Courtesy of Andrew Betteridge
The director is the most important person on any given film set. Movies can be (and have been) made without actors, writers, on set technicians, etc. But it is impossible to make a film without a director. Even if the entire crew works together to make a film, their Group Think mentality fills the role of Director. And directors have the most influence on how a film turns out, what kind of style is employed, how much of that style if used, and so on, to the point where different filmmakers can take the same story and make vastly different films (Wyatt Earp vs Tombstone, Jesus of Nazareth vs The Passion of the Christ, The Omega Man vs I Am Legend).
This guide will have a three-pronged purpose over its (hopefully) many installments: 1) It will let you know which directors to pay attention to (and subsequently how to spend your money film-wise), 2) it will let you know which directors to avoid like Aunt Maple's week-old tuna casserole, and 3) it will let you know about those guys in the middle, the ones with some style and substance and showing some promise to bust out one day with a great movie, and the ones that did bust out with a great film and have spent years trying to replicate that magic. It is important to know your directors - money spent on bad films just gets us more bad films, and that does us all a great disservice. We want to build up our great artists, and banish the hacks to the dark corners where they belong. But how can this be done if you don't know the difference between Brian Robbins and Brian De Palma? Or D.J. Caruso and David O. Russell? Shankman and Spielberg? Education is the key to success!
Know Your Andersons!
There are multiple directors working today who claim to be the sons of Ander, and each one making very different films from the others. As a matter of fact, the two most different Andersons have names so similar that they require the use of middle initials to help differentiate. After all, you don't want to credit the director of Death Race for his work with Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood. He most likely would accept the credit....I would anyway.
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Paul Thomas Anderson aka P.T. Anderson (not known if he has an affinity for Cruisers) grew up in the film industry, so breaking in was a little easier for him than it is for most. Perhaps this is why he has never seemingly felt the need to produce commercially-viable movies. He started with Hard Eight, a low-budget character film, and using his connections to get actors like Philip Baker Hall, John C. Reilly, Gwyneth Paltrow and Samuel L. Jackson, his debut feature film is head and shoulders above the films of many other aspiring film makers. He followed this with the epic film Boogie Nights, an extremely well made romp through the porn world of the 1970's and 1980's, and by the time he got around to making Magnolia, box office success remained out of reach, while his prestige and reputation as an artist grew. He made one of the quirkiest and truest romantic comedies ever in Punch Drunk Love, and followed that up with the epic There Will Be Blood, a sprawling film about the blossoming oil boom of the early 1900's. He continues to do things his way and slowly yet surely he is amassing a body of work that will stand the test of time.
On the other side of that coin lives Paul William Scott Anderson aka Paul WS Anderson, a British director who had immediate commercial success with Mortal Kombat, a film based on a then-very popular video and arcade game. This success gave him the leeway to get more work, a FOX offered him Event Horizon, a project that was already in production and had a deadline to be met. Anderson saw this as a chance to make a hard R-rated, gory space horror film, and later claims that FOX forced thirty minutes worth of cuts on him in the editing process, which included scaling back the violence that apparently upset audiences (last I checked, horror films are supposed to upset their audiences...just wondering aloud here). This is what happens when you play in the commercial studio-run sandbox - the Big Kid in the box calls the shots, and with certain studios, the director is never the Big Kid. That film flopped hard at the box office, and his next movie, Soldier, suffered a similar box office fate (though this time, no one blames studio tinkering for the movie's awful stiffness). With two bombs in a row, he saw his leash shortened; after all, he got his directing gigs by showing the studios he can make money with established brands, so once he stops making money, why would anyone invest in his movies (as opposed to P.T. Anderson trusting that his prodigious talent will get him from project to project). So since WS Anderson's biggest success was an adaptation of an existing property, where would his future lie? The zombie based video game Resident Evil, in which Anderson was able to turn a profit again, and more importantly (for the studio), he got a new franchise up and running and still making money. So if he makes money with one established franchise, why not give him two? FOX gives Anderson Alien vs Predator, and again Anderson turns a profit. So they indulge him in a remake of Death Race 2000. And of course, Death Race barely broke even at the box office, if at all. And now Anderson finds himself directing yet another Resident Evil film, in the hopes of making money for the film overlords, so he can continue making these bland, tasteless action movies aimed at 13-year old boys.
Trying to strike something of a balance between those two worlds is Wes Anderson - using the language of film as therapy to work out his issues with his father, Wes Anderson started small with Bottle Rocket (in which he introduced the world to the Wilson brothers, Luke and Owen), and slowly his films and stories have grown. While his first film took place mostly in a roadside motel, his later films have had protagonists all over the world in places like France and India (The Darjeeling Limited). Movies like Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums are all about youths (relatively speaking) dealing with the influence of their elders and mentors, and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is more or less the same deal, except with water. He even made a "daddy issues" movie in stop-animation (Fantastic Mr. Fox)! But despite the repetition in theme, Wes Anderson knows his craft and makes very specific films, influenced by the French New Wave movement, full of quirk and fun and great production values and interesting characters, and he remains a director worth watching.
Brad Anderson, meanwhile, looms on the horizon, a pretty good film maker daring to be great. He started out in the late 90's with a couple of quirky romantic comedies and enjoyed critical success and little else. Then he flipped a switch - he decided to leave the rom-com world behind and got darker and weirder with Session 9, a thriller about an asbestos clean up crew working in an abandoned insane asylum, and The Machinist, a drama about an insomniac and the great guilt that keeps his awake and in bad shape (the titular machinist is played by a very emaciated Christian Bale). And most recently, Brad Anderson made Transsiberian, a thriller starring Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer, and like the rest of his films, it received good reviews and little box office support. While Brad Anderson is not on the level of Paul Thomas, or even Wes, at least he's trying to make interesting and original films. He is definitely a director who could use the support of the people - he's this close to making a really great movie. Who knows? The next one could be it.
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