Steven Seagal discusses the one director he would “love to work with”
A general rule of cinema is that actors who maintain a certain level of fame and visibility for years are presented with repeated opportunities to work with high-profile directors, which obviously isn’t true as it applies to Steven Seagal.
While he’s been a recognisable star and prolific actor for almost 40 years, his stardom was short-lived in the conventional sense. Breaking out in the late 1980s when audiences couldn’t get enough of ass-kicking action heroes, it wasn’t long before he was banished to the realms of irrelevancy.
Seagal’s career had well and truly peaked by the mid-1990s, to the point he’s only appeared in three features since 1997, which received a wide theatrical release. The straight-to-video circuit has been his bread and butter for three decades, which reasonably eliminates any opportunity to work with an auteur.
Knowing how highly Seagal thinks of himself, he’d probably name Steven Seagal as the best director he’d ever worked with, but for those who aren’t prone to self-aggrandisement, it would probably be fair to say that Above the Law and Under Siege helmer Andrew Davis – who steered The Fugitive to a ‘Best Picture’ nomination – and Machete‘s Robert Rodriguez are at the top of the pile.
There’s no shame in daydreaming, though, with Seagal clearly enamoured by a blockbuster action franchise that won huge acclaim and cleaned up at the box office for its immersively bone-crunching set pieces when he was pressed to name the filmmaker he wanted to work with the most.
Even more remarkably, there was a heavy dose of self-awareness tossed into the mix. “Certainly I’m on the bottom of the totem pole in many people’s eyes, and so there’s thousands of guys out there that I’d love to work with,” he admitted to JoBlo. “I’d love to work with Paul Greengrass. It doesn’t mean that I’ll get the chance, but I’d love to.”
It’s not difficult to imagine a scenario where Seagal The Bourne Supremacy and/or The Bourne Ultimatum and thought to himself, ‘I could do so much better than this Matt Damon guy’. Comfortably among the cream of the crop to emerge from action cinema in the 2000s, the aikido savant would have been casting envious glances at the brutal scraps and frenetic pacing that steered the saga to billions in ticket sales.
Putting the two of them together would be a recipe for instant success, at least if it was Seagal being asked. After all, this is a screenwriter so talented he was brought to tears reading a script that he’d written himself, so pairing him up with Greengrass for a no-holds-barred adventure that leaned into the former’s spectacular penmanship and the latter’s signature aesthetic would inevitably yield greatness. Right?
