James Buchanan

Producing and directing of BBC Maestro's most significant and ambitious course to date, with the renowned actor Brian Cox generously imparts his insights garnered from over six decades on stage and screen.

This comprehensive course revolves around Brian's intimate, direct-to-camera lessons, skillfully guiding students through his method of preparing, interpreting, and delivering a performance. The program is enriched by in-depth conversations with some of Brian’s outstanding collaborators, including casting director Nancy Bishop, writer and showrunner Jesse Armstrong, and co-star Miranda Richardson.

To provide an immersive experience, we captured over an hour of drama workshops, featuring a remarkable assembly of young actors. Viewers witness Brian's adept advice, as he steers and refines the cast’s performances.

Edit Producing on the most successful documentary series on American cable television. The Accused is an observational true crime project, following those charged with the most serious offences as they prepare for trial. Months of intimate filming with defence teams and the accused’s families lead to compelling stories told without VoiceOver and in the present tense.

The series requires exceptionally thorough understanding of legal processes, powerful storytelling and great resourcefulness - as legal reviews and the twists and turns of each story demand flexibility right up to the moment of picture lock.

This project has been so much fun to exec-produce and direct. The format is simple – take fascinating actors, authors and musicians; give them access to some of the most amazing artefacts in the astonishing British Library collection; and then back off for an hour while they explore the treasures with passionate expert curators.

We’ve filmed 11 episodes with talent including feted jazz artist Jamie Cullum, legendary children’s author Julia Donaldson and spellbinding actor Andrew Scott. We have filmed everything from the first edition of Hamlet, through the original plasticine models of Winnie the Pooh to Beethoven’s tuning fork.

Working with:

Richard Dale, Victoria Page (Directors)

LEARN FROM THE WORLD’S BEST.

MasterClass focuses cinematic production standards and spellbinding expertise on a single mission statement - what can we all learn from the true world-leaders of their fields?

Across my Emmy-nominated classes we prepared though months of dedicated research, countless calls and planning sessions with the talent involved and meticulous blocking out of every demo, case study and student session. Filmed on custom built sets, the cinematic scale crew achieve a defining look for every class. The edits bring a level of documentary creativity and rigour to the cutting, graphics, grade and mix.

During my time showrunning and directing at MasterClass I have overseen classes with Bill Nye, Malala, Alexis Ohanian, George Stephanopoulos, Indra Nooyi, Michael Pollan and Amanda Gorman - the latter being nominated for the 2023 Emmy Awards.

This series lifts the lid on giant factories to show how the everyday staples of British life are produced in mind boggling assembly lines. Directing the Christmas episode, I told the story of how an iconic British holiday food product, mince pies, was created at a mega factory in Yorkshire. 

The actual assembly line, from pastry mixer to packaging robot, spans 120 yards and lasts about 95 minutes. But to capture it in all its glory we used three separate camera teams; slow motion, crane-jibs and a drone; fun scenes with a dozen workers along the assembly line; and almost neurotic attention to every last fact, statistic and detail.

Together with our much-loved and quirky host, Greg Wallace, this fun format reveals the truly incredible story of products you can pick up in any supermarket.

Working with:
Sam Bailey (Director)

The premise is simple – we show you that an international hub airport is the most heavily controlled and engineered space on the planet, revealing exactly how it can fly millions of passengers a year to destinations across the globe.

This series was a producing challenge bringing many complex factors together. We had to build incredibly deep access and trust with dozens of teams and companies operating at Frankfurt Airport; manage filming across four continents, using seven types of camera; had to design and commission over 60 minutes of ground breaking CGI.

The result was a complete, mesmerising showcase of the wonders of engineering that are gigantic hub airports.

Working with:

Ross Young, Graham Strong, Colin Campbell (Directors)

Directing the US shoots on an award-winning corporate documentary series. The project showcased the revolutionary capabilities of green start-ups invested in by global energy company Shell.

Silicon Ranch, based in Nashville, are a pioneering American solar farm company, operating giant arrays of solar cells in states from coast to coast.

Greenlots, based in Los Angeles, will allow vehicle fleet operators to transition seamlessly to all-electric cars and trucks. Greenlots technology and expertise can guide everything from the placement of charging stations to managing the battery levels of hundreds of vehicles.

A landmark history series for Channel 4. I developed this project for Pioneer Productions, from initial one-liner through to 8-part commission. Each episode was presented by a different well known figure, with acclaimed writers, politicians, scientists and journalists each giving their very personal take on a key period of Christianity’s history.

After the commission and casting I then directed the film, hosted by redoubtable Conservative politician Anne Widdecombe. This film allowed Anne to explore her own faith and conversion from the Anglicanism to Catholicism. This informed her narrative of the tumultuous history of the Reformation, as we reviewed the upheaval of Luther’s defiance, Paris’s St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the lasting bitterness of sectarianism on the streets of Northern Ireland.

Your son’s face is being eaten alive by bacteria; a fungus is growing a colony in your lungs; black mould has found its way into your breast implants. The tiniest killers can be deadlier, tougher and creepier than an shark, lion or wolf. 

