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Best Films Directed By A Writer

By Riley Webster · November 16, 2012

"Hybrid" is a term tossed around a lot in the film industry when talking about a person who does multiple roles on a film set.  George Clooney, for instance, is no longer a "one-brid"; because he has directed 3 films, he is now an "actor-director", much like Orson Welles or Kevin Costner before him (I'm sure he'd prefer to be paired with the former than the latter….ironic, given my choice of #1 on this list).

This list is about people who were well-known and established as writers, and then began directing.  My rules are basically that no writers are allowed who have always been hybrids — if they directed their first screenplay, for instance, or pull a Darren Aronofsky or Paul Thomas Anderson and always direct their own work, then I can't have 'em on here.  The main thing is that all of these guys had to have an established career as a writer FIRST, and then moved into directing.

In order of greatness, these are, for me, the best directing jobs of any screenwriter in Hollywood.

10. Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium (2007)

It's not easy to start a list of "best anything's" with Mr. Magorium.  Believe me, I've started plenty lists with it, and it's always followed by hollow guffaws and the occasional tendency to disbelieve everything else I say and write.  But hear me out: Mr. Magorium is an honest-to-God delightful movie, enchanting and strangely beautiful.  It made me "manly mist", as my Dad would call it, in the theatres where I was the only one sitting.

Zach Helm really made a splash in the screenwriting world with Will Ferrel's Stranger Than Fiction, which oddly seemed to give him more praise and attention before the movie actually wound up being released.  It was a good film, but not the Charlie Kaufman level of insanity the world seemed to expect, so he did a quick turn-around and attempted a Willy Wonka for the 21st century.  And was promptly cruxified for it.

For me, Mr. Magorium is everything you could want in a family film.  It has a boat load of charm, laughs, some instances of low-budget magic, and a really wacky performance from Dustin Hoffman (and a horrible-hair-cut performance by Natalie Portman).  The last act of the movie gets pretty heavy for some people, and indeed it's a tear-jerker, but in a really sensitive and beautiful way.  For me, no movie can be even remotely bad with this line — "Life is an occasion.  Rise to it."

9. Shattered Glass (2003)

A wonderful but criminally over-looked movie from writer/director Billy Ray, Shattered Glass is an exceptional inside-look in the world of magazine writing and editing, as well as pathological lying.  Seeing Hayden Christensen continually try and worm himself out of lie after lie is compulsively watchable (and yes, Christensen himself does a wickedly excellent job — who knew, that a crappy actor's best performance would be as a real-life crappy actor?). 

Ray has only directed one other film since, the quiet conspiracy thriller Breach, but has written for TV since the early 90's, as well as penning big-budget films like Volcano, Flightplan, State of Play, and now, unfortunately, The Hunger Games.  He never approached the intricate and subtle brilliance of Glass, which manages to be suspenseful not in the sense that we're ever worried a man might be killed or covered in lava, but because we can't believe just how far Christensen's reporter is going with his lies, and how badly he'll be burned when he's discovered. 

Along with the suspense, the film is also occasionally hilarious, and there is one scene in particular that says more truth about writing than almost any other film in recent memory.  When an article writer is getting shredded on her latest work, she says she was trying to be funny, and the other writer shakes her head.  Heartbroken, the writer whispers "It's…a little funny…" to which her friend replies, "But…you don't write funny."  Anyone who has felt the sting of rejection understands how brutal this scene is.

8. Auto Focus (2002)

Paul Schrader's 14th film as director is easily as close as he ever got to matching the brilliance behind the lens as he has behind the typewriter.  The legendary screenwriter of Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, and Last Temptation of Christ wrote and directed this searing bio-pic about Hogan's Hero's star Bob Crane, who led a much more distasteful and dangerous private life than his on-screen persona would've alluded to. 

Schrader has long been interested in the themes of addiction and redemption, and in Crane he found a perfect muse — a charming, gentle funny man who houses an excessive sex addiction, and destroys two marriages and his career in the process, before meeting a violent and unsavory end.  Greg Kinnear plays Bob perfectly, mixing the dark sexual undercurrents with a shiny, hilarious facade.  His partner in crime is played by Willem Dafoe in what can only be classified as exceptionally creepy.

Some of Schrader's film tactics to showcase Bob's slip into darkness may seem a little hokey today, if only because of their frequent overuse on TV (the last half is all hand-held cameras and bleached out filters).  But it works, and I find Auto Focus a wonderful, highly underrated masterpiece of both the seedy underbelly of Hollywood and a character study of an addict.

7. Groundhog Day (1993)

I feel as the years have progressed, Groundhog Day has slowly evolved into Bill Murray's most beloved film, and a crowning comedy achievement.  Harold Ramis had seen modest success as a writer of SCTV and hit it big as a writer and occasional actor of films like Meatballs and Animal House.  But Groundhog Day is something different.  It's not just a silly, funny adventure, although it is often that.  It's also surprisingly philosophical, romantic, fantastical, and spiritual.  It's a perfect film comedy.

