Five incredible directors who went on to become authors
As both a self-confessed film nerd and a bookworm, the moments when cinema and literature collide prove to be embarrassingly high points in my life. Almost always, it will be a film adaptation of a treasured book, and almost always, I’ll bite my nails in both anticipation of seeing beloved characters and stories rendered on the big screen and outright anxiety that the filmmaker is going to screw it up colossally.
Occasionally, however, this intersection between two art forms occurs due to a transition of an artist. The more common example is a writer leaping into a screenwriting territory, as seen with Nic Pizzolatto, whose debut novel Galveston came two years before the ground-breaking HBO series, True Detective, on which he served as sole writer and showrunner. Or there’s the late, great Cormac McCarthy, who, after giving us ten novels over 40 years, tried his hand with the script for The Counselor, which Ridley Scott subsequently directed. Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie – the list is endless when it comes to authors tackling the silver screen.
What really gets me going is when a brilliant filmmaker tests their mettle in the literary world. It doesn’t happen often, which makes it all the more scintillating. When it’s justified and vindicated by a genuinely significant contribution to the art form, there is (albeit somewhat sadly) nothing I find more satisfying or exhilarating. Now, when it comes to heavy hitters in Hollywood picking up the pen, it doesn’t get much heavier than Quentin Tarantino. Two years after his supposedly penultimate film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino announced that he’d make his novel debut with a tie-in/novelisation. In keeping with the auteur’s style, the result was something far greater in scope; a broad canvas that supplied additional context to the world and characters we’d met whilst also acting as a semi-fictional exploration into the history of Hollywood.
That same year, another titan of cinema offered us their first literary outing. Werner Herzog, the German meister whose career is so expansive that it’s given us both Fitzcarraldo and a small recurring role in Disney+’s The Mandalorian, premiered his first novel. The Twilight World was a feverish and hypnotic tale that masterfully blended fact and fiction, revolving around the very sad and very true story of Hiroo Onoda, a WWII Japanese soldier who remained trapped on a tropical island for over thirty years by his own delusion that the war was still going on.
In the same vein of jungle insanity, Oliver Stone’s debut novel in 1998 was a semi-fictional account of a descent into madness after being put on combat duty in the Vietnam War. Although he’d proved himself a master wordsmith with the screenplays for 1978’s Midnight Express and Scarface in 1983, Stone proved to have an exquisite command of prose with A Child’s Night Dream, weaving a hallucinatory and nihilistic tale that constantly oscillated between being an autobiography and a kaleidoscopic, paranoid thriller.
While Herzog, Stone and Tarantino were all supremely gifted writers, out of everyone, Ethan Coen surprised me the least with his literary prowess. The writing on every Coen film is damn-near perfect; if I were to advise any non-cinephile to try reading a script, I’d say anything from Miller’s Crossing to Inside Llewyn Davis reads just as well as any decent book, if not better. Released the same year as Stone’s novel, Coen’s Gates of Eden is a wonderfully rich collection of short stories ranging from Jewish family dramas to tales (quite a lot) of various Private Investigators trying to stay afloat. Boasting a level of imagination that only a Coen brother could write with, the collection flows between first, third and second person, and one of them even reads like a radio play – sound effects included.
My favourite of these directors-cum-authors, however, would have to be the legendary New York cynic Nora Ephron. Technically, Ephron was a published novelist before she garnered mainstream success in the film industry, but to be perfectly frank: I simply don’t care. Her mastery of both the film and literary mediums is so mighty and awe-inspiring that she, out of everyone, is exempt from the rules. In 1983, the same year she was nominated for ‘Best Screenplay’ for Silkwood, her novel Heartburn was published. A tender, angry, candid and heartbreaking account of the breakdown of her marriage, it contains everything in the written form you might find in her films like When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, or You’ve Got Mail. Order a copy, and get the tissues ready, because tears of sorrow and laughter will flow aplenty.
Five directors who became authors:
- Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2021)
- The Twilight World (Werner Herzog, 2021)
- A Child’s Night Dream: A Novel (Oliver Stone, 1998)
- Gates of Eden (Ethan Coen, 1998)
- Heartburn (Nora Ephron, 1983)
Never Miss A Take
The Far Out Quentin Tarantino Newsletter
All the latest Quentin Tarantino content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.