So, Johnny Depp thinks he can direct? Apparently so, with news Monday that the questionably vindicated movie star has lined up his first directing gig in 25 years.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Depp will helm “Modigliani,” a biopic about Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani. The project represents Depp’s latest effort at a career comeback, following his lurid but legally successful defamation trial against ex-wife, Amber Heard.
If Depp wants to restore his professional reputation by directing his second-ever feature film, he’ll have to manage multiple people, check his ego, minimize his flare for off-screen drama and deliver quality work. Unfortunately, his history as a director doesn’t bode well.
In 1997, Depp decided to direct, co-write and star in “The Brave,” a neo-Western with an improbable and problematic premise, a tragic production backstory and a way-past-his prime Marlon Brando as co-star. Depp’s first directorial effort was critically savaged, with Time Out calling it the actor’s “ folie de grandeur,” or an exercise in megalomania and delusions of greatness.
The movie was so bad, it was never released. However, many in Depp’s army of online fans may not realize that as they celebrated the “Modigliani” news with throwback photos of Depp directing “The Brave” and the hashtags “#JohnnyDeppRises” and “#JohnnyDeppWon.”
In 1997 Johnny Depp not only starred in The Brave, he also directed it. Spring of 2023 he’ll be behind the camera again directing Modigliani. ???? #JohnnyDeppRises #JohnnyDeppWon #JohnnyDeppKeepsWinning #JohnnyDeppIsALegend pic.twitter.com/e65UUjv7vu
— Wendy Campbell ????☠️⚓️???? (@campbedream) August 16, 2022
According to the film’s premise, Depp plays a Native American husband and father named Raphael, living in poverty at the edges of a garbage dump. For $50,000, which he can leave to his family, Raphael agrees to star in a snuff film in which he’s tortured and killed. Brando plays a mysterious figure who offers Raphael the money and engages in “windy philosophizing about death,” according to the Variety review.
As for the production’s backstory, it’s as horrific as it can get. Depp took over as director from Aziz Ghazal, the manager of the USC film school stock room, who originally optioned the Gregory McDonald novel on which the movie is based, the Los Angeles Times reported.
On Dec. 1, 1993, shortly before work on the film was to begin, Ghazal bludgeoned to death his 13-year-old daughter and his estranged wife, the Times said. He then killed himself, although his body wasn’t found for a month.
When “The Brave” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival inn 1997, a then-33-year-old Depp said that he was deeply moved to tell a story about a man sacrificing for his family.
“I felt driven to do this movie,” Depp said. “This was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. It just about ripped me to shreds.”
Unfortunately for Depp, the movie also ended up personally costing him $2 million of his own money, which he contributed to the $5 million budget, the Times said. Because of “devastating” reviews, Depp decided not to give it a formal release in theaters.
The reviews suggest that Depp’s choices as director and co-writer are to blame for the movie’s troubles.
Variety called “The Brave,” a “turgid and unbelievable” film with Depp offering “further proof that Hollywood stars who attempt to extend their range are apt to exceed it.” Depp also displayed “age-old Hollywood bad faith” in its depiction of Native Americans, making them “generic” in a way that could be “taken as exploitative or insulting,” Variety added.
Timeout zeroed in on what it called the film’s “two fatal flaws.” The film is “tediously slow,” as well as “hugely narcissistic as the camera focuses repeatedly on Depp’s bandana’d head and rippling torso.”
The producers of “Modigliani,” who include legendary actor Al Pacino and veteran producer Barry Navidi, seem to believe that Depp, now an Oscar-nominated, 59-year-old veteran of “The Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, has matured enough as an artist to lead their long-planned project about Modigliani.
The film takes place in 1916 and covers “a turbulent and eventful 48 hours” in the life of the painter and sculptor who died at age 35 in Paris of tubercular meningitis, without ever achieving success while alive, The Hollywood Reporter said. Casting has yet to be announced.
Producer Navidi called Depp “a true artist with an amazing vision to bring this great story to the screen,” according to THR. Depp said he is “incredibly honored, and truly humbled” to be able to tell Modigliani’s story. “It was a life of great hardship, but eventual triumph — a universally human story all viewers can identify with,” he told THR.
To Depp’s fans, his return to movies, including as director, is “our victory,” as one proclaimed.
See! This is the kind of stuff we should be talking about instead of stressing & screaming about his ex-wife. This is good & positive. This is our victory. #JohnnyDeppRises https://t.co/IdbeSln3wX
— Scott Cardinal (@ScottStories) August 15, 2022
Others viewed this news with skepticism, including Jezebel writer Audra Heinrichs who called Depp “the world’s most repulsive Renaissance man.”
In addition to “raking in millions” as the face of Dior, releasing a new album with guitar legend Jeff Beck, and returning to acting to play King Louis XV in another European-set biopic, Depp’s new job as a director means he’s joined Hollywood’s “alleged-abuser-to-director pipeline, Heinrichs said.
Others in this circle include Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick. It’s not yet know how Depp will measure up to these men as filmmaking geniuses, but Heinrichs said he shares their tendency to have suspect personal or professional relationships with women.
Earlier this year, Depp won his second defamation lawsuit involving Heard’s domestic violence allegations, but to some, he remains under the stain of those allegations. He lost his first libel trial in the U.K., with a judge there affirming that he abused Heard. Audio recordings played at the recent trial in Virginia also revealed that Depp could sometimes be a drunken, raging, self-indulgent narcissist.
Nonetheless, Depp is getting back to work, directing a movie about a tortured artist. As Depp prepares to tell Modigliani’s story, it remains to be seen whether he’ll be able to make a movie about that artist and not himself.
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