Hannibal or bust: Vin Diesel’s continued disobedience of Steven Spielberg
Having spent the last two decades doing almost nothing but returning to familiar franchises while trying – and regularly failing – to launch new ones, the notion of Vin Diesel reemerging as a multi-talented filmmaker and creative visionary at any point for the remainder of his career seems fanciful at best.
The one-two punch of Pitch Black and The Fast and the Furious at the turn of the 21st century set him on a path he’s been walking ever since, with the actor and producer almost obsessively lending his talents to nothing other than sequels or movies that have the perceived potential to launch sequels.
And yet, that was the exact opposite of how he came to prominence in the first place, with Diesel seizing destiny by the collar and making his own luck. At least two generations of cinemagoing audiences know him only as the beefy and gravel-throated action star who wouldn’t be caught dead wearing anything with sleeves, but for a while – a long time ago, admittedly – he had the makings of an independent auteur.
One of the countless aspiring actors who spent their early years unsuccessfully trawling audition rooms across the country, Diesel used those repeated rejections as the basis of the semi-autobiographical 21-minute short film Multi-Facial, where he plays a character who struggled to be cast because nobody was entirely sure of what his ethnicity was.
He wrote the script in a single night as well as writing, directing, producing, starring, and composing the score, and Multi-Facial even screened at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival. The impressive debut won him enough admirers that he was granted the funds to upgrade to a feature, with 1997’s Strays costing 15 times more than his previous effort but still coming in at a threadbare $47,000.
Diesel once again wrote, directed, produced, and starred in the drama following a drug dealer looking for meaning in a superficial existence. Another festival favourite, Strays premiered at the 1997 edition of the Sundance Film Festival and earned him his biggest fan yet when Steven Spielberg wrote a role specifically for him into Saving Private Ryan.
Since then, Diesel has written nothing and directed nothing on a feature-length scale. He claimed he was told by no less of an authority than Spielberg himself that it was a crime of cinema he hadn’t stepped back behind the camera in so long, with Fast & Furious short Los Bandoleros the only thing he’s scripted or helmed in over a quarter of a century.
There’s one project that could easily convince him to dust off those directorial skills, though, but nobody has been interested in seeing him make it. When he first became a star, Diesel was optimistic that his newfound clout would give him the opportunity to make the one film he always wanted to make by relying on his newfound bankability.
“The key is that I have the ability to make movies, the idea that right now I can make a film called Hannibal, and I can have the studio want to make a film called Hannibal,” he told Black Film. “That’s the objective.” When did he say that? In August 2002, and for the next 20 years he’d repeatedly kept banging the exact same drum to no avail.
Everyone in Hollywood knew Diesel wanted to make his historical epic on Hannibal Barca, and while they may have been willing to let him headline it as a known commodity and drawing card, at no point has it ever come close to reaching the starting line with his name attached to the director’s chair.
Once in a while, Diesel will bring up the Hannibal movie, and it’s a cycle that’s been ongoing for the majority of his career. Cruelly, Antoine Fuqua and Denzel Washington are planning to tell the exact same story for Netflix, which must have felt like a slap in the face.
For most filmmakers, having Spielberg tell them they need to direct would be more than enough impetus, but not Diesel. Maybe he didn’t want to end the drought until Hannibal became a reality, but if that’s not going to happen, perhaps he’ll continue to disobey the all-time great for the rest of his days after failing to make his dream a reality.
