Director Saul Metzstein on the set of Dinosaurs on a Spaceship (2012).
The first thing I thought when I saw the script was that we’d never get it made,” says Saul Metzstein of 2012’s Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, the first of the five episodes of Doctor Who he directed. “They’re on a Triceratops running through a spaceship, chased by robots firing laser guns… I just thought, ‘No way!’”
But Saul had come straight from being second unit director on the movie Dredd (2012) and was surely used to action-packed sci-fi. “Yes, but on Doctor Who you can shoot up to six or seven pages of script a day, which is hellish when you’re doing special effects, visual effects, monsters and robots. On Dredd, there was hardly a day when I shot more than one page! That’s a massive difference. On Doctor Who, every day should be a disaster – you’re halfway through the afternoon and you look at the schedule and think, ‘We’re totally screwed!’ But the crew we had were amazing. They could just get everything done.”