Appeal of the Director's Chair

This month, screen-legends Robert De Niro and Clint Eastwood are joined by fellow movie superstar Mel Gibson, in seeing their latest directorial offerings transfer to DVD. De Niro’s The Good Shepherd, a compelling yet ultimately disappointing spy drama telling the story of the birth of the CIA, is only his second film as director. In contrast, Eastwood builds on an already esteemed directing career with Flags Of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima, two separate films looking at the crucial World War II battle, from both the American and Japanese perspectives. Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto (as the publicity sometimes reads) forms the director’s more relaxed follow-up to the massively successful Passion of the Christ.

Historically, big-name actors have had generally smooth transitions to the director’s chair, and the Academy has responded generously. Two of the biggest travesties in Oscar’s history have involved A-List actors moving behind the camera, and the loser on both occasions has been Martin Scorsese. Raging Bull, perhaps the greatest sports film in cinema history, was beaten to Best Picture in 1980 by Ordinary People, Robert Redford’s family drama, and his directorial debut. A decade later, GoodFellas, routinely celebrated as the greatest film of the 1990s, and a clear showcase of Scorsese at his artistic best, fell victim to Dances With Wolves, Kevin Costner’s fairy-tale Western, and coincidentally also his directorial debut. The reality is that Oscar has long carried a conservative leaning and has a strong history of favouring the most openly conscientious filmmaking, regardless of whether the most conscientious is also best. Ordinary People was a study of the American family unit disintegrating from the inside, whilst Dances With Wolves was the first of contemporary Hollywood’s revisionist Westerns, following a Unionist soldier’s trip to the Frontier, and the relationship he forms with the Indians he finds there (and, for the record, the Indians of the Mid-West who I’ve spoken to think of themselves as both Indians and Native Americans).

The Oscar success of Dances With Wolves paved the way for Eastwood’s astonishing revisionist Western Unforgiven, which came two years later in 1992. Eastwood directed himself in Unforgiven, as Costner had done in Dances With Wolves. As ever, the bottom line in Hollywood is financial, and even the biggest names in the business face constant pressure from the studios to deliver on their investment. Mel Gibson directed historic epic Braveheart only on the studio-imposed condition that he also take the starring role of William Wallace. The producers were only too aware that with only one low-key entry on Gibson’s directing CV (1993’s The Man Without a Face), his name was worth far more on the cast-list than it was on the crew. In the past few years, however, Gibson has become a force unto himself through the stunning global success of The Passion of the Christ. Turned down by every studio, Gibson invested around $20million of his own money. Despite the film’s bloodletting making it more akin to the Saw franchise than to The Ten Commandments or The Greatest Story Ever Told, the Christian movie-going public responded in their masses, with church groups block-booking theatres across the US. Gibson walked away as the wealthiest actor in the world, with $800million in global box-office.

The creative freedom that Gibson now enjoys has most recently resulted in the superior Apocalypto, a grandly presented tale set against the backdrop of the last days of the Mayan civilisation in Central America. For all its marketing pretensions, however, the film tells a simple tale of a young tribesman kidnapped following an attack on his village, and his subsequent attempts to escape and rejoin his family.

So long as someone else’s money is at stake, however, terms and conditions apply. George Clooney, while routinely celebrated in the media as encapsulating what remains of Hollywood’s integrity, is an individual who plays the game with aplomb. Through the likes of Batman & Robin, The Peacemaker and Out of Sight, he established himself as an A-Lister, before making his directorial debut in 2002 with Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. The film was a low-key success, and his next film as director, the excellent Good Night, and Good Luck, telling the story of pioneering broadcaster Ed Murrow, won more attention from the Academy than from the movie-going public. With his true filmmaking interests failing to make big impressions at the box-office, he has been forced to satisfy the studios by playing supporting roles in the films he directs, whilst also balancing his output with more commercial fare. The most obvious of these has been the Oceans 11 franchise, remade from the rat-pack original, and then spawning two sequels of its own. The films have been, on the most part, a lot of fun, but ultimately disposable. However, they have been commercial enough to bring studio funding to projects that Clooney is more passionate about, such as Good Night, and Good Luck.

Ultimately, the director's chair clearly hold its appeal. A body of screen-work under the guidance of myriad distinct directors, can create their own insightful stamps on an actor seeking to make the transition. Perhaps crucially, however, a career in the director's chair, and behind the scenes in a wider sense, generally carries a greater longevity than is offered before the camera, especially in modern cinema. It is longevity that established actors tend to identify among their primary objectives, as they sets their sights on the future.