12 Great & Not-So-Great Debuts From Screenwriters-Turned-Directors

“…but what I really want to do is direct,” goes the hoary old Hollywood refrain. Actors, key grips, wardrobe assistants, the odd ambitious caterer — sometimes it feels like everyone who’s ever stepped on to a movie set dreams, idly or with calculation, of one day calling the shots. Even the clapper loaders, who technically are the ones who call shots. But of all those jealously eyeing the director’s megaphone (metaphorical sadly, they seem to have gone the way of the plus-four as part of the director’s standard kit) perhaps those with the most reason to be covetous are the screenwriters, the hardy souls who turn in 120-page draft after draft, only to have their baby wrested from their grasp and dressed up, maybe brilliantly but often not, in clothes they might not have chosen themselves.

So is it any wonder that so many of them try to make that leap? The results range from the sublime to the ridiculous, of course (there’s no guarantee that even a great screenwriter will coincidentally come equipped with the talents to be a great director, after all), and with two others coming down the pike (Alex Garland‘s “Ex-Machina“and Matthew Michael Carnahan’s “Violent Talent” with Garrett Hedlund) this week sees another attempt as Geoffrey Fletcher, Oscar-winning screenwriter of “Precious” releases his directorial debut, “Violet and Daisy.” You can read our full review of the teenage assassin movie here or a more concise summation here, but if you want to see how it might stack up against previous screenwriter-turned-director efforts, we’ve collected a bunch of them together here.

We’ve tried to concentrate on people known primarily as feature screenwriters before they made the transition (as opposed to straight-off-the-bat writer/directors), though this doesn’t always mean they have a long list of prior screenwriting credits (Fletcher only had one prior, but it did win a writing Oscar) though in every case, they were directing from a screenplay they (at least co-) wrote. So here’s our rundown of screenwriter-turned-director debuts, 8 shining examples, 4 hideous cautionary tales, and a whole load of good-to-middling in between, that we feel shed some light on the men and women who decide that “Fade Out” should not be their final words on a film.

8 Great Debuts

Steve Zaillian — “Searching for Bobby Fischer”
Before stepping away from the typewriter/computer (or whatever we had all those aeons ago in 1993 — dinosaur quills and parchment?) writer Steven Zaillian turned in three screenplays for films of varying quality “The Falcon and the Snowman,” “Awakenings” and “Jack the Bear” that showcased the best and worst of his tendencies as a filmmaker. Best: his ability to find simple emotive throughlines in broader, sometimes historical contexts and worst: an occasional lapse into sentimentality or worthiness. Thankfully his directorial debut “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” largely avoids the latter (aside from the odd overegged moment) and delivers a genuinely heartwarming story of a young chess prodigy growing up in the shadow of the great Bobby Fischer’s disappearance, and the choice he has to make between chess and, well, everything else. It’s a little reactionary in a kind of “Forrest Gump”-y sort of way — the moral runs that it’s better to be decent than brilliant, happy than successful — but the film is well-meaning and the performances from a stellar cast (Joe Mantegna, Ben Kingsley’s accent, Laurence Fishburne, Joan Allen, Laura Linney, William H Macy all show up) mostly walk the right side of mawkishness. And with Zaillian’s simple faith in the goodness of children as opposed to the agenda-laden antics of the grown-ups (witness the great scene where the squabbling parents are removed from a junior tournament, to the applause of their well-behaved chess-playing progeny) he clearly is of one mind with next collaborator Steven Spielberg.

Subsequent Career: Providing something of a template for screenwriters who want to make the jump, Steven Zaillian has continued as a high-profile screenwriter long after his directorial debut, only occasionally dipping his toe back in directorial waters, and never with the same straightforward success of his first time out. As a writer, however, he’s gone on to be a bona-fde superstar nominated twice more after “Awakenings” for “Gangs of New York” and “Moneyball,” and winning for “Schindler’s List.” Directorially after the disappointment of “All the Kings Men” things seemed to go quiet, but he wrote an early version of the upcoming “Jack Ryan” reboot and is slated to return to the ‘Dragon Tattoo’ well with “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” as well as doing a pass on the mooted Ridley Scott Moses film “Exodus“.

Charlie Kaufman — “Synecdoche, New York”
Having written some of the defining screenplays of the early noughties (ok fine, “Being John Malkovich” was 1999) Charlie Kaufman became something of a brand-name screenwriter — one whose own input rivalled that of the directors he’s most associated with (Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze) for authorial ownership over the finished film. And with a writerly vision as extraordinarily idiosyncratic, (and in the case of “Adaptation,” meta-autobiographical) as his, it’s no wonder his debut “Synecdoche, New York” is so completely unique. How could it not be, as it details a director/Kaufman proxy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his relentless quest for an authentic theatrical experience that leads him to essentially recreate and recast his entire life, as it is currently unfolding, in a 1:1 scale model. Sprawling in every sense of the word, shot through with great, self-deprecating insight about the creative process but so meta it practically eats itself alive, the film is a dizzying, mind-altering headfuck, yet way, way too smart to simply be a trip. In fact it’s so easy to lose sight of the horizon line while simply watching ‘Synecdoche,’ that we kind of have to fear for the sanity of the man who conceived, wrote and directed it. Charlie Kaufman, never, ever change.

Subsequent career: Kaufman has apparently been working, solely in screenwriting terms, on the young adult adaptation “The Knife of Never Letting Go,” among other things, including a possible reteam with Spike Jonze. But with a partly Kickstarter-funded animation based on his play “Anomalisa” currently filming — Kaufman is listed as co-director — probably the film we’re anticipating even more from him as writer/director is his much-touted “examination of celebrity as a mental illness” (according to star Jack Black) “Frank or Francis” a musical, which also stars Nicolas Cage, Kevin Kline and Steve Carell. There’s also his FX series “How and Why” in the works, which fills in the small-screen gap for Kaufman after his HBO series with Catherine Keener apparently didn’t get off the ground.

Shane Black — “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”
With all the “Iron Man 3” hubbub in recent months, we’ve found ourselves typing the words “Shane Black” an awful lot more than we’d been doing for the few years prior. Which is all right with us, as we’re big fans of the man who was not only, famously, the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood at one time, he has also turned out to be a genuinely terrific genre director, with a particularly bright eye for the wit and wisecrackery he writes so well. Especially when it features Robert Downey Jr. His debut turn behind the camera, however, came a lot later than the scripts that made his name (you can read our rundown of those right here), and while it was hardly the box office blockbuster it may have been hoped the “Lethal Weapon” writer would turn out, it’s in fact a great, great film; a hugely enjoyable comedy/murder msytery/noir hybrid romp with plenty of meta flourishes and sideways-winking humour. Small-time thief Harry (RDJ) gets accidentally embroiled in a murder case along with PI Gay Perry (Val Kilmer, just great in this) and Harry’s childhood crush, an aspiring actress named Harmony (Michelle Monaghan). Twists, betrayals, bonding and romance ensue as Black constructs and then gleefully deconstructs seemingly every archetype for which he was responsible in the first place.

Subsequent Career: Well, aside from the small matter of having his directorial follow-up be the fourth highest-grossing movie of all time, Black had been pretty quiet on the writing front since “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” (“AWOL” is his only credit in that period). But now he’s back on top as a golden boy (we wonder, did he watch the grosses for “Iron Man 3” climb skyward with an inevitable sense of “here we go again”?) new directorial projects are already being lined up, first among them apparently “Doc Savage” at Sony, and then perhaps manga adaptation “Death Note” for Warners.