It seems inevitable, these days, that an actor will eventually turn his (much more rarely, her) hand to directing. It's just a couple of feet to the other side of the camera, isn't it? Well, not exactly. Not every career change will bear the same creative fruit as Beatty's, Eastwood's or, latterly, Clooney's. But try to tell them that.
This year at Sundance two of the festival's favourite actors – Philip Seymour Hoffman and Mark Ruffalo – have arrived with their directorial debuts. Each has been derived from a source close to the actor, each has been made with friends, as a labour of love. One is rather good; the other, I'm sad to say, is a Sundance stinker.
Jack Goes Boating is adapted from the stage play first produced by the LAByrinth Theatre Company, in New York, where Hoffman and John Ortiz were co-directors for 10 years. The two men co-starred in the play, a comic yet poignant tale of best friends, one encouraging the other into a new relationship while his own is on the rocks. They team up again in the film version, with Hoffman also stepping behind the camera. This is the good one.
Hoffman is the eponymous limo driver, with a penchant for reggae (accompanied by comical dreadlocks) and few social skills. Jack is persuaded by Clyde and Lucy (Ortiz and Daphne Rubin-Vega) to court Connie (Amy Ryan), who works as a secretary in a funeral parlour, and is even weirder than he. It's a match made in heaven, though they make a bloody meal of getting there, and soon their unhappy matchmakers offer more hindrance than help.
We've been here before, not least with Hoffman's character, who has distant relatives in Boogie Nights' Scotty, and Allen from Happiness. But while Hoffman tells the Sundance audience that "I was definitely not that guy looking to direct", he makes some inspired directorial moves to open out the story from its stage roots and shows that he's learned some tricks from his own directors, not least Paul Thomas Anderson and Todd Solondz. Not surprisingly, the performances he's elicited are excellent, especially from Ryan, who has shown her range between The Wire and Gone Baby Gone.
Ruffalo is one of those actors one imagines is a thoroughly decent bloke. He's made Sympathy for Delicious because it was written by an old pal from acting school, Christopher Thornton, who is paralysed from the waist down since a climbing accident. With this script, about a young DJ confined to a wheelchair, Thornton was, quite understandably, creating a role for himself. "He hands me this 198-page script that is all over the place," recalls Ruffalo, "but I immediately knew I had to direct it. I had no idea that it would take over a decade of hellish struggles to see it finished."
Admirable indeed. The trouble is, the script may have become shorter, but it is laughably, horribly bad, as Thornton's "Delicious" Dean starts the film on skid row, discovers that he has a gift for faith healing, then joins a rock band during whose performances he leaves his decks to heal a few folk in the audience.
"LA is the only place where the idea of a rock'n'roll faith healer doesn't seem that far-fetched," suggests Ruffalo. Poor deluded soul. Like Hoffman, he also acts in it, as a priest who battles with the DJ over the best way to use his gifts; unlike Hoffman, his performance suffers on both sides of the camera. He's not helped by his friend's acting limitations, nor indeed by those of Thornton's more famous co-stars Juliette Lewis and Orlando Bloom – the former tiresomely riffing on her real-life rock-chick shtick, the latter baring his chest and sporting an appalling northern accent as a sub-Jim Morrison self-styled rock god.
It's possible that the difference between these two films is merely a matter of judgment. I hope Ruffalo gives it another go. I'm sure Hoffman will. But is it ever possible to predict who will make the transition successfully, and who won't? Could anyone have predicted such auspicious debuts as Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, or Eastwood's Play Misty for Me? Who do we imagine directing in 15 years' time, say, out of Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint? Actually, here's where we can buck the trend: my money's on Emma Watson.
