10 Famous Directors Who Completely Changed Style For One Movie

Most directors have their own unique fingerprint. Their films reflect their own unique artistic sensibilities and creative visions. And over the course of a career, it's easy to see certain patterns form in their work, whether it be a repeated visual aesthetic or the inclusion of very specific types of characters.

Some auteurs are able to sustain long and fruitful careers without ever diverging from their self-created molds. Woody Allen has been making the same kinds of movies for the better part of four decades. Same goes for Martin Scorsese. And we all pretty much know what to expect from a Quentin Tarantino movie by now.

This can naturally lead to pigeonholing, and sets up unreasonable audience expectations that can suffocate a filmmaker. After all, just because you do one thing very well, that doesn't mean you can't try something else.

And that's why even the most steadfast auteurs have to occasionally shun expectations, throw caution to the wind, and deviate from their normal directorial habits for a bit. Even if it's just for a single film.

The results aren't always pretty. But at least they were willing to try something different.

We all know what a Guy Ritchie production looks like by now: Extended music videos full of jump cuts, lens filters, and more gratuitous shootouts than a John Woo film. Ritchie broke out as the flashy director behind Snatch and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels.

Those two films were the byproduct of a new, ultra-violent era of crime noir ushered in by Quentin Tarantino, and Ritchie was one of the few truly effective copycats of that style.

So it was more than a little baffling when Ritchie released Swept Away, a deserted island rom-com adrift in misplaced sentimentality and by-the-numbers storytelling. The film, which starred then-wife Madonna, replaces Ritchie's signature snappy banter and slick black comedy with rote dialogue and one of the most unlikable characters to ever be stranded on a beach.

Swept Away is as straight-ahead as love stories come, and there's nary a high-speed action sequence in sight. It's more Nicholas Sparks than Quentin Tarantino.