Most people picture a director behind a camera, not behind a typewriter. Yet a surprising number of filmmakers have published fiction, some before they ever shot a frame and some long after.
The ten names below come from several countries and generations. Each one produced a novel or fiction that stands on its own, and the books reveal as much about their films as the films do about the books.
Jean Cocteau
Cocteau was a poet, painter and playwright before he became a filmmaker. He published the novel Thomas l’imposteur in 1923, and in 1929 he followed it with Les Enfants terribles, a short, feverish book about a brother and sister locked inside their own private games.
His directing career produced The Blood of a Poet in 1930, Beauty and the Beast in 1946 and Orphée in 1950. Les Enfants terribles reached the screen in 1950 too, directed by Jean Pierre Melville with Cocteau writing the adaptation and supplying the narration.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pasolini established himself in Italian letters first. His novel Ragazzi di vita appeared in 1955, followed by Una vita violenta in 1959, and both drew on the lives of young people in the poor outskirts of Rome.
He moved into directing with Accattone in 1961 and kept returning to the same streets and faces in Mamma Roma the following year. His last film, Salò, came out in 1975, the year he was killed. The unfinished novel Petrolio was published only in 1992, long after his death.
Satyajit Ray
Ray is remembered for Pather Panchali in 1955 and the Apu Trilogy. He also wrote a large body of fiction for younger readers in Bengali. In 1961 he helped revive the children’s magazine Sandesh, and it became the home for much of that writing.
His best known literary creations are the detective Feluda, who first appeared in 1965, and the scientist Professor Shonku. Ray later adapted Feluda stories into films himself. The Academy gave him an Honorary Award in 1992, shortly before his death.
Marguerite Duras
Duras built her reputation on novels first, and she won the Prix Goncourt in 1984 for The Lover. The book draws on her youth in French Indochina and sold widely around the world.
She had already moved into directing by then. India Song arrived in 1975, and Le Camion followed in 1977. Both films work with sparse imagery and voices that are heard apart from the figures on screen, which will feel familiar to anyone who knows her prose.
Clive Barker
Barker broke through with the Books of Blood short story collections, published in the mid 1980s. He then wrote the novella The Hellbound Heart in 1986, and he did not wait for another filmmaker to adapt it.
He directed the adaptation himself as Hellraiser in 1987. Nightbreed followed in 1990, based on his novel Cabal, and Lord of Illusions came in 1995. His longer novels, such as Weaveworld and Imajica, show he was never just a horror writer with a camera.
Michael Crichton
Crichton is best known for novels such as The Andromeda Strain in 1969 and Jurassic Park in 1990. Less often remembered is that he directed several films. Westworld in 1973 was the first, and Coma followed in 1978.
In 1978 he also directed The First Great Train Robbery, adapted from his own 1975 novel about a Victorian heist. Looker and Runaway came in the early and mid 1980s. He was a rare case of a writer who treated directing as another way to tell the same kind of story.
Takeshi Kitano
Kitano began as a comedian in Tokyo and became one of Japan’s best known filmmakers. His crime drama Fireworks won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1997. Alongside his film work, he has published books in Japanese.
One of them is Asakusa Kid, which looks back at his years as a young performer in the Asakusa district under the comedian Fukami Senzaburo. It was adapted into a Netflix film released in 2021. The adaptation was made by another team, so Kitano’s role was as the author of the source material.
Ethan Hawke
Hawke is mostly known as an actor, though he has directed films including Chelsea Walls and Blaze. He is also a published novelist. His first book, The Hottest State, came out in 1996 and follows a young actor through a short, painful romance in New York.
A second novel, Ash Wednesday, followed in 2002. In 2006 he directed a film version of The Hottest State, so one story passed through both of his creative roles. The book and the film show how closely his acting, writing and directing overlap.
Charlie Kaufman
Kaufman first became known as a screenwriter, and he moved into directing with Synecdoche, New York in 2008. He co-directed the animated Anomalisa with Duke Johnson in 2015. In 2020 he directed I’m Thinking of Ending Things for Netflix, adapted from Iain Reid’s novel.
That same year he published his own first novel, Antkind, a sprawling comic book of about seven hundred pages. It follows a film critic named B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, who believes he has found a remarkable lost film. Readers who like the strange structure of Kaufman’s movies tend to find it a natural extension of them.
John Waters
Waters made his name in Baltimore with low budget provocations such as Pink Flamingos in 1972. He later reached a wider audience with Hairspray in 1988. For years most of his books were essays and memoir, which suited his talent for storytelling and self mockery.
In 2022 he published his first novel, Liarmouth, subtitled A Feel Bad Romance. It follows a luggage thief and compulsive liar, and its tone is as deliberately outrageous as his early films. The book showed that his sense of humor translated to the page without much adjustment.
