Everybody Wants To Be A Director And Nobody Wants To Make Movies

A spectre of ambition is haunting contemporary culture – the spectre of directing.

The fantasy of authorship has overtaken the act of authorship itself. In universities, agencies, and social media biographies, everyone wants to be “a creator,” “a curator,” “a creative director.” Yet few want to do the thing these titles once implied: to make something. Build a world, fail inside it, and see what survives.

The rise of the “creative director” perfectly illustrates this shift. Once a role tethered to the visual coherence of advertising or fashion, it’s now an aspirational identity in itself: detached from any particular medium. To “direct” today means to orchestrate psycho-social attention. It’s not about what one creates, but about how seamlessly one appears to control the aesthetic field around them.

This is, at heart, a fantasy of control: the dream of arranging the scene without entering it, of manipulating the frame without being touched by it. It gratifies the modern appetite for mastery without mess: to shape the world while remaining cleanly outside of its friction. The director archetype promises omniscience without exhaustion, authorship without anxiety, and genius without labor.

Once upon a time, originality was a baseline expectation. To write a movie meant to imagine something no one had seen before – a world, a rhythm, a voice. Today, it feels almost gauche to try. Studios, armed with data and risk-averse accountants, have learned to bet on nostalgia. The “new” is too unpredictable; the “known” sells better. The industry doesn’t so much produce films as franchise memory.

But economics only explains part of it. The deeper shift is cultural: we’ve become habituated to repetition. The same storylines, faces, and aesthetics circulate in an endless loop, not because we crave them, but because they’re easy to digest. Our imaginative metabolism has changed.

Short-form media plays a crucial factor in this shift. The constant scroll of vertical content has reprogrammed how we think about narrative. A story doesn’t need to unfold anymore; it only needs to register. Everything is optimized for instant semiotic impact: a color palette, a micro-expression, a sound bite. Meaning arrives in bursts, not arcs. This is cinema’s real crisis -- not the lack of funding, but the collapse of duration.

To write an original screenplay now feels like an act of defiance against that temporal order. It asks for patience, attention, the willingness to dwell in uncertainty. The screenplay -- slow, text-based, dependent on human interpretation -- is an anachronism in a culture addicted to surfaces. A two-hour film built on an unfamiliar story feels radical precisely because it doesn’t flatter our predictive instincts.

There is also, of course, the seductive title of “director.” A sense of authority, artistry, and command trails behind the word. In a culture where aesthetics, identity, and influence blur into one seamless performance, being a “visionary” at the center of production carries a kind of divine currency. The director today is not just a maker of films, but a manager of taste – a curator of their own myth.

It’s not hard to see why everyone wants to be one. The director has replaced the novelist, the painter, even the pop star, as the symbol of pure authorship. They hold the fantasy of total control in a culture terrified of disorder. But the deeper irony is that while everyone wants to be a director, almost no one wants to make movies. The tedious, collective, materially grounded act of storytelling – writing, rehearsing, arguing, failing – has become the least glamorous part of cinema. To make a movie is to commit to something slow and uncertain; to be a director is to appear decisive.

And perhaps that’s the real appeal. It’s easier to be seen as a director than to risk the vulnerability of making something original. The industrial machine rewards replication over invention – franchises over films, biopics over imagination. Every year the same faces are reborn in new costumes, every story a derivative of another. Original screenwriting, once the lifeblood of cinema, now feels almost deviant, as if to write something new were an act of arrogance.

Yet that’s precisely why a film like Challengers (2024) struck a nerve. It wasn’t revolutionary – it was simply new, in the way that freshness itself has become a rarity. Guadagnino’s film reminded audiences that the thrill of cinema lies not in recognition, but in discovery. To make a movie, it turns out, still requires something no algorithm or marketing plan can reproduce: the courage to begin without knowing the ending.

The director, as we now imagine them, is the Author reincarnated for the visual age. Their signature replaces the script; their taste substitutes for narrative; their authority guarantees value. When Barthes argued that the text belongs not to its maker but to its readers, he meant to liberate art from the tyranny of ownership. Yet culture, ever faithful to hierarchy, turned that liberation into branding.

To direct, in its original sense, was to guide: to shape a collective process, to organize chaos into form. Now it means something far more spectral – to embody vision. The modern director doesn’t just make films; they perform authorship itself. Every frame, every color grade, every Instagram story becomes a proof of their taste. It is not creation that matters, but the performance of creative control.

