Why Steven Spielberg is disappointed with Vin Diesel

Vin Diesel was bitten by the acting bug very early in his life, starring in a New York production of Dinosaur Doors at the age of seven. How Diesel became involved in Dinosaur Door was kismet. It seems that he and some friends broke into the theater to destroy it, but were captured by the theater director. Instead of calling the police, Diesel and friends were offered a performance, which they accepted. (For those in the know, this sounds a lot like the story of the dance movie Step Up.) Diesel ended up studying writing and filmmaking in college.

Diesel made his film debut in 1990, playing an unnamed orderly in the Robin Williams/Robert De Niro drama The Awakening. He was 23. Diesel, also in development, wrote and directed the short film Multi-Facial in 1995, a film about his own multiracial background. In 1997, Diesel wrote, directed and starred in the character-driven crime film The Wanderers, which screened at the Sundance Film Festival.

It seems that it was “Multi-Facial” and “Strays” that attracted Steven Spielberg to Diesel. Spielberg performed Diesel in his 1998 war drama Saving Private Ryan loved the intensity of the young actor and intrigued by his voice as a director. Saving Private Ryan was Diesel’s big break, leading to star turns in the financial drama Boiler Room and the low-budget sci-fi thriller Pitch Black. A year after the release of “Black and White” Diesel starred in “The Fast and the Furious” and a billion-dollar franchise was born.

Although Diesel is firmly entrenched in the pop consciousness with his Fast and Furious films and his role as Groot in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he hasn’t directed since The Wanderers. In an interview with The National in 2020Diesel admitted that the lack of directorial effort was his fault and caused frustration on the part of Spielberg. The latter, Diesel revealed, hired him in part in the hope that Saving Private Ryan would inspire him to direct more.

It wasn’t just a suspicion of Diesel. Apparently, Spielberg took his frustrations to Diesel’s face. Indeed, Spielberg said that Diesel’s turn to acting and producing was, in the director’s words, “a crime of cinema.” It seems that Spielberg had special ambitions for his actor. Diesel told the story this way:

“Speaking of Steven Spielberg, I saw him recently and he said to me, ‘When I was writing Saving Private Ryan for you, I was obviously hiring an actor, but I was also secretly championing the director in you. , and you didn’t direct enough. This is a crime in cinema and you should get back in the director’s chair.’ (…) I didn’t direct enough.”

It is possible that Diesel, being associated with the Fast and the Furious films, should have become more of a businessman than an artist. He’s produced a lot of these movies, and each one tends to make millions and millions of dollars. Moreover, all of his non-Fast and Furious non-Marvel projects tend to be blockbuster genre films like Bloodshot, the XXX movies, or, uh, “Babylon AD” (a rather infamous sci-fi failure). His only real directorial work since The Tramp was the 2009 short film The Fast and the Furious.

Not that he didn’t try. Diesel noted in the same interview that he was very interested in creating a collection of historical war epics about Hannibala famous Carthaginian general who fought gloriously against the Roman forces during the Second Punic War. You probably learned about Hannibal in college. Back in the early 2000s, Diesel apparently began looking for locations, and a few years later he hoped to begin work on an animated prequel. Unfortunately, none of these projects have been implemented in the last 20 years. Time will tell if any Hannibal movies will be made. If Spielberg was right about Diesel, they promise to be amazing.