Why Steven Spielberg Is Disappointed With Vin Diesel

Vin Diesel was bitten by the acting bug very early in his life, having acted in a New York stage production of “Dinosaur Door” at the age of seven. The way Diesel came to be involved in “Dinosaur Door” was kismet. It seems that he and a few buddies had broken into the theater to vandalize it, but were caught by the theater manager. Rather than calling the police, Diesel and friends were offered parts in the play, which they accepted. (For those familiar, this is very similar to the story of the dance film “Step Up.”) Diesel ended up studying writing and filmmaking in college.

Diesel made his motion picture debut in 1990, playing an unnamed orderly in the Robin Williams/Robert De Niro drama “Awakenings.” He was 23. Also a burgeoning filmmaker, Diesel also 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-based crime movie “Strays,” a film that played at the Sundance Film Festival.

It seems that it was “Multi-Facial” and “Strays” that attracted Steven Spielberg to Diesel. Spielberg cast Diesel in his 1998 war drama “Saving Private Ryan,” fond of the young actor’s intensity and intrigued by his voice as a filmmaker. “Saving Private Ryan” was Diesel’s big break and it led to star-making turns in the finance-bro drama “Boiler Room” and the low-budget sci-fi thriller “Pitch Black.” The year after “Pitch Black” came out, Diesel starred in “The Fast and the Furious,” and a billion-dollar franchise was born.

While Diesel has firmly ensconced himself in the pop consciousness through his “Fast & Furious” movies and his role as Groot in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he hasn’t directed any features since “Strays.” In a 2020 interview with The National, Diesel admitted that his lack of directorial efforts was a failing on his part and has invited disappointment from Spielberg. The latter, Diesel revealed, hired him partly in the hope that “Saving Private Ryan” would inspire him to direct more.

This wasn’t just a suspicion that Diesel had. Evidently, Spielberg expressed his disappointment directly to Diesel’s face. Indeed, Spielberg said that Diesel’s turn to acting and producing exclusively was, in the filmmaker’s words, “a crime of cinema.” It seems that Spielberg had particular ambitions for his actor. Diesel related the story as follows: 

“Speaking of Steven Spielberg, I saw him recently, and he had said to me, ‘When I wrote the role for you in ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ I was obviously employing the actor, but I was also secretly championing the director in you, and you have not directed enough. That is a crime of cinema and you must get back in the directing chair.’ […] I haven’t directed enough.”

It’s possible that Diesel, in becoming associated with the “Fast & Furious” movies, had to become more of a businessman than an artist. He’s produced the bulk of those films and they tend to make millions upon millions of dollars each. What’s more, his non-“Fast & Furious” and non-Marvel projects all tend to be blockbuster-facing genre films like “Bloodshot,” the “XXX” movies, or, uh, “Babylon A.D” (a rather ill-reputed sci-fi flop). His only actual directorial effort since “Strays” was a “Fast & Furious” tie-in short in 2009. 

Not that he hasn’t been trying. Diesel noted in the same interview that he has been intensely interested in making a collection of historical war epics about Hannibal, the noted Carthaginian general who famously took on the Roman armies during the Second Punic War. You probably learned about Hannibal in college. Back in the early 2000s, Diesel apparently started scouting locations, and a few years thereafter that he was hoping to kick things off with an animated prequel. Sadly, none of these projects have come to be in the last 20 years. Time will tell if the Hannibal movies ever get made. If Spielberg was right about Diesel, they promise to be amazing.