This mutation isn’t confined to cinema. The “creative director” – a title now ubiquitous across fashion, tech, music, and media -- is the perfect neoliberal offspring of Barthes’s death of the author theory. Their power lies not in producing work but in authorizing it. They oversee, delegate, curate, decide. They are less craftspeople than aesthetic executives, managing other people’s labor while appearing to incarnate originality. In Marx’s terms, they represent the ultimate alienation of creative labor: the separation of making from meaning. The “director” becomes an interface between production and desire, a human trademark stamped onto collective effort.

Guy Debord declares this as the spectacle in its purest form. The director doesn’t merely make the image – they are the image, the visible proof that authorship still exists in a system that no longer requires it. Their celebrity reassures us that art is still personal, that meaning still originates from genius rather than industry. The myth survives because we need it to.

And so everyone wants to be a director. Because to direct, in the current lexicon, means to matter without having to make; to claim authorship without enduring its uncertainty. It is a title of sovereignty in a world allergic to risk.

To understand this cultural fixation, we have to trace its genealogy. The director wasn’t always a mythic figure. In early studio Hollywood, directors were technicians -- artisans in a vast industrial apparatus. Authorship was diffuse, buried beneath producers, screenwriters, cinematographers. Then came the French New Wave, and with it, the auteur theory.

François Truffaut, writing in Cahiers du Cinéma in 1954, proposed that the director should be seen as the true “author” of a film -- the single visionary imprinting personality upon an industrial medium. It was a radical act of reclamation at the time: an assertion that cinema could be art, that films bore signatures. But like all revolutions, its meaning mutated.

By the late twentieth century, the auteur had become a brand. Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino -- names that carried both artistic integrity and market power. The “director’s cut” wasn’t just an artistic statement; it was a marketing tool. The authority of the director became synonymous with the authority of genius -- and genius, in capitalism, is profitable.

The contemporary “director” inherits this mythology stripped of its original struggle. They no longer fight against the system; they are the system’s avatar of individuality. The myth of the auteur, born in defiance of Hollywood, now sustains it.

This is where Roland Barthes becomes instructive. In The Death of the Author, Barthes argues that the author’s supposed mastery over meaning is an illusion -- that writing is an act of recombination rather than divine origin. Yet what we see today is a kind of inverted resurrection: the author returns, not as writer but as brand. Authorship, emptied of substance, is reborn as aesthetic authority. The director no longer disappears into the work; the work disappears into the director’s aura.

If the twentieth century worshipped the auteur, the twenty-first worships the algorithm.

It would be ignorant, however, to treat this as mere narcissism. It’s also an economic adaptation to a media landscape governed by algorithms. In an attention economy, visibility precedes production. The filmmaker’s task is no longer to make the best movie, but to maintain an aura of relevance -- to perform the condition of creation perpetually, even when there is nothing being created.

Walter Benjamin foresaw a version of this in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. For Benjamin, the artwork loses its “aura” through endless reproduction -- but in the twenty-first century, the logic has flipped. Aura itself has become the commodity. The director’s image of authenticity circulates more rapidly than any actual film.

Hence the paradox: as the tools of creation become democratized, the imaginative horizon contracts. Everyone can make something, yet fewer dare to make something new.

Every film student I meet says they want to direct, but few can tell me what story they’re dying to tell. The title precedes the work. The calling has become a costume.

What’s more, directing today extends beyond cinema. The logic of the director -- control, authorship, branding -- permeates every cultural surface. Musicians become “creative directors” of their own albums; influencers “direct” their daily routines; even academics frame their research as “curatorial.” To direct has become a moral position, a sign of self-possession in a world anxious about chaos.

But to make movies again -- to really make them -- would mean reclaiming uncertainty as a virtue. It would mean treating originality not as arrogance but as courage. It would mean remembering that direction, in its truest sense, is not authority but orientation: a way of finding one’s path through chaos. I understand this exceedingly as a self-proclaimed director and filmmaker myself.

The exhaustion of originality has become our aesthetic mood. Hollywood, perhaps the most visible symptom, treats narrative not as creation but as iteration. The franchise model replaces mythmaking with maintenance. A culture that can no longer imagine new worlds must recycle its old ones. Every reboot, every origin story, every biopic of a barely-dead celebrity is a confession: we are terrified of the blank page.

And yet, paradoxically, audiences still hunger for what feels new -- even if “new” now means simply “not derivative.” It reminded us that the essence of cinema lies not in perfection, but in uncertainty. To make a movie is to enter a problem, not solve it.

The fantasy of being a director -- of controlling the vision -- is, at its core, a defense against risk. Risk of failure, risk of embarrassment, risk of irrelevance. But the films that endure are born from precisely those risks. When we say “everybody wants to be a director,” what we really mean is: everyone wants to be seen deciding. Nobody wants to linger in the indecision that creation requires.

How powerful would Hollywood become if it stopped wanting to be directors and started wanting to make movies again?