With The Great Directors, documentarian Angela Ismailos has made the cinematic version of a really awkward icebreaker. You know the type: If you were stranded on a deserted island and could only bring one book, movie, album and person, what would you choose? (In the interest of full disclosure, that would be Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, The Blues Brothers, “Stop Making Sense” by The Talking Heads and Dorothy Parker, incidentally.) The Great Directors follows Ismailos as she answers an icebreaker she only asked herself: If you could make a documentary about your ten favorite directors, who would you pick? And although she succeeded in finding a genuinely awesome cast of ten real-life directing superstars to appear in The Great Directors, the resulting film is far, far less than the sum of those parts, and was almost certainly more fun for her to make than it is for us to watch.
The Great Directors is little more than a series of interviews with ten of Ismailos’ favorite directors, and the list is nothing if not impressive: Bernardo Bertolucci, Catherine Breillat, Liliana Cavani, Stephen Frears, Todd Haynes, Richard Linklater, Ken Loach, David Lynch, John Sayles and Agnes Varda. Not a hack in the bunch. The film has its fair share of geek out moments, from getting David Lynch to talk about Dune (no small feat) to the more intimate conversations with Agnes Varda in her famed home. Ismailos clearly enjoys her nearly unparalleled access to these artistic giants, but make no mistake, this is her film and you will be forced to follow her interests. Some directors get much more screen time than others, which will be disappointing if the ones getting the short shrift are your favorites. There’s even a palpable sense of her disappointment in John Sayles, a brilliant director who only gets a couple of short minutes to talk in this feature length production, and they’re almost entirely devoted to an amusing anecdote about working as a script doctor on The Patriot. Frankly, John Sayles deserves better, but then all of these directors do.
Ismailos freely admits in the beginning of the documentary that she had no agenda or even game plan in choosing these directors. They are merely her favorites (or at least, her favorite directors who were willing to talk to her). Ismailos takes ten of the most artistic people in the world and only devotes 90 minutes to all of them. As a result none of them get much time to talk, and there’s very little they have the opportunity to say that can’t be found in a decent biography, IFC special or Film Comment article. There’s nothing wrong with The Great Directors that another 8 hours of footage couldn’t fix, and I suppose it’s a compliment that we want to see more of Ismailos’ film, but the reason we want to see more is because it seems like Ismailos missed her own point. Without an overarching theme or even a series of logical connections between her subjects, The Great Directors is less a movie than an overlong trailer for a really great but nonexistent television series that would have given each great director their own epsidoe and enough time to talk, be heard and maybe even share a revelation or two.
The Great Directors isn’t a bad film – really, any film that affords such a great group of artists a forum to express themselves, however briefly, has some value – but it never feels like much more than a vanity piece for the director herself. Ismailos sure seems to have a lot of screen time in her own documentary about the people she thinks are the greatest directors alive today, and what’s worse she herself never seems to have much to say about them. Maybe if she’d gotten these fine filmmakers into a room together they would have had more engaging conversations with each other. But it is a great icebreaker, and it would be tempting to see other filmmakers make similar projects about some of their cinematic heroes. Who would you pick? (I wonder if Woody Allen, Wes Anderson, John Carpenter, Sofia Coppola, Walter Hill, Satoshi Kon, David Mamet, Michael Mann, Chris Nolan and Sam Raimi are available…?
CRAVE ONLINE RATING: 5 out of 10
