First-time directors with films premiering at Cannes next week would be forgiven for feeling nervous. But three of the directors who are unveiling their debut features inFranceare less likely than their peers to be quaking as they approach the red carpet.
ActorsScarlett Johansson, Kristen Stewart and Harris Dickinson are all among the film-makers with movies screening in Cannes’ prestigious sidebar Un Certain Regard over the next 10 days.
Now 35 and 40, Stewart and Johansson have had careers forged on the Croisette and have attended for many years. Stewart also served on the competition jury in 2018 while Johansson stars this year in a film in the main competition – Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme. Twenty-eight-year old Dickinson, meanwhile, made his critical breakthrough in Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness, which won the Palme d’Or in 2022, before finding worldwide fame opposite Nicole Kidman in Babygirl.
Actors broadening their portfolio by dabbling in directing is nothing new, and Cannes has energetically indulged talents such as Sean Penn, Tommy Lee Jones and Clint Eastwood – as well as myriad domestic stars including Mathieu Amalric and Louis Garrell – who have attempted it.
But the films of Stewart, Johansson and Dickinson are unusual in that none feature the famous name that is behind the camera in front of it. This may suggest financiers have been emboldened by the likes of Barbie director Greta Gerwig, who has resisted the temptation to do double duty on her own movies, with no noticeable impact on box office returns.
In the cases of Johansson – one of Hollywood’s highest paid female actors – and Stewart, it is likely they would have had the resources to bypass conventional revenue streams and fund their own films. Dickinson’s debut, Urchin, is low budget and backed by BBC Films.
Urchin stars Frank Dillane as a rough sleeper struggling with drug abuse, and was inspired by its writer-director’s experiences working at a shelter for homeless people in east London. “Around 2019-20 I was becoming disillusioned with politics and wanted to take action on a more local level,” says Dickinson. “So I began to lend a helping hand with very small localised things. It’s where I really started to understand how many people in that community were incredibly vulnerable and in need of support – let down by society and the system.”
Dickinson’s cinematic heroes are Cannes darlings Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. “That’s been my bread and butter,” he says. “They’re incredibly political film-makers who hold a huge importance in film.”
The Chronology of Water, Kristen Stewart’s adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir detailing multiple traumas, is also a passion project. Stewart first announced the movie, which stars Imogen Poots, in 2018, and became so disillusioned by the false starts that in January 2024 she declared: “I’m going to make this movie before I ever work for someone else. I will quit the fucking business. I won’t make a-fucking-nother movie until I make this movie. I will tell you that, for sure. I think that will get things going.”
Six months later, she was shooting in Latvia. “Lidia’s memoir honours corporeal experience, radically,”Stewart has said. “To make that experience physical feels vital to me.”
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Johansson’s movie, Eleanor the Great, is perhaps the one with the strongest commercial prospects, having already sold to Sony Pictures and now drumming up Oscar buzz for its star, June Squibb, who plays an elderly woman who relocates from Florida to New York.
“Premiering in Cannes, I don’t know how I will be able to process the hugeness of it,” said Johansson earlier this month. “It makes me nervous, but I’m excited as well.”
She told a producing partner on the film: “If I do my job well and do what I’m supposed to do, I can imagine June walking the Croisette at age 95, starring in this incredible dramatic role.”
Previous Un Certain Regard prizewinners include early works by Östlund, Yorgos Lanthimos and Sinners director Ryan Coogler. However, there are less happy precedents for actor-directors. In 2014, Ryan Gosling premiered his first film as director,Lost River, in the sidebar, fresh from high-profile Cannes smashes such as Drive and Only God Forgives. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, one of the kinder critics at the time, called it “colossally indulgent, shapeless, often fantastically and unthinkingly offensive and at all times insufferably conceited”. Gosling has not directed since.