thinking, “I must remember that because maybe in 20 or 30 years someone’s going to be like, ”OK,Ben, we need to finish this story.’”

He relates how he and Morgan always talked about the need for there to be “a kind of healthy distance between now and where The Crown is.”

Caron adds that Morgan has “always talked about sort of 20 to 25 years distance, and I think the plan was always to finish [the story] around 2000.”

The thing that links his recent projects — The Crown, Andor and Sharper — is “the protein” in the writing, he says.

“You’ve got to work hard at it,but I think, hopefully, that it will stay with you and will nourish you.”

But Caron agrees that there’s a fine line between interpreting real lives and fictional lives.

It’s tricky, though, especially when the enthralling fiction of Sharper clashes, brilliantly, with my reality.

Sharper is in select U.S. theaters now. The film will stream worldwide on AppleTV+ from February 17 hit select UK cinemas the same day.