Stuart Urban

Currently Stuart is writing and exec producing ‘Let This Be Our Secret’ (working title) a greenlit miniseries for ITV Drama and Hat Trick. It is a 3-part true crime drama starring James Nesbitt.
A film-maker since 1982, Stuart has made highly regarded, award winning popular TV drama and movies that have sold around the world, winning him two British Academy (and other) awards.
At 13, Stuart had his first film shown at the Cannes Film Festival. The Virus of War was a thirty-minute 16mm drama about a fascist outpost on some British Islands in the Atlantic. It is preserved in the National Film Archive. After graduating from Balliol College, Oxford, with a first class degree in Modern History, Stuart worked as writer, director and producer. His first feature-length BBC drama, ‘An Ungentlemanly Act’ dramatising the first 36 hours of the Falklands War starring Ian Richardson and Bob Peck, won a BAFTA as Best Single Drama and many international awards.
From 1994-95, Urban directed ‘Our Friends in the North’ starring Daniel Craig, the most successful drama for 15 years on BBC2, which won him another BAFTA for Best Drama Serial. It was recently voted the number three television drama of all time by The Guardian’s critics’ panel.
In 1995, he wrote the $6 million HBO/BBC film ‘Deadly Voyage’ that won Silver Nymph for Best Screenplay at Monte Carlo and proved one of HBO’s most popular movies of the year.
In 1997, through his company Cyclops Vision, he wrote, produced and directed cult comedy ‘Preaching to the Perverted’, theatrically released in 23 countries and a popular title on the film festival circuit. This 1997 cult comedy was theatrically released in 23 countries and a popular title on the film festival circuit. Tribute clubs to the film formed in several countries and there are over 500,000 views of its excerpts, trailers and mash-ups on YouTube. Recently the first European film to be revived by crowdfunding on Kickstarter.
In 1999, Harold Pinter chose Stuart to co-write, produce and hard-hitting documentary attacking the NATO bombing of Serbia for the BBC and Cyclops Vision.
From 2000-2001 he co-produced, wrote and directed ‘Revelation’, a Cyclops Vision Production for Romulus Films. This mystical/supernatural thriller stars Terence Stamp and Udo Kier and was shot in Europe and the Mediterranean. It concerns the quest to locate and understand a relic that heralds the fusion of science and religion. Budget is $8.5 million and it was theatrically released in UK April 2002, playing for 5 weeks in the West End. It sold widely and Alexander Walker of the Evening Standard found it “excellent…a film with a brain behind it”.
He has also directed factual television, for example BBC’s ‘Panorama’.
May I Kill U? (2013) starring Kevin Bishop and Frances Barber, is a black comedy about a cycling bobby who goes rogue after the London riots. Released theatrically UK, USA, Russia and elsewhere, it won a Silver Melies as one of the best European genre films of the year. Philip French of The Observer described it as “funny, sharp and ruthless”, while Bizarre Magazine said it was “hilarious and thought-provoking in equal measure”.