We’re all guilty of perceiving people in film based on their image. In their own way, directors personal proclivities have a way of shaping their films until they become part of their public persona. Time has shown us that Steven Spielberg is not a fan of Nazis, or Michael Bay of things that neither explode nor have tits. In any other industry, such lack of flexibility might be seen as a negative thing, but the film world thrives off predictability.
But what if any of these directors suddenly found themselves forced into a career change? Let’s look at the worst possible second jobs for a variety of world-renowned auteurs.

George Lucas – Military Strategist

Log of Gen.George Lucas, 1138th Armoured Division, Baghdad – 12/2/2010, 2100 hrs
“Worked hard today. I don’t know who was in charge of these troops before, but they had no clue about battlefield tactics. I told them, everyone has to stand in a big line, in a nice open space, firing blindly... Some of them were even hiding behind stuff! They told me it was ‘cover’... I mean, jeez! How’re you supposed to charge when you’ve got a big rock in the way? Just lazy, these kids nowadays.
It was just all a goshdarned disaster, almost as bad as inspection this morning. Can you believe I had to send our entire stock of armoured personnel carriers back? Two hundred APCs and not one of them had giant robotic chicken legs! How am I supposed to fight a war when the enemy can’t use their tow cables?
Still, on a positive note, that slow kid in the Canteen fixed the soup machine. Made him a Commander.”

Werner Herzog – Motivational Speaker

Knowing his reputation, motivating people wouldn't be a problem - this is the man who actually got Klaus Kinski to behave (Well, occasionally, and it did involve threatening to shoot him.) But as his films not only reveal a fascination with sociopathic obsessives driven to grand and destructive achievements, but end up being every bit as insanely fraught behind the scenes (I repeat, Kinski + Implied Bullet = Man Management, Herzog Style) he'd probably end up killing everyone. Imagine his self-help plan: hauling a hundred-ton riverboat up a mountain in the morning, adrift on a raft full of monkeys by the afternoon, with perhaps a side order of live gunfire for lunch. I suppose it gets people up and moving a lot quicker than a few flowcharts...
If you want to know more about Herr Herzog’s life-changing ideas, look out for his upcoming book So How Hard Can It Be? Eaten By Bears?

M. Night Shyamalan – Relationship Counselor

“Helen, you have to start trusting that your fiance isn’t cheating on you. He couldn’t even if he wanted to. He’s been a ghost all along. Bet you didn’t know that, did ya? An alien ghost who’s allergic to water. Who causes train crashes even though he’s crippled. Look at how more able he was than you always thought! You got psyched, huh? Oh, and you know how he never lets you go to the other side of the forest? Because out there IT’S THE FUTURE! Where’s my Prozac? My GOD! My Prozac was Ritalin all along! WHO KNEW?!?”

Neil LaBute – Dating Site Founder

(Extract from promotional materials for XX-666.com, The Dating Site That Only Bleeds When It’s Wounded)
“The first thing you need to do when you sign up is to make sure your profile contains absolutely no truths about yourself –after all, you’re making yourself vulnerable enough by getting the opposite sex involved, and you’ll find things go much smoother if you let people believe what they want about you.
Once you’ve done that, sit back and let the saucy emails flood in – or even send one or two of your own! Active members can even win free 12-month Premium memberships if you win the Three Date Challenge. Men, that means you have three dates to have sex with your date and then dump her in the cruellest and most humiliating way you can. And don’t you ladies think you’re missing out – you have three dates to emasculate the new man in your life and completely destroy his self-worth.
Just remember to send off your progress reports after every date, because you’ll be judged by the other members – if you’re picked as the month’s Alpha Male or 100 Carat Bitch, you’ll receive a year’s premium membership ABSOLUTELY FREE!
And girls, don’t get any ideas about bucking the system and standing by your new man; if you get as far as a fourth consecutive date with the same guy, Mr. LaBute himself will come round in a bear suit and punch you in the face!”

Stanley Kubrick – Improv Comedy Host

Because no-one wants to see Wrestlemania set in a nunnery in the style of Oklahoma seventy-five times in a row until they get it right, goddammit.

The Wachowski Brothers – Driving Instructors

“Good morning. We are the Instructors. We’ve been waiting for you. You have many questions, and although the process has altered your consciousness, you remain irrevocably displaying P plates. Concordantly, while your questions are pertinent, you may or may not realize that they are the most irrelevant.
Try a three-point turn here.
Your journey back to the driving school is the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to the milleu of what is generally given the semantically commonly understood signifier of ‘a driving lesson’. You exist as an anomaly in the mathematically perfect state that governs the road and if the balance is to be rectified, we must address our dissonant alignment, perhaps concurring that alternative methods of progress will instigate a chain of enactment that will inexorably lead to balance… Yes, we meant get in the right lane!
Don’t worry about your grip on the steering wheel; the steering wheel grips you, and it has done from the beginning. To concern yourself on where your hands are is to muddle yourself with a choice the wheel has already made. What remains to be seen is if the wheel understands that it has chosen.
Concordantly, this leads one to address the issue of ‘control’. We tell ourselves that we are travelling the roads, that we choose our destination, but are we simply disseminating comfortable truths to reinforce us as the anomaly in the overarching equation? Do we choose our individual outcomes, or are the social pressures to which we must submit the real masters, ones which we strive to obfuscate under a veneer of reason? For we are concordantly compelled to concur that if we were to discard our semantic allusions, and submit to the inevitability of the road equation as mathematic dissonance, then ergo the pedagogical –
Stop sign? What sto-“


So there we have it – the careers that thankfully never were (At least so far). Next time you find yourself complaining about famous director X’s latest cinematic abortion, just ask yourself: where would you rather these people? Behind the camera, or out on the streets where they could do real damage?
Keep cinema alive, folks. It’s the thin celluloid line between us and anarchy.

Written by Cavan Gallagher