The Actor/Director

When I was a kid I used to watch Home Movies on Adult Swim, a show about kids who try to make movies with a hand held camera. I remember the main character, who was the director, saying at one point that he was going to switch roles with his friend and become the actor, because every director wants to act, and every actor wants to direct. Hollywood keeps proving this statement true. Spike Lee regularly appears in his own movies, Tarantino has done it, Kevin Smith wrote Silent Bob for himself, David Lynch acted in Twin Peaks, Martin Scorsese, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Fritz Lang, the list goes on of directors who have appeared in their own films. Then there are those who have had full time jobs as both actors and directors, most notably Orson Welles and Clint Eastwood. Both of them can be studied in either context, and often appear in their own work. But what I’m getting to are the actors, who make it big in Hollywood, and then try their hand at directing. These films are what interest me the most.
There are several great examples of this, and a couple bad ones as well. A talent in acting does not translate to a talent for directing, even if it does usually ensure you funding and names for your film. The weirdest example of this is probably Johnny Depp’s 1997 directorial debut The Brave. It’s a minimalist piece where him and Marlon Brando play Native Americans. Depp’s character, Raphael, is tired of watching his family live in poverty, so he decides to do a snuff film (an underground porno where they kill the person at the end) for ten thousand dollars so his family can have a better life. It is a very upsetting movie, and not a very good one, and since Depp has stayed out of the movie making business. He’s a very talented actor, and he plays his part in this movie well, and the original score by Iggy Pop didn’t hurt, but it probably was not as good as he had hoped.
My favorite film directed by a veteran actor is Billy Bob Thornton’s Sling Blade. Again, a sort of emotional and minimalist piece, as most of actor’s films seem to be. Sling Blade tells the story of a mentally retarded man named Carl being let out into the world after spending decades in a mental hospital, having previously murdered a boy and his own mother. It’s a very slow movie, but a very good one. Carl befriends a neighborhood boy named Frank, who is abused nightly by his mother’s redneck boyfriend. Thornton proves to be a very competent director/screenwriter with excellent use of lighting and color, and a very powerful opening monologue sequence where Carl explains why he did what he did to land him in the hospital.
It’s as if these actors have such a good role for themselves to play that they make an entire film around it. Anyway as I said these films can be hit or miss – Edward Norton’s Keeping the Faith was cute and a little silly, Marlon Brando’s One Eyed Jack’s was just weird, and Robert De Niro’s A Bronx Tale was funny and heartwarming. As I’ve previously mentioned I enjoy Danny DeVito’s film Death To Smoochy, I did not like Duplex though. Sean Penn’s film The Pledge is slightly different than most of these other films as he does not personal star in it and he refrains from giving the audience everything they want. In it, Jack Nicholson plays a cop who swears to a family that he will find the man who killed their daughter. The police find and execute a man for the crime, but Nicholson is not convinced and obsesses over finding the real culprit.
Finally, there are the unavoidable films of Mel Gibson. I grew up watching The Man Without a Face and Braveheart, so it’s hard for me to be objective about them, but I can fairly say I prefer the former. These are two great examples of an actor giving a great part to himself. He sort of ruined his reputation with The Passion of the Christ, although it was a tremendous success now he is pegged as a Christian ideologue. I haven’t seen it, and have no desire to, but it’s not hard to realize that it changed his reputation. His most recent film, 2006’s Apocolypto, was much better than anyone was really ready to give him credit for. Using a cast of all unknown brown people speaking Mayan, it tells the story of Jaguar Paw, a Mayan caught in the middle of tribal warfare. It caught a lot of people off guard by how good it was. If it wasn’t for the subsequent meltdowns, Mel Gibson might have been able to continue a career as a film director.