If you haven't yet seen it, go run out, buy it now, and then come back and finish this list.  Ok, awesome, glad you saw it.  Isn't it great???  As you now well know, Bill Murray plays a weather man douchebag who winds up getting stuck in Pawnxsatawny Philidelphia, re-living the same day over and over and over again, seemingly stuck for eternity.  The scenes of him abusing the power of a God (with the standard Murray understatement) are side-splitting.

But the movie doesn't shy from analyzing the darker aspects of eternal life, and what it means to become an unwilling god.  His romance with Andie McDowell is believable, or as believable as it can be, and gosh darn it, we wind up liking the big lug.  Ramis never wrote any screenplay more intriguing, creative, and wonderful since.

6. Doubt (2008)

John Patrick Shanley has had a bizarre film career.  He won an Oscar with almost his very first script, Moonstruck, and then created the Tom Hanks cult classic Joe Versus The Volcano.  And then he disappeared, writing only stage plays for almost 20 years.  But when he returned, boy, did he make an impact.  Doubt  is possibly one of the top 5 screenplays of the past decade.  The movie takes a story we've all seen before – a possible molestation mystery within a Catholic school – and turns it into a powerhouse drama full of intricacies and unanswered questions.

As a director, Shanley wisely lets his script and actors do all the heavy lifting.  Despite cinematography by Roger Deakins, the look of the film is never eye-popping — rather it's his words, and the stellar performances by Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams (all of whom won Oscar nom's for their work here), that get the most attention.  Streep in particular is terrifying as a feisty old nun who believes Hoffman molested the young black child in their congregation — whether or not that becomes clear by the film's end, I'll leave for you to discover.

To raise so many moral, ethical, and religious questions in one film, and then leave it for the audience to make up their own minds, is a strategy crazier than letting James Cameron direct an upcoming Dora the Explorer adaptation.  But it worked, and Doubt is one of the best returns from a long-dormant filmmaker I've ever seen.

5. LA Confidential (1997)

This brilliant and complex neo-noir from director Curtis Hanson and written by himself and Brian Helgeland made a personally huge difference in my evolution as a screenwriter.  I wasn't allowed to see just about any R-rated movie for a very long period, and then when I finally saw this one in grade 9, I was floored — not by the violence, nor the sex/profanity, because by today's standards both are fairly tame.  I was stunned by the sheer complexity of the storytelling, and the mastery both writers had overlapping so many plot-lines into one cohesive whole.

And, y'know, the movie is thrilling and bad-ass and awesome as hell, lest I start sounding too stuffy.  Hanson and Helgeland had both been writers for over a decade by the time, and although Hanson has mostly stayed in the directing arena since Confidential, Helgeland has become one of Hollywood's top go-to writers, penning diverse films like Robin Hood, Man on Fire, A Knight's Tale, and Conspiracy Theory.  However, neither ever got close to the cunning genius of LA Confidential, adapted from an James Ellroy novel. 

With three excellent major performances from Russell Crowe, Kevin Spacey, and Guy Pierce, Confidential  is one of the quintessential noir films of all time, deserving to be mentioned in the same breath as Chinatown and The Third Man.  To see three very different detectives all tackle different cases, with different clues, only to culminate into one epic conspiracy…it's an absolute joy to watch. 

4. 40 Year Old Virgin (2005)

And speaking of joys to watch, Judd Apatow's 40 Year Old Virgin is still quite possibly the funniest film I've ever seen.  I don't know if I can label it the world's greatest comedy, but few films have ever made me laugh as hard and as constant, while still making me have so much love and empathy for every single character.  It's an incredibly difficult balancing act, achieving that level of hilarity and warmth, and even Apatow himself has had difficulty attaining it again (his next two features, Knocked Up and Funny People, got far too dramatic and schmaltzy in the end).  But Virgin is his pinnacle, and a greatly funny film.

Steve Carell stars as the titular character, a loveable geek in his 40's who has never had sex.  He plays the role absolutely perfectly, mixing delicate innocence and raging-bull horny.  Present-day staples of the comedy scene got their major big breakthrough with this movie, such as Paul Rudd, Seth Rogen, and Jonah Hill (all of whom had acted many times before, including with Apatow, but never in a hit this big).  From top to bottom, the acting is superb, and Apatow (in his directing debut after years of screenwriting and producing) handles it deftly.

Comedy is a funny thing — either you find something really funny and love the film, or you don't, and won't.  I truly love 40 Year Old Virgin as much today as I did back when I saw it in theatres (my parents sat several rows away from me, no doubt sensing the impending awkwardness).  Everything in Virgin makes me laugh, and even the dramatic bits are so well interspersed, they don't harm the flow of the comedy.  It's damn-near perfect.

