STEPHEN ROBERT MORSE

Stephen Robert Morse (Green-Templeton, 2015) is on a serious hot streak. As the director and producer behind How to Rob a Bank-the wildly popular Netflix documentary that dropped this June (2024) and quickly soared to stellar reviews-he's making waves on both sides of the Atlantic. Settled now in Primrose Hill, London, Morse brings an infectious energy to his conversations about the film business, and you can easily picture him in the heart of Hollywood. But he prefers the creative calm of London to the frenetic buzz of New York or the gridlock of Los Angeles. "I like to walk everywhere," he says, noting how going car-free improves his quality of life and sparks fresh ideas.

Still, Morse is quick to emphasize that geography is more flexible than ever in today's entertainment world: scripts get written and deals get done anywhere the Wi-Fi is strong. When the cameras roll, yes, he'll be on location-wherever that happens to be. But a quarter of the year in production mode still leaves plenty of time to think, write, and negotiate from wherever you're happiest.

For Morse, that's currently the UK, whose film and digital sectors have become dynamic hotbeds of creativity and innovation. It didn't hurt that the pandemic era saw a flood of cash into content creation, giving audiences endless choices on demand. But what once felt like a boom is now showing signs of cooling off. 'This past year has been an ongoing winter in the sector,' he says. While the writers' and actors' strikes have reached a temporary resolution, Morse points out that the current contracts are short-term fixes that don't meaningfully address how AI is reshaping the entire film and TV landscape. The reality? Three years from now, 'we might be working under a whole new rulebook-one heavily influenced by emerging technologies,' he says.

Morse has firsthand experience with the changing tides. How to Rob a Bank, which he co-directed with Seth Porges, dives into the exploits of Scott Scurlock, a.k.a. 'The Hollywood Bandit.' Scurlock managed to rob 19 banks in Seattle between 1992 and 1996, in an era long before smartphones and ubiquitous surveillance. The documentary deploys a rich tapestry of animation-once a painstaking, expensive, and hands-on process. Now, Morse foresees a world where AI-driven tools slash those costs and timelines: 'Virtual and augmented reality could revolutionize how we recreate the past and dazzle audiences. Even documentary storytelling, which relies on true stories, might adopt more efficient tech for post-production, allowing creators to do more with less,' he says with enthusiasm.

The timing is apt. How to Rob a Bank is at once a throwback and a cutting-edge piece of filmmaking. It conjures a nostalgic '90s Seattle vibe when the public half-admired daring robbers as modern folk heroes, while also highlighting the streaming revolution that's captured our attention. Just this summer, YouTube announced it controls more than 10% of U.S. TV viewership. That's bigger than many cable channels, and Netflix and Disney+ hold another 8-9% each. Add it all up, and you see how deeply digital platforms have transformed media consumption-and how fluid this industry has become.

Morse's journey started far from today's sleek streaming universe. He grew up on the South Shore of Long Island, camera always at the ready. At the University of Pennsylvania, he directed and produced Ain't Easy Being Green for his senior thesis, a piece he still counts as 'prescient' because it highlighted the great efforts of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party to kick a Green Party candidate off the ballot using every legal and illegal manoeuvre available to them -- which repeated itself with now former Senator Bob Casey fighting for his political life this past November.

Later, Morse headed to Oxford's Saïd Business School in 2015, determined to master the business fundamentals beneath all great filmmaking. 'I wanted to learn the business side, not just wing it,' he says. He left with an MBA and a network of a hundred brilliant friends-plus the strategic savvy to fund and support films that push creative boundaries.

So what does a documentary pro like Morse watch when he's off the clock? He names classics like Andrew Jarecki's Capturing the Friedmans (2003) and Marshall Curry's Oscar-nominated Street Fight (2005) as great influences on his work. He also cites the unvarnished honesty of The Blue View, a 2020 book by Rodney Muterspaw chronicling 30 years in the life of a police officer in Middletown, Ohio. And he's itching to adapt corporate saga Kochland (2019) into a feature film or series, seeing in it a narrative that cuts straight to the heart of America's economic machine.

If Morse's name rings a bell, it might be thanks to Amanda Knox, one of Netflix's first breakout true-crime documentaries, which earned him his first Emmy nomination. Or maybe you've caught EuroTrump on Hulu or In the Cold Dark Night on ABC/Hulu/Amazon/BET+, both of which garnered rave reviews and another Emmy nod. He also produced Bad Hombres for Showtime and co-executive produced Fugitive: The Mystery of the Crypto Queen on Channel 4 in the UK. Outside of film, he co-founded SkillBridge, a tech startup later snapped up by Andreessen Horowitz-backed Toptal. This entrepreneurial background shapes Morse's daily work, making him a business-minded director and producer who can navigate the big questions of technology, distribution, and financing as deftly as he directs a shoot.

At the end of the day, Morse believes in marrying creativity with commerce to bring challenging, original stories to life. As he lines up projects at his production outfit, Morse Code Group, he's staying laser-focused on what makes a film truly memorable: authenticity, rich characters, and the kind of narrative that lingers in the mind long after the credits roll. The tech might change, the distribution channels might diversify, but Morse is confident that great storytelling-like Scurlock's daring heists-will always find a way to captivate us.