Star-directors Franco, Fiennes, Reeves say pulling double duty a tall task

TORONTO -- While directing the stately period piece "The Invisible Woman," Ralph Fiennes had to occasionally take a critical, unblinking look at the performance of his lead actor: Ralph Fiennes.

Fiennes says directing himself -- which the two-time Oscar nominee did for the first time with 2011's "Coriolanus" -- is a fulfilling if draining experience, but when it comes to judging his own performance, it requires a little help from his friends.

"I've loved being able to be, as it were, the puppet master of my own performance -- I love that," Fiennes said in an interview during the Toronto International Film Festival, where his film had its world premiere.

"(But) you need people to give you good, constructive, critical feedback, especially about your own performance.... So I'm not escaping into any kind of inadequacy or misjudgments or, frankly, badness."

Here, the British thespian smiles.

"Actually, I have. In (editing), I had to confront the bad bits later."

Indeed, even those multi-talented multi-taskers blessed with the ability to pull double duty as director and actor need something else: the humility to know when it's their own performance that needs adjusting.

And this year's Toronto film festival seems to feature a bumper crop of actor-directors, including Joseph Gordon-Levitt in "Don Jon," Jason Bateman in "Bad Words" and Keanu Reeves in "Man of Tai Chi."

Fiennes' "The Invisible Woman" is a painstakingly detailed period piece casting the "English Patient" star as legendary British scribe Charles Dickens. The film zeroes in on the married author's single-minded pursuit of an admirer named Nelly Ternan (Felicity Jones) and the catastrophic consequences the affair poses for an unmarried young woman in Victorian England.

As much as Fiennes enjoys shepherding his own performance, he says it's incredibly taxing.

"It's crazy. It's very, very hard," he said. "I don't know how people do it consistently and do it so well, like Orson Welles did or Laurence Olivier did, Clint Eastwood does, Kevin Costner's done it.... There's no question that you've got two often opposing headspaces which you have to balance."

Reeves realized that on his first day of production for "Man of Tai Chi," an ebullient China-set martial-arts flick about an innocent bicycle courier and tai chi practitioner (Tiger Hu Chen) who is gradually lured to the dark side by a mysterious mogul (Reeves himself, in a villainous role).

The 49-year-old, who grew up in Toronto, was making his directorial debut. And it struck him early on that flourishing in both roles would require some serious dexterity.

"The first day was not fun," Reeves said earlier this week. "Because one is so objective and one is so subjective. As an actor, you only have your responsibility to your role within the whole, and the director has a responsibility to the whole and you in it. So it's a different mindset. And you're literally, physically, in two different spaces. You're either in front of the camera or behind the camera."

"It was definitely difficult the first day," he added. "It wasn't fun. We were also on time pressure the first day I had to do it. By the end of it, I didn't mind it."

And on whom did Reeves lean for constructive criticism?

"I have enough critics in my life," he joked, before saying that the film's writer, cinematographer, assistant director and producer all offered feedback.

"I think I asked you a couple times: 'How was that?"' he said, turning to his co-star Chen. "He was just like, 'no,' and I was like: 'OK, I'll do it again."'

As hard as it is for the overworked soul in the director's chair, for fellow actors it can be a unique joy to be steered by a person with a deep understanding of what's required to sparkle onscreen.

"Jason, he was seamless," said "Bad Words" star Kathryn Hahn of working with Bateman in his ribald directorial debut.

"He never was not there for us off camera. When you were in scene with him ... you would never feel like you were talking to a director, it was always (his character) Guy Trilby in the scene with me. Because he was an actor for so long, and he's been through so many different lifetimes as a performer, his empathy and respect for actors is (extensive)."

And filmmakers more experienced with the dual roles, meanwhile, seem slightly more likely to shrug off the supposed difficulty.

Toronto's Don McKellar actually chose not to appear in his latest comedy "The Grand Seduction," which screened at the festival, but he took roles in his previous directorial efforts "Last Night" and "Childstar."

And he agrees that directing one's own performance becomes easier with experience.

"The danger is actually for a healthy person, I think, that you're hyper-critical of yourself and if you're new at it, it's easy just to hate yourself," he said. "Everyone knows what that's like to hear your voice and go: 'Ugh! Who is this guy? Why does he talk like that? What is going on with that posture? Has he no spine?'

"So you have to get over that. If it's working correctly in the editing suite, you develop this kind of strange schizophrenia where you are another character and you think: 'Oh, he's good here. I think he got it in this take."'

Quebec wunderkind Xavier Dolan has appeared in all his movies (with only a small cameo in 2012's "Laurence Anyways"), and this year's festival entry "Tom at the Farm" is no different. He stars in the psychological thriller as a grieving young ad copywriter who attends a rural funeral and soon becomes (perhaps alarmingly) close to the peculiar family of the deceased.

With typical audacity, Dolan bucks the trend by arguing that presiding over his own performances is no big deal.

"I don't want to be brash but you just do it," he said. "It's not complicated. I love it. I love doing this. I sit down on the chair to do the scene, and then I get up, ask for the playback. And if it's bad, it's bad. If it's good, it's good. I won't hesitate a second if it's bad."

"Some actors will never be able to watch themselves even though it's on the Oscars when they're playing the excerpt for the movie they're nominated for," he added. "But I mean, I'm able to watch myself act and be like: 'That's OK. That's a good scene."'

If there's anyone who should agree with Dolan's unfussy attitude toward self-direction, it might be jack-of-all-trades James Franco.

After all, the multi-hyphenate actor/author/essayist/poet/director/producer/professor has two projects at the Toronto film festival: "Palo Alto," which stars Franco based on a novel written by Franco; and "Child of God," a Cormac McCarthy adaptation in which Franco served as star, director and screenwriter.

"I've done it many times before -- it's something I've grown used to," Franco, 35, said in an interview this week. "It's sort of just as a director you're viewing everything from above or the outside. You just want to make sure all the pieces are working well together. So if I'm going to act in a movie I'm directing, I can just look at: OK, that's the role I'm going to play, this is what I know as a storyteller that I need from this role, you just go and do it.

"I've acted in enough films that I can feel it from the inside, like, OK, this is right. If something is really off or whatever, I do have my producer and my (cinematographer) on the outside that can tell me."

So it's no big deal, right?

Actually, even Franco -- a man whose relentless flair for multi-disciplinary experimental excursions has become both a calling card and a frequent punchline -- would prefer in an ideal world to focus on only one of the demanding jobs.

"I actually don't like to do it," he conceded. "I enjoy directing other actors more. I enjoy the collaboration between directors and actors so much that if I can get away with not being in a movie that I'm directing, I will.

"But sometimes you have to."

With files from Canadian Press reporters Victoria Ahearn, Andrea Baillie, Diana Mehta and Cassandra Szklarski.