Since the very first directorial cameos – George Méliès’ sorcerer-like appearances in The Vanishing Lady and Playing Cards in the 1890s – directors have often been unable to resist being in front of, as well as behind, the camera.” M Night Shyamalan, a film-maker notoriously eager to appear in his own work speaks for all these frustrated thespians: “It’s important for me to be a part of the film in some way […] I would love to play the lead role, but it’s physically impossible.”
An ever-growing league of multi-hyphenate actor-directors have, however, been proving Shyamalan wrong. Aside from the obvious heavyweights in 20th-century cinema who juggled on and off-camera personae (Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, Warren Beatty, Laurence Olivier, Charlie Chaplin et al), the past decade has seen a staggering influx of actors deciding to direct – and often casting themselves as the main character – in their own films. Michael B Jordan went from squaring up inside the ring in Creed to escaping it (and of course getting back into it) eight years later in Creed III as actor-director, while Meg Ryan, after decades of starring in swoony romcoms, last year became pilot of the airport romcom What Happens Later. Greta Gerwig went from performing (and sometimes writing) indie comedies such as Frances Ha and Damsels in Distress to mainstream Hollywood with Barbie. Meanwhile, Anna Kendrick is centre stage in all senses in her dating show serial killer thriller mashup (aptly named) Woman of the Hour. And Dev Patel, hankering after roles with more ass kicking than he’d previously been permitted, wanted in on the action, literally, with Monkey Man. The list goes on.
But the question still stands: how do they do it? Perhaps disappointingly, joint acting-directing is not a matter of superhumanly defying the laws of time and space. As veteran actor-director Elia Suleiman explains, it often involves a constant dashing in and out of scenes to get each shot right. With his Buster Keaton-esque skewering of the absurdity of life under Israeli occupation in films including Divine Intervention and It Must Be Heaven, rendered in impeccably symmetrical, precise compositions, this requires a colossal amount of fine-tuning. “I really did not even anticipate what complications it would entail,” Suleiman says. “It’s quite exhausting actually […] and you have to shift your mental and emotional state between acting and going back to see as director on the monitor how it is shot.”
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Added to that is the challenge of galvanising the best performance from one’s cast, when that cast is mainly yourself. “Everybody from the unit departments around you thinks that you are ready to just jump in front of the frame, because you are the director, so you know exactly how you’re going to behave in front of the screen,” says Suleiman. The reality, with all the cumbersome logistical, financial and temporal pressures on set, is very different. “You’re not given as much time as you give the other actors. Usually, I’m left till the end, without rehearsals.”
To cope with the cognitive strain of sustaining the actor-plus-director mentality, Suleiman says he calculates his character’s exact number of steps and, rehearsing in the mirror, plans an itinerary of facial expressions. Lake Bell (In a World …), on the other hand, enlists an acting coach. “I say [to them], I’d like to work on these scenes as if someone else wrote it, as if I’m not directing,” Bell says. “While I’m prepping and I’m doing all these other things, I show up for a two-hour or an hour’s session with that in mind, and then I take notes about all the things that I learn.”
Bell plays a wannabe voiceover artist fending for herself in an industry dominated by men (including her own father) in the wryly funny In a World …, and is one half of a fed-up couple in I Do … Until I Don’t. She has another trick up her acting-directing sleeve. “I’ve had the same stand-in for a really long time who somewhat shares my likeness – because that’s part of the stand-in process – but also understands my cadence and how I move,” she says. “She has to know all the lines and watch me during rehearsal, then emulate everything I do. I keep her in until the last minute. When I bring in all the main actors, I’m having her act with them, so that I can see the frame, see where I move.”
Taking on a hybrid actor-director role can leave limited bandwidth for cast camaraderie, or to keep a close eye on everything going on behind the scenes. Fresh from his second foray into acting-directing with The Dead Don’t Hurt, a pensive western, Viggo Mortensen says: “I think that’s probably tough on the other actor. If you think about it, I’m acting with you in a scene and the normal thing, depending on the relationship, [is] you might be talking, saying, ‘How are you doing? I think that was pretty good. What do you think?’ You’re in contact. An umbilical cord is there.”
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Despite what might be lost in actor-to-actor bonding, Mortensen says he favours this method. “I’m totally, 100% present, which is what one always should be as an actor … As a director I find that you don’t have time to be anything but. So, even though it’s more tiring to do both things, strictly in terms of acting and what I get on a screen this is more efficient. I don’t need more than a take or two.”
Bell agrees: “There is an efficiency of storytelling and tone when you have a creator that’s doing a lot of things. It becomes very unique and specific, which I think in art is a strength if it can be delivered well. When you are an artist that writes, directs, acts, produces, you have been living with the material for so long, by the time you arrive at getting to make it you have all that seasoned flavour.”
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Another repercussion of actors occupying the director’s chair seems to be the prioritisation of the performances in the final cut. “What I said to the actors is, I’m always going to cut to the actor,” says Patricia Arquette of her recent 1970s-set biopic Gonzo Girl. “I don’t think anyone’s ever 100% done that with my performances. I said to them, ‘I promise you that I will 100% cut to performances all the time.’”
Perhaps partly because of this, actor-directors often find themselves in the firing line. While studios actively encourage A-listers to star in their own movies (Arquette and Mortensen are actors turned reluctant actor-directors), recent vitriol heaped on Chris Pine’s Poolman and George Clooney’s The Boys in the Boat may reveal that the reverence for actor-director “auteurs” such as Eastwood, Woody Allen and Kevin Costner (whose two-chapter epic Horizon: An American Saga has struggled to find an audience) is waning.
After all, this veneration may be slightly misplaced. When directors step in front of the camera, decision-making inevitably winds up falling to other members of the crew, with assistant directors, producers and directors of photography given more room to speak up. Armani Ortiz, a protege of fellow actor-director Tyler Perry, goes as far as to say that his entire cast took part in the directorial process for his TV series Perimeter. “The actors felt like I had skin in the game also,” he says. “Me being in the trenches with them meant [we] were able to build a bigger family dynamic. They had the director’s mind as well.” So maybe casting oneself as the lead in your own film is not an act of vanity as the meanest critics say, but a selfless deed of sharing.
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