3. Synecdoche New York (2008)

Rarely has a screenwriter received more acclaim and attention than Charlie Kaufman.  But then, rarely has there ever been a writer (of movies or any medium, really) as bizarre, original, and inventive as Kaufman.  Although he worked in television for years, his 1999 script for Being John Malkovich took Hollywood by storm, with all critics and audiences alike asking — who is this guy, and where the hell does he come up with this stuff?  His scripts for Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine were also highly wacky, twisted, darkly funny, and shockingly fresh.  But his directorial debut, Synecdoche, was mostly met with confusion, with the majority of critics labeling it that grandly over-used word "pretentious".

Simply put, they were all wrong.  Synecdoche New York is as maddening and brilliant as any film, ever.  Utilizing a performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman that spans decades (I think, at least), Synedoche is the ultimate mind-trip, a convoluted film that is certainly pretentious in the sense that it's striving for greatness, but not pretentious in the sense that it succeeds so admirably.  Kaufman's script, as always, is heavily obsessed with the meaning of death, the pointless-ness of life, the horrible ways we hurt each other, the interesting ways we love each other.  It attempts, in no easy terms, to explain all of existence.

Well, it was just too obtuse and, as my sister labels it, "po-mo" for most audiences, and even for the majority of critics (I think Ebert was the only one who really loved it).  Kaufman has yet to direct a film since, and has even seemed to be mostly scorned from screenwriting as well.  It's a shame — and yet, it's also a possible indicator of the audacious brilliance of the film.  Most great movies were almost career killers, such as Citizen Kane and Vertigo, and hopefully Synecdoche New York will someday sit alongside them.

2. The Seventh Seal (1957)

One of my ultimate rules with this list was to not be able to use any writer who directed his first script, eliminating great screenwriters like PTA and Aronofsky in the process.  I thought Ingmar Bergman would fall into the same category, because he's one of the most famous hybrid filmmakers of all time.  But, lo and behold, his first movie screenplay, Torment, was not directed by himself, and so he counts.  Which means that I now get to talk about The Seventh Seal, which makes my insides bubble with happiness.

Despite making more masterpieces than almost any other filmmaker, Seventh Seal is, in my mind, the pinnacle of Bergman's career.  It's often viewed as old-fashioned these days, but I would rather take the "wearing-it's-heart-on-it's-sleeve" Seal over the "everything-is-such-a-muddled-metaphor-I-don't-understand-a-word" of The Silence or Wild Strawberries.  Everyone knows the famous opening scene of a knight playing chess with Death.  But the film offers so much more than that one pivotal scene — rarely do movie characters ask so many questions, speak so eloquently, and strive so hard to discover the truth about their existence. 

A lot of people will find The Seventh Seal boring, as many do with all of Bergman's works.  Even though I sometimes find myself antsy in the slower passages, I can't imagine how you couldn't be entranced by The Seventh Seal.  It's a visually arresting, morbidly funny, spiritually beautiful flick, and possibly the best foreign film I've ever seen.  If we could all write half as well as Bergman, there would never be another Transformers sequel again. 

1. JFK (1991)

It's easy to hate Oliver Stone, and frankly, it's easy to hate this movie.  Perhaps that's why I love it so much.  Stone spent a decade being one of the most successful screenwriters in Hollywood, penning classics like Midnight Express and Scarface, before becoming a major director with Platoon in the late 80's.  But for me, his crowning achievement is JFK, a 3-hours-plus paranoia thrilller that has the weight and power of The Godfather with the visual madness of Goodfellas.  And honestly — I think JFK is just as good, if not better, than both of those masterpieces.

JFK is a sprawling epic, where Kevin Costner plays Jim Garrison, the only man who ever brought a conviction and trial to someone in the conspiracy murder of John F. Kennedy.  He keeps the overly-heroic stuff that plagues most of his performances at bay, and instead merely shows Garrison as a man convinced that the world truly needs to see, or at least begin to see, the truth.  Tommy Lee Jones and Joe Pesci also give wonderful and devious performances as the possible conspirators. 

Like I said, it's easy to hate JFK.  Stone himself now admits that the film over-embellishes the truth frequently, and is the "conspiracy to the conspiracy" rebuttal to the Warren report's blatant lies.  But whether you believe it's claims or not, there's no denying the sheer power and magnitude of Stone's vision, and how amazing it is that he tells this convoluted and expansive a story, and yet always makes it clear, concise, and thrilling.  The final 45 minutes, where Stone finally lets out an endless monologue during the trial, explaining all the details of the murder, is just about as virtuoso of film-making as you can get — a barrage of information, emotion, rapid cuts, different film stocks, and a relentless camera will make you feel  the conspiracy, even if you don't believe it.  For my money, it's the best film a screenwriter ever directed.