Auteur know better: can the actor-to-director transition ever go smoothly?

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/apr/08/auteur-know-better-actor-director-transition

Version 0 of 1.

When Ryan Gosling’s Lost River is released on Friday in the US, we’ll see the latest example of an actor getting behind the camera and directing. That progression makes sense: while acting involves a very specific kind of ability and craft, directing gets to the broader scope of film-making.

It allows you to try the whole spread, and there are many ways to do so. You can be the auteur: micro-managing every aspect of your production, writing the script and storyboarding the shots and signing off on every detail. Or you can be a conductor: assembling a crack squad of pros (a screenwriter and a director of photography, assistant directors and so on), and allowing them to help you learn how to direct and figure out how best to manage that team.

Related: Ethan Hawke and Seymour Bernstein: Hollywood's unlikeliest double act

With Lost River, Gosling’s chosen to write and direct without acting, which means he’s using all his untested skills and sidelining the one that made him famous. But in the scale of how an actor can transition to film-making, where does it rank in terms of degree of difficulty?

One option is to make a documentary. This is a different task entirely than making a feature film, for all of the obvious reasons: your subject isn’t fictional, reporting and journalistic duties are required, etc. I’d place it outside the spectrum of actors transitioning to directing, because of these details and also because there are many ways to shepherd a documentary to the screen; for example, both Ethan Hawke and Lena Dunham have released documentaries in the past month, but Hawke directed his (Seymour: An Introduction), whereas Dunham executive produces and features in hers (It’s Me, Hilary: The Man Who Drew Eloise).

The safest and most manageable way to make the switch to feature directing, then, might be to stick to what you’re good at. Kevin Costner (Dances With Wolves), Clint Eastwood (Play Misty for Me), Edward Norton (Keeping the Faith), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Jack Goes Boating), Ethan Hawke (Chelsea Walls), Tommy Lee Jones (The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada), and Jodie Foster (Little Man Tate) all chose as to direct and star in another person’s script for their first directorial efforts.

That way, they could take advantage of the fame and goodwill that they’d accumulated as actors, not to mention the relative luxury of getting to direct themselves, without having to dive all the way in and write the film as well. By virtue of being on a set and interacting so closely with the film-makers and crew, acting can give you a real sense of what it takes to direct a movie, particularly if you rely on a crew you trust. But in the same way reading novels doesn’t mean you can write them, memorizing scripts for a living doesn’t guarantee you’ve got a screenplay in you.

Plenty of actors do though. Looking at the list of credits for the debuts of Steve Buscemi (Trees Lounge), Tom Hanks (That Thing You Do!), Lake Bell (In a World), and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Don Jon) is to see the same three names in the first three spots. So did some guy named Orson Welles, as well as the brilliant DIY film-makers Shane Carruth and Joe Swanberg, but none of them established their reputations as actors first.

There’s an interesting safety in taking this much control over, safety not meant to be pejorative here: the substance of the movie becomes so deeply attached to your identity and vision that it shrinks the scope of the project a bit, makes it personal. It’s the closest film-making comes to being novelistic, in that the natural mechanism of making a film – a ton of people working together – shrinks around a single “auteur”. As it often is, the word auteur can be deceptive; you never know how much of what’s on-screen is attributable to the director and how much of it comes from the director of photography, the writer, or someone else. But when the film’s credentials start and end with your name, there’s a pretty good chance you had some real sway over it.

Related: Ryan Gosling opens up about Lost River's autobiographical roots at SXSW

A different approach – and I’d say slightly riskier, because you’re no longer trading on your own acting reputation – is to not star in the film. In Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, George Clooney played a role, but he let Sam Rockwell take the limelight. Robert Redford directed Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore to four Oscars, including best picture, in Ordinary People. But it’s actually hard to find examples of these debuts in which the actor chose just to direct, not write or star also. More common is that the actor is involved from the top on down, even if they don’t get on screen. Ben Affleck didn’t appear in a single frame of Gone Baby Gone, instead putting his brother Casey in the lead, but he wrote screenplay with his longtime collaborator Aaron Stockard. Angeline Jolie wrote and directed In the Land of Blood and Honey without acting in it, and Sarah Polley did the same with Away from Her.

This is the road/waterway Gosling’s taken with Lost River, and all the more impressive, he’s apparently made a movie in the vein of David Lynch, and Nicolas Winding Refn, Gosling’s frequent collaborator and an idiosyncratic iconoclast in his own right. Even if the booing at Lost River’s Cannes debut seemed to indicate that, at least for some, Gosling stuck close to these directors to the point of being derivative, his ambition has to be respected, as does his desire to do a movie in which his enormous reputation – and the fact that’s launched a thousand think pieces – is nowhere to be seen.