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Better than Spielberg? Non-directors who could be great

It’s not uncommon in today’s film industry to see A-list actors try their hand at writing or directing; many music videos seem more like mini-features, with introductory sequences and outros longer than the song itself; the line between artist and filmmaker has been all but erased. Last year saw Steve McQueen, winner of the Turner Prize in 1999, collect an Oscar for Twelve Years a Slave. In short, these days it appears almost as if anyone can be a filmmaker.

With this in mind, here are a few individuals from across the spectrum of the arts whose directorial debuts would set hearts beating that much faster.

First up, how about Haruki Murakami? Imagine, if you will, a film in which a real-life version of Johnnie Walker (the whiskey mascot) harvests the beating hearts of talking cats and uses them to build a flute the size of the universe. Or one in which the softly-spoken narrator spends weeks cooking pasta, listening to Brahms and wondering why his wife has left him, before eventually beating her brother to death in a dream to win her back.

You have just pictured the potential film adaptations of Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

So far, the only film adaptation of the seminal Japanese writer’s work has been Norwegian Wood, a Japanese-made version of Murakami’s 1987 novel of the same name. Dealing with nostalgia, sexual experimentation and adolescence, both book and film are strong offerings, but Norwegian Wood is the least typical of Murakami’s writing, lacking his trademark flair for magic realism. The immense creativity that pours from the pages of all of his other work would lend itself to films that were engaging, moving and utterly puzzling, and probably between three and four hours long.

When the Japanese publisher of Kafka on the Shore opened a website to deal with questions about the novel, over 8,000 were submitted to the author. If Murakami were to find the means to translate his unique vision into celluloid, the results would undoubtedly mean more of the same. Think along the lines of a Japanese-language David Lynch movie with more humanitas.

My second dream film-maker would be Kanye West. If you are still one of those people who thinks of Kanye West as the guy who interrupted Taylor Swift onstage at the VMAs, or the guy who gave Kim Kardashian a naked painting of herself as a wedding gift, then you probably haven’t listened to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. If you haven’t listened to MBDTF then you probably haven’t seen the short film that was made to accompany it, Runaway. And if you haven’t seen Runaway, then you are, unfortunately, unaware of the brilliance that a feature-length conceptual movie based on a Kanye West album could hold.

It would have to be a musical, of course. With Kanye doing the soundtrack and the storyline, there would be guaranteed excess – he’d have to top what his short film already covered, which included supermodel Selita Ebanks playing a fallen phoenix who he nurses back to health, and a giant papier-mâché tribute to Michael Jackson paraded by a marching band. Only Kanye West could cite Federico Fellini and Karl Lagerfeld as influences on the same piece of art. Any film he made would be part fashion show, part ego-worship and part misinformed political statement, and all controversy.

Kanye’s not necessarily alone in having this idea. Childish Gambino did something similar recently, with his album Because the Internet doubling as a screenplay and a short film Clapping for the Wrong Reasons released alongside it. Ultimately, though, Kanye’s ambition, arrogance and ability to set tastes would see his directorial debut unrivalled.

Like Yeezy, South African hip-hop artists Die Antwoord have already starred in their own short film, Umshini Wam (the name means ‘Bring me my machine gun’ in the Zulu language). Directed by Harmony Korine of Spring Breakers fame, it is a horrendously low-budget affair in which Ninja and Yo-Landi Vi$$er spend most of their time rolling around in wheelchairs wearing onesies and arguing.

Nonetheless, the duo manages to display fleeting moments of untapped big-screen potential and within the sixteen-minute runtime they draw significant sympathy for their characters. After all, Die Antwoord have spent their entire careers building up devil-may-care personas for themselves which must – at least partially – be an act. Surely no-one can truly tell where the white trash swagger ends and the real Die Antwoord begins?

Their case is helped by the fact that every DA song is improved by about 1000% when watched with the music video. Fatty Boom Boom and Pitbull Terrier are particularly good examples, and one needs only to imagine two hours of this kind of thing to picture the total insanity that a film directed by these iconoclastic and maverick individuals would represent.

Dan Harmon could be considered part of a trinity, along with Joss Whedon and JJ Abrams, of the best cult filmmakers of the past ten years. However, the creator of Community is the only one of the three yet to transition from TV to feature films. Following the successes of Abrams’ Lost and Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and the cult status of Firefly), the two have ended up directing the Star Trek reboot and the Avengers movies respectively. Harmon, however, has reached nowhere near the status of the other two despite working with big names including Sarah Silverman and Jack Black. His writing credentials more than justify a movie; one which would be irreverent and full of brilliant self-parody.

Harmon is also the most likely person in this list to actually end up directing something. Despite looking at one point as though it was consigned to history as the show that was too smart for mainstream television, Community has found a second wind, with Harmon returning to the show for a markedly improved fifth season and a sixth commissioned by Yahoo Screen. With rumours abounding of a big-screen adaptation, it would be hard to imagine anyone other than Harmon at the helm. #SixSeasonsAndAMovie!

Artist Damien Hirst at the helm of a blockbuster is difficult to imagine, but bear with me. Anyone who has seen Ben Wheatley’s Civil-War-meets-mushroom-trip film A Field In England will remember a scene in which the sun, a huge swirling mass, terrifyingly black, expands and engulfs the sky. The effect is both mesmerising and paralysing. Damien Hirst’s Black Sun is not dissimilar for obvious reasons. At first appearing a simple black circle painted onto a wall, the piece draws in the unwary viewer in until their face is inches away from the canvas. It is only then that they realise the sun is composed of the bodies of thousands upon thousands of dead flies. Nihilistic and all-consuming, Wheatley’s cinematography could almost be an animation of Hirst’s static artwork, and offers a vision of what the latter’s oeuvre could lend to the silver screen.

Hirst was once the enfant terrible of British art. Now he is part of the establishment, and has slightly faded out of public consciousness. A film could be the perfect way for him to burst back onto the scene. Following his £111m sale at Sotheby’s in 2008, there would be no need for him to compromise or tone down his ideas in order to secure funding – it would be a pure vanity project. Dead cows and sharks, butterflies, pills and skulls would be the visual media, and the downfall of humanity and inevitability death would be the subject matter. Hirst’s movie could be like an ultra-stylised Melancholia.

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