What They’ve Always Wanted to Do Is . . .

The directors were the stars of two recent Showtime original movie series: “Fallen Angels” and “Rebel Highway.” But with the cable network’s latest series, “Directed By,” stars are the directors.

“Directed By,” which premieres Sunday, showcases short original films directed by accomplished actors Peter Weller (“RoboCop”), Laura Dern (“Rambling Rose”), Danny Glover (“Lethal Weapon”), JoBeth Williams (“Poltergeist”), Kathleen Turner (“Peggy Sue Got Married”) and Treat Williams (“Prince of the City”).

The showcase is the brainchild of Oscar-winning executive producer Jana Sue Memel, whose Chanticleer Films has produced numerous short films for Showtime as well as the full-length “Lush Life.”

“I think actors, out of all the first-time directors I have worked with, make the best crossover directors because you can surround people with a director of photography, production designers and everybody else who can make them good,” Memel explains.

“But ultimately, no one can go up and talk to the actors other than the director. And the person who I think talks to an actor best is an actor. I was incredibly knocked out by all six of the people I worked with.”

Memal discussed story ideas with each novice director. But, she adds, “there was a lot of carte blanche. Treat pitched me a bunch of ideas, but he knew he wanted to do something about flying. Laura co-wrote hers, so she really knew what she wanted to do. Kathleen read this entire collection of Lynn Mamet stories and found one which really resonated within her and so did JoBeth. Danny wanted to do sort of a feminist piece, which is what he definitely did.”

Weller received a 1993 Academy Award nomination for best short subject for his comedic “Partners,” which he adapted with Ebbe Roe Smith from Tom McGuane’s short story. Griffin Dunne stars in this freewheeling story about a rising young attorney whose career nearly comes to a halt when he rekindles a romance with an old flame (Marg Helgenberger), now married to the firm’s biggest client.

Directing has always been a passion for Weller, who majored in it at the University of North Texas. “I just put it on the back burner,” he says, until directors with whom he worked suggested he try directing. “Robert Redford invited me to the Sundance Institute, and I directed at Sundance. Then I dropped some irons into the fire. One of them was at Chanticleer. I took Jana Memel’s advice and did a comedy. I was going to do a serious film. I think it was good advice.”

“People who have done the heavier dramatic pieces (for a first film) have a harder time advancing in their careers,” Memel explains. “People who have done the comedic pieces, somehow, studios are willing to risk letting someone who has done something funny do something dramatic. It seems they are less willing to risk somebody who has done something dramatic do something funny. They think there’s a trick to comedy. If you can do that trick, you can do any trick.”

Weller relished being the boss on the set. “I put my thumb in everybody’s pie,” he says, laughing. “That’s the fun part. I said to the set designer, ‘I want all the offices in primary colors. I want yellow over here, red over here. I want this dining room blue, because it’s a sign of control, you know. I want ducks here.’ ”

Before he began production on “Partners,” he wrote letters to several directors who have been major influences, including Woody Allen, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Mike Nichols, informing them he was “going to rip them off. I literally ripped them off. Woody, he wrote me a great letter back saying, ‘Go ahead, directing is no big deal. It’s just solving problems.’ Scorsese said something to the effect, ‘We have all ripped everybody else off.’ ”

Though Weller still loves acting--he has a cameo in “Partners”--he wants to concentrate on directing. Early next year he is scheduled to begin production on his first feature, “Incognito,” a thriller about art forgery for Morgan Creek/Warner Bros.

Laura Dern opted to do an original story, “The Gift,” which she co-wrote with Emily Tracy, who also penned the screenplay. Mary Steenburgen stars, along with Peter Horton, Isabella Rossellini, Bonnie Bedelia, Mary Kay Place and Dern’s mother, Diane Ladd.

Directing something she co-wrote, Dern says, made the task easier for her. “I was so connected to the story because it’s something I worked on with the writer,” she explains. “I really had a lot of answers to the questions in my head of what I imagined it to look like. The idea is something I feel very strongly about, learning to be connected with each other and help each other through things. I think writing it alone would have been an impossibility.”

Before production began, Dern thought dealing with the camera would be the hardest part of directing. “Actually, I had the most fun with it, just learning about it and having great people around me to teach me. I think the most difficult aspect was just physical stamina, you know, just trying to pace myself on very little sleep and really be open to answering all the questions, figuring out what I wanted, trying to never compromise and also being opinionated and saying to people, ‘No. This is my idea. I want it this way.’ It’s kind of rough. I find that a difficult thing as a person.”

The actress isn’t certain actors make the best directors, “but I think those who are great, they’re probably just wonderfully gifted at directing, anyway. At the same time, I think there’s an amount of patience that makes it more fun to work with actor-directors because they understand, having been through it, what doesn’t feel good and what is not appropriate. I think they’re kinder on the set.”

At least that was her experience being directed by Clint Eastwood last year in “A Perfect World.” “He was really nice to everybody,” she says. “There was a casualness with which he approached everything, which always made me more comfortable.”

Dern can’t wait to try directing again. “I love it,” she says with enthusiasm. “I want to do something completely different. This was a piece about women and behavior and I wanted it to be that because that is what I was interested in. But now I’d like the opportunity to do something with more camera work, so I can learn more in a more visual area.”

As for Treat Williams, his directing opportunity “literally fell in my lap.” He acknowledges, though, he was not initially courted to direct because, “I wasn’t a big enough name.” But he harbors no resentment.

“That’s just business,” he says matter-of-factly. “The deal was the name the actor has in Hollywood and, as you know, I’ve been doing television films. My career has not been slow, I’m a steadily working actor, but ... “

His manager, though, came up with an idea of Williams directing a film written by David Mamet and pitched it to Showtime. “All of a sudden, it changed,” Williams says. “There was a much more positive attitude. My manager called me and said, ‘I got good news and bad news.’ He said, ‘You are going to direct your first film and David Mamet is writing it.’ I said, ‘God, what could be the bad news?’ And he said, ‘David Mamet doesn’t know it yet.’ ”

So Williams, who has appeared in Mamet plays, called the award-winning writer-director and asked him if he would write a script. “It was very hard for me to do, but I called him and asked if he’d have the time and energy to write a short film for me.”

Williams told Mamet the idea and Mamet agreed to do write “Texan,” a film noir mystery with a twist.

“David is an old-school guy,” Williams says. “He’s a very loyal man, the most loyal man I have ever known, particularly in this business.”

Directing “a Mamet” wasn’t easy. “You’d think with Mamet, it would direct itself,” Williams says. “But it is very, very tough because it takes much more technical proficiency than a behavioral film where people are naturally overlapping. David’s writing is meant to sound like natural language, so you must go into the editing room and take these technical breaks and try and put them together so they start to have a rhythm. In a way, as a first-time filmmaker, my work in the editing room was very tough because it was so specific rather than a loose, artistic behavioral kind of first film where there are lots of shots of trees and people taking long pauses. I didn’t have that luxury.

“I had rhythms which I knew were in David’s writing. In the editing room, I would bang my head against the wall saying, ‘This doesn’t sound right. We