Vin Diesel was bitten by the acting bug very early in his life, starring in the New York stage production of Dinosaur Door at the age of seven. The way Diesel got involved in "Dinosaur Door" was kismet. It appears that he and several friends broke into the theater to vandalize it, but were caught by the theater director. Instead of calling the police, Diesel and friends were offered parts in the play, which they accepted. (For those in the know, this is very similar to the story of the dance movie "Step Up.") Diesel ended up writing and making movies in college.

Diesel made his film debut in 1990, playing an unnamed editor in the Robin Williams/Robert De Niro drama The Awakening. He was 23 years old. Also an aspiring filmmaker, Diesel wrote and directed the 1995 short film Multi-Facial, a film about his own multiracial background. In 1997, Diesel wrote, directed and starred in the character-driven crime film 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 chose Diesel in his 1998 war drama Saving Private Ryan. fond of the young actor's intensity and intrigued by his voice as a film director. Saving Private Ryan was Diesel's big break and led to star turns in the financial drama Boiler Room and the low-budget sci-fi thriller Pitch Black. The year after Pitch Black came out, Diesel stars in The Fast and the Furious and a billion dollar franchise was born.

While Diesel has firmly cemented himself in the pop consciousness through his Fast and Furious films and his role as Groot in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he hasn't directed a single feature since Strays. In an interview with The National in 2020Diesel admitted that his lack of directorial effort was a failure on his part and caused disappointment with Spielberg. The latter, Diesel revealed, he hired in part in hopes that Saving Private Ryan would inspire him to direct more.

This wasn't just a doubt that Diesel had. Apparently, Spielberg took his disappointment directly to Diesel's face. Indeed, Spielberg said that Diesel's turn to solely acting and producing was, in the director's words, "a crime of cinema." It seems that Spielberg had special ambitions for his actor. Diesel told the story this way:

"Speaking of Steven Spielberg, I saw him recently and he said, 'When I wrote the part for you in Saving Private Ryan, I was obviously hiring the actor, but I was also secretly going for the director in you. , and you haven't directed enough. (...) I haven't directed enough."

It is possible that Diesel, being associated with the Fast and Furious movies, had to become more of a businessman than an artist. He produced most of those movies and they tend to make millions and millions of dollars each. What's more, his non-Fast and Furious and non-Marvel projects tend to be blockbuster-facing genre films like Bloodshot, the XXX movies, or, uh, "Babylon AD" (pretty bad loud sci-fi flop). His only real directorial effort since Strays was the 2009 short Fast & Furious.

Not that he didn't try. Diesel noted in the same interview that he was intensely interested in doing it a collection of historical war epics about Hannibalthe noted Carthaginian general who famously took on the Roman armies during the Second Punic War. You must have learned about Hannibal in college. Back in the early 2000s, Diesel apparently began scouting locations, and a few years after that he hoped to kick things off with an animated prequel. Unfortunately, none of these projects were realized in the last 20 years. Time will tell if the Hannibal movies will ever be made. If Spielberg was right about Diesel, they promise to be amazing.