Denouement: When a Directorial Career Goes Awry
To be entirely honest with you, that post I wrote earlier about Jim Sheridan -- who, if you would have asked us "who is your favorite director working today" in 2002, would have at least been in the top five -- depressed me to no end. When you find a filmmaker whose work you truly adore, you find yourself following his/her career in a way that's almost parental: You just want your kid to make the right decisions, to be happy and to reach his/her potential. And when it goes wrong, it's not just the filmmaker who suffers; it's his/her fans, the people who, at one point, so admired his/her work that it almost felt like their own.
It really hurts when it falls apart, when a director either loses too much money on a film or takes the wrong path or just loses the creative spark. I tend to follow my favorite directors' careers almost like I do my favorite athletes', from superstars like Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher the Coen Brothers, to grizzled, wily vets like Clint Eastwood and Steven Spielberg, to the up-and-comer prospects like Jeff Nichols. When you see one of your early favorites struggle for a while and then break through, like a Darren Aronofsky or a David O. Russell, the triumph feels, in a way, like your own. Someone whose work you championed and invested yourself in paid off; the rest of the world now knows what you know, and it feels great.
And then there are the ones who go wrong. The ones you believed in, the ones you thought would be making serious, intelligent, entertaining films for decades to come ... and end up directing "Dream House" or "Abduction." (I talked about John Singleton's heartbreaking collapse last week.) The offense is almost personal: I trusted you, man, and now you're farting around with Taylor Lautner? What happened to you?
Of course, there is value in someone who could engender such loyalty in the first place, which is why fans always end up feeling so disappointed and betrayed. But moviemaking is a job like anything else; sometimes you gotta pay the bills, and your priorities when you're 50 are awfully different than they were when you're in your twenties and hungry. A filmmaking career is just that: A career. Not everyone gets to be Woody Allen or Martin Scorsese or even Mike Leigh, with that sort of freedom for decades. You gotta make choices. Jim Sheridan chooses to make "Get Rich or Die Tryin'." John Singleton chooses to make "Abduction." Ang Lee chooses to make "Taking Woodstock." Oliver Stone turns into whatever the hell he has turned into. They don't know me. They don't owe me anything.
It still hurts. I'm gonna go see "Dream House" on Friday, and when it's over, I'm gonna go watch "In America" and maybe even "In the Name of the Father" or "The Boxer" and pretend that he stopped, then, back in 2002, when he still mattered so much to me, when he didn't make me so sad.
