The directors who inspired Jason Bateman’s filmmaking career: “That’s what gets me going”
Jason Bateman has been a successful actor for a very long time. Not as long as the likes of Robert Redford or Michael Caine, granted, but if you can cast your mind back to an American TV show, Little House on the Prairie, and how long ago that aired, well, Jason Bateman was in that show.
Probably thanks in no small part to having an actor and director dad, he was just 11 when he started on that tale of a farming family and went on to appear as the lead in the very hairy but not very necessary 1980s basketball comedy sequel Teen Wolf Too.
While a moderate success, it didn’t make Bateman the global face he might have thought, and he focused on more TV work throughout the ’90s, although he did make a directing debut on a sitcom called Two of a Kind in 1999.
After another quiet five years, he started to make some appearances in notable big-screen comedies, although you’d be hard-pressed to remember who he was in any of them. He did Starsky and Hutch, Dodgeball, the Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston vehicle The Break-Up and Juno in 2007 before his excellent turn in Horrible Bosses sparked increasing interest in him as a leading man.
It took him on a run of box office successes like 2013’s Identity Thief with Melissa McCarthy, a sequel to Horrible Bosses and voicing the artful fox in the massive animated hit Zootopia, which brought in over a billion dollars at the box office for Disney. Two years later, he produced and starred in the very funny Game Night, another hit that landed him several award nominations.
He made a return to the much-loved and once-cancelled Arrested Development in 2018 before he got involved in the TV project that has brought him the most acclaim: Netflix’s Ozark. One of the most successful dramas of recent times, the show tells the story of a married couple who move to a new area and launder money for a Mexican drug cartel.
It concluded after its fourth season in 2022, but not before Bateman had scooped ‘Best Actor’ awards from the Screen Actors Guild and the Emmys, and he also directed several episodes of the show.
Bateman spoke of his love for directing as a craft and the artists who inspired him when he sat down with GQ, revealing, “The Coen brothers’ stuff, Paul Thomas Anderson’s stuff, Alexander Payne’s stuff—that’s what really gets me going”.
He certainly has one eye on experiencing the kind of longevity he’s managed as a TV actor on the directing side, adding, “I want to look back on this as truly the midpoint of a 60-year career, and the next 30 years are like what Clint Eastwood did with his career. You hardly even think of him as an actor anymore. The career he’s had as a director is just insane!“
Bateman is now pairing up with Jude Law in a new Netflix thriller that will hit screens next month called Black Rabbit. It tells the tale of two brothers who launch an exclusive restaurant and VIP lounge into the frantic New York late-night scene with a guest list people would kill to be on. He’s directed the first two episodes alongside actor and Ozark co-star Laura Linney, who will also hog the director’s chair for the following two; the show will premiere on Netflix, September 18th.
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