Does heart rule head when directors get passionate about their long-term projects?

Directors keep clinging to their 'passion projects'. Can an audience possibly share a director's passion?

Andrew Garfield in Silence. Courtesy StudioCanal

Martin Scorsese's Silence arrived in cinemas last Thursday, marking the end of a three-decade struggle by the director to bring Shûsaku Endô's novel to the screen, since he was given a copy of the book in 1988.

Scorsese isn’t the first successful director to develop an almost obsessive attachment to one particular “passion project”, regardless of commercial viability, and carry it with them doggedly until they finally get the chance to make it.

It can perhaps be seen in some sense as a badge of honour for a director to have such commitment to an obscure, often ostentatiously art-house project in which only they see the true merit.

Scorsese got to make Silence eventually and it has been relatively well received – by critics, if not by paying audiences. Some of his peers have been less fortunate.

Probably the best-known example of a passion project gone awry is Terry Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, based loosely on the classic novel by Miguel de Cervantes.

The film, from the acclaimed director of Brazil, 12 Monkeys and Time Bandits among others, has been 19 years, and counting, in the making. Over the years, stars including Johnny Depp, Michael Palin, Ewan McGregor, John Hurt and Adam Driver have been involved, with the project in and out of production. It is still not finished.

In 2002, Lost in La Mancha was released, an acclaimed documentary about the first failed attempt by Gilliam to make the film, which was scuppered by an injury to veteran French actor Jean Rochefort, who had been cast in the title role.

This was possibly an attempt by financiers to claw back some of the millions that had already been poured into the project –its US$40 million budget (Dh147m), in 1999, made it one of the most expensive European films at that time.

The project has been revived periodically since, most recently when Gilliam announced at the Cannes Festival last May that it was going back into production. Shooting was due to start in October, but the promised funding failed to materialise.

Fans of the 76-year-old director’s work should not give up hope, though – Gilliam insists “I will be dead before this film is.”

He should perhaps be careful. Stanley Kubrick had a similar obsession with a film called Artificial Intelligence – but died in 1999 before he could make it.

His efforts to adapt Supertoys Last All Summer Long, a short story by author Brian Aldiss, began in 1976, a decade after it was written. However, the notoriously obsessive director was insistent that an actual robot should play the lead role of a mechanical boy called David, and so put the film on hold, waiting for technology to catch up. It didn't.

After Kubrick's death, his friend Steven Spielberg took over the project, casting Haley Joel Osment, fresh from the success of The Sixth Sense, as the robotic child. We can only imagine what the film might have been with Kubrick in charge, instead of Spielberg, whose version, which received mixed reviews, displayed his usual sentimental streak.

If the risk of never getting to make the film, or dying before they can, is not enough to put directors or actors off a pet project, perhaps practicality should be.

Apocalypse Now was Francis Ford Coppola's passion in the late 1970s. Eventually he delivered a stunning film, but one that had left cast and crew exhausted and pushed some to the brink of madness. Star Martin Sheen, brought in to replace the sacked Harvey Keitel in the lead role, had a breakdown and suffered a near-fatal heart attack on location.

Even when a film is finally complete, that is not necessarily the end of the filmmaker’s woes. Because the projects are often so personal, sometimes it seems like there is no consideration of whether the audience will be as interested as the filmmaker.

Some passion projects are great and find success – Apocalypse Now, for example, or actor Ryan Reynolds's cherished take on Deadpool from Marvel's X-Men comics. After Furious 7 was a huge hit, director James Wan sat out Fast and Furious 8 to return to his first love and make a sequel to his film The Conjuring.

While not a billion-dollar global smash like Furious 7, The Conjuring 2 was nonetheless a big success, critically and at the box office.

Others are less successful – if not downright terrible. This week alone had the release of Ben Affleck's poorly-received Live by Night and Scorsese's Silence, which critics adored but few people bothered to watch. Both tanked at the global box office.

If the history of passion projects teaches us anything, it is that when directors start to make films first and foremost for themselves, they perhaps forget, or ignore, the fact that they also need to appeal to others. Benicio Del Toro's two-part five-hour passion project, Che, was also a box-office failure.

Perhaps directors need to stop being so precious and pretentious. They make films – and films need audiences.

There’s a question for filmmakers to ask themselves – just as many viewers do when they check out a movie channel or Netflix and wonder: “Oh, is this just going to be another boring film about people talking to each other?”

In the case of passion projects, it often is – but even if you are Scorsese or Spielberg, you cannot expect audiences to turn out in their millions for that. At best it will find a niche audience or cult success.

For better or worse, mainstream audiences want to to see fast cars, things exploding and/or romance. So let us put the passion projects’ contemplations of faith and the meaning of life aside, please.

Did Ridley Scott really need to give the world Prometheus? Maybe we should just stick with superheroes.