A Writer, an Actor, a Producer and a Director: Vin Diesel - Essay Example

Probably the greatest sign that Vin Diesel is not at all who you thought he was from his big-budget films comes from the film “Multi-Facial” which he wrote, directed, and starred in when he was unable to be cast in any movies in Hollywood.

This is a film about how it can be very hard for someone with a multi-ethnic background to be cast into movies, because they will either be called “too white” or “too black” for a lot of the parts, and though they could pass for Hispanic they do not have the accent or the language skills to keep up with real Hispanics in a film role. Vin Diesel did almost every part of this film himself for a budget of only $4000, and it was eventually accepted into the Cannes Film Festival in 1995.

Vin Diesel even wrote and performed all of the music for this piece, showing that he has a wide array of talents. At the Cannes Film Festival, Steven Spielberg saw this film and was truly impressed, and eventually decided to write a part for Diesel in the incredibly well-received Saving Private Ryan. Added to this is Vin Diesel’s amazing amount of popular appeal. He has been a star in a lot of highly successful Hollywood movies, most notably “xXx” and “The Fast and the Furious.

” He can do well in these movies because he has a unique combination of being a good actor and having an incredibly strong-looking physique, which naturally pushes him towards these high-budget action-packed movies and away from the artistic movies he probably envisioned himself doing when he was a child. Diesel struggles perpetually with his ethnicity. He has described himself as being a person of color even though to many people he appears white, partly because he was raised by an African American father (who was not his biological father) and because he has black ancestry somewhere in his past.

His father who raised him was an acting teacher and managed a theatre in New York, but interestingly this is not how Diesel entered into acting as a young child. Vin Diesel recounted the story of how he got involved with acting in an interview with the website Jam Canoe. In this, he states that he and his brothers broke into a space owned by a New York Theatre when they were young children (Diesel himself was only seven years old at the time) with the idea of vandalizing it (Jam Canoe). When he was caught by a theatre staffer, rather than call the police or talk to their parents he gave the children scripts and said that they would not face any punishment if they agreed to act in an upcoming show.

Diesel agreed, and from then on had a passion for theatre and film, which eventually led him to a career in screenwriting and then acting.