5. The Scarlett Letter/Roland Joffé
Roland Joffé began his career humbly, working on TV shows like
Coronation Street before graduating to work on features. And when he jumped into the film arena, he made quite the splash indeed, with his first two films,
The Killing Fields and
The Mission, earning him Academy Award nominations for Best Director, with each being nominated for a total of 7 Oscars, including Best Picture. It would be a colossal achievement for Martin Scorsese let alone a director just starting out, but alas, it set a very high standard that Joffé was unfortunately never able to meet again. The following years were met with disappointingly mediocre ventures in
Shadow Makers and
City of Joy, and Joffé followed this by making the baffling decision to act as a producer and co-director on the calamitous
Super Mario Bros. video game adaptation, but it wasn't until his 1995 misguided take on
The Scarlett Letter that it ever really seemed like the director was in real danger. Joffé chose to freely adapt Nathaniel Hawthorne's source material, and this goes a way to explain why the film was so critically reviled, while commercially, it only ended up making a tragic $10m against a $46m budget. In addition to this, it received a string of Razzie nominations, including Worst Remake or Sequel, Worst Actress for Demi Moore, Worst Picture, and of course, Worst Director for Joffé. Though the director never repeated failure on such a vast scale, his career never recovered. The subsequent failures of
Goodbye Lover and
Vatel meant that it was 7 years before Joffé got work in Hollywood again, contracted as a hack-for-hire for the diabolical Elisha Cuthbert torture porn vehicle
Captivity. He followed this with the peculiar Mischa Barton-starring, glorified t.A.t.U fan film
You and I, which along with his next film,
There Will Be Dragons, is pretty much relegated to DVD bargain bins, and the cobwebbed archives of torrent websites. As for the future, he does have a science fiction film,
Singularity, in post-production, but we won't be expecting a Best Director nomination for him anytime soon.