Landman Star Billy Bob Thornton Has A Sad Reason For Not Directing Again

Billy Bob Thornton came to acting a little later than one might have expected. He had already graduated from college and was working as an asphalt spreader, having dropped out of a psychology program that he decided wasn't for him. It wasn't until the mid-1980s, when he was approaching 30, that Thornton moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting as a career. His first professional screen role was a small part in a "Deliverance" knock-off called "Hunter's Blood," released in 1986.

By 1996, though, Thornton was frustrated. He had been struggling for a decade, but he didn't have a project he could really call his own. He began developing a character named Karl, a developmentally disabled man from Arkansas with a good heart but little understanding of the world. The character soon became a one-man show, then a short film, and then the 1996 feature film "Sling Blade," which Thornton also wrote and directed. The movie won Best Screenplay at the Oscars and netted Thorton a nomination for his acting.

Thornton has continued to act incessantly ever since and is a proper awards darling. When it comes to directing, however, he's only made four additional movies: the 2000 Western flop "All the Pretty Horses," "Daddy and Them" in 2001, "The King of Luck" in 2011, and "Jayne Mansfield's Car" in 2013.

Why hasn't he directed a movie since then? Thornton revealed the lamentable reason why in an interview with CBS. It seems that his interests as a filmmaker, he feels, are far too niche for mainstream audiences and likely wouldn't get funded. Thornton, it appears, wants to make multiple movies based on the literature of the deep American SOuth, and he feels there just isn't enough audience for that. Otherwise, the muse has left him.

When asked if he would ever direct again, Thornton was frank, saying: 

"You know, I don't know that anybody wants to see what I have to say as a director or writer, 'cause all my stuff is based on Southern literature. And I don't think that those stories would really be relevant to anyone right now. So, I doubt I ever do it again."

"Southern literature" typically describes any number of writing movements to come out of the South, and it usually alludes to books published at the beginning of the early 20th century. It was a movement that acknowledged the separate cultures from the South, largely informed by slavery and the U.S. Civil War. Some are very critical of Southern attitudes and lingering racism (see: Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird"), while others vaunt a mythical "lost cause" narrative about the Confederacy (see: Margaret Mitchell's "Gone with the Wind"). Luminaries of the movement include William Faulkner, Alice Walker, and Richard Wright, but the movement also includes work by Thomas Wolfe and James Agee. 

Faulkner is notoriously un-filmable (he deals in psychological realism and inner monologue), although James Franco infamously adapted his stories "As I Lay Dying" and "The Sound and the Fury" into movies in 2013 and 2014. Thornton didn't say which of the above authors he'd be interested in adapting, but whoever it is, he feels they're too obscure for mainstream audiences. The note he gave about Southern literature being irrelevant may also be inspired by the call for inclusivity in Hollywood; a tale of the Civil War as a "lost cause" would not play well in the 2020s.

So, he'll be away from the director's chair for the immediate future. He's currently busy with "Landman" now, anyway.