 My episode of this hit series was filmed with three families who had overcome, just, the worst the microbial world has to throw at us.

The film was centred on long, detailed and highly emotional interviews with the survivors and their families. This was then married with highly stylised dramatic reconstruction of the gruelling but ultimately successful fight with the deadly parasites. 

I produced and directed the Norman Pembrokeshire film in the Walking Through History series for Channel 4. Presented by Sir Tony Robinson, this series follows a simple but revealing format - a walk through one of Britiain’s most stunning landscapes and an exploration of that region’s turbulent history.

Amongst the rugged beaches, meandering rivers and sleepy villages of Welsh Pembrokeshire we found a story of Medieval conflict, as the rampant Norman conquerors of England pressed on into the furthest corners of Britain. But amongst the sieges, ambushes and battles there was also a dazzling multicultural culture, royal affairs and social progress.

The entire production was filmed in a hectic four days, directing two separate camera crews to capture stunning scenery and gripping narrative.

A true landmark series for Discovery Channel, funded at $1m an episode, featuring celebrity interviews, high-budget drama and astonishing documentary footage. It was watched by over 80 million viewers worldwide.

 The series profiled the incredible invention stories of skyscrapers, airplanes, cars, mobile phones and guns.

Drama scenes (filmed in South Africa), recaptured the moments when the Wright Brothers cracked the secrets of flight, when Ford perfected the assembly line and the Empire State Building was struck by an aircraft. Interviews with Eric Schmidt, Buzz Aldrin, Marty Cooper, Jay Leno, Richard Branson, Chesley Sullenberger and many others gave us insights on the nature of invention.

Working with:

Jonathan Rudd, Chris Hook, David Hutt (Directors)

What makes someone a genius? Can we ever become a cyborg? How does our brain pull off the mental tour de force that is lying? This series brought together a barrage of serious science and pop appeal to explain the greatest mysteries of our brains. 

We filmed with chess masters, daredevil risk addicts and a woman who could instantly connect with any person, animal, even buildings. Our host, neuroscientist Dr. Jack Lewis, took part in experiments where he was shocked with electricity, hypnotised and controlled a computer game with his brainwaves alone. And we used a street magician, Pete Heat, to bring the science to life, manipulating the brains of passers by with his magical tricks.

Putting all of this together on an incredibly tight budget was a massive challenge but the result was a hugely enjoyable, information rich plunge into the workings of our brain.

Working with:

Nathaniel Walters, Matt Pothecary, Kate Dart (Directors)

The first film I ever directed, and a gift of a subject.

This National Geographic documentary told the complete story of the Hubble Space Telescope, from the incredible engineering of its design, through the heart stopping space walk to fix a crucial error, to the truly astonishing celestial wonders that Hubble has shown us and helped explain.

The story was told by the original engineers who designed the telescope back in the 1970s, the Shuttle astronauts who fixed it in orbit and the astronomers who use Hubble to make breakthroughs to this day.

This project was a fascinating collaboration. Paris-based production company Pernel Media and French channel RMC wanted to add an “Anglo-American” tone of investigation and storytelling to a series covering the world’s great monuments. 

 So I directed the research and wrote the shooting scripts for two of the episodes, exploring the medieval wonders of Mont Saint-Michel in France and the stone-hewn beauty of Petra in Jordan.

Working with a research and production team 6,000 miles away, across two or occaisionally three different languages and learning more about each country’s production terminology and culture was very rewarding.

The resulting films have stunning visuals, dramatic storytelling and have been a ratings success for RMC.

Could you imagine riding up 102,000 feet, in a small metal canister suspended underneath an enormous helium balloon… and then jumping off. You fall, plummeting close to the speed of sound, for a full four and a half minutes before your parachute opens and glide back down to Earth. Only then do you inform ground control that your protective suit had developed a fault soon after take-off. That’s exactly what scientific daredevil Joe Kittinger did in 1960.

Retelling Kittinger’s dramatic journey to the stratosphere and back was the spine of this film, which looked at the incredible role our atmosphere plays in life on Earth.

We interviewed NASA scientists, dived in the Mexican pools where oxygen was first produced and discovered how life might adapt to the air on other planets. But nothing surpassed the terror and wonder of Joe’s journey into the air above us.

A countdown series, profiling the world’s ten most extreme bridges, roads, tunnels, airports, waterways and railways. Each of the six episodes tackled a different type of infrastructure and showed its different perilous examples across the world.

We explained the natural or manmade perils that made each location a hazard; showed the resourceful engineering that allowed people and trade to keep flowing over the route.

But we then went beyond that to show the astonishing human stories. In India, we rode on the roofs of the incredibly crowded commuter trains; we followed motorbike adventurers in Siberia riding the rough gravel roads built by gulag prisoners; in Bolivia we drove the cliff-edge Death Road with local truckers.

This series involved co-ordinating filming on seven continents, in over thirty countries, using dozens of different filming teams and stringers.

Working with:

Sam Miller, Rob Kaplan, Richard Turley, Russell England (Directors)