Actors who direct and star in their own films may be motivated by something other than vanity, but they usually manage to make themselves look cool — or at least cooler than they would have if someone else had been in the director's chair.
Exhibit A is actor/director Takeshi Kitano, whose cop and gangster heroes effortlessly dominate everyone else on the screen, whether with their personalities or fists.
In directing his first film, "Gama no Abura" ("Toad Oil"), Koji Yakusho goes in a different direction. Almost as much in demand abroad as he is at home, Yakusho has starred in everything from the 1996 international hit comedy "Shall We Dance?," later remade with Richard Gere in Yakusho's role as a ballroom- dancing salaryman, to Shohei Imamura's Cannes Palme d'Or winner "Unagi" ("The Eel," 1998), in which Yakusho played a mercurial ex-con, and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Oscar-nominated "Babel" (2006), in which he played the father of Rinko Kikuchi's troubled hearing-impaired teen.