| "As soon as you start getting on people's cases and being strong about your vision," Fincher said, "you'll get a mutiny." Fuqua learned the lesson the hard way. On his second movie, Entrapment, creative differences with the star and producer, Sean Connery, resulted in Fuqua's departure from the project. "When you start to do that early in your career, and they don't understand you, you end up out the door," Fuqua says. "It's hard because you have everybody breathing down your neck and trying to tell you how to make a movie. We're saying, 'I know how to make a fuckin' movie, I just don't want to make the movie you want to make.'" Even veteran directors bump heads with producers and stars. But first-timers are often lucky to land even a minor project. The best of them understand the magnitude of the opportunity. Charles Stone III and Tim Story both turned genre flicks into unlikely hits by infusing them with unexpected warmth and nuance. |
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| Takingon last year's Paid in Full, Stone welcomed the challenge of bringing something new to a tired story line: the black drug dealer wondering what else life can bring besides money. "I wanted to work in a genre that was played out," says Stone, 36. "I thought, How can I flip it? The thing I brought to it was a sense of humanity and some surreality." The director, also known for his innovative "Whassup'!" Budweiser commercials, made a box-office breakthrough with Drumline, attracting white audiences to a film about the black college experience. Like Stone, Story managed to transcend cliche with Barbershop, whose familiar characters could have easily crossed the line into outright coon-ery. Instead, Story infused the picture with surprising emotional depth as well as hilarity. "MGM didn't exactly know how much heart they were going to get," says the 33-year-old Story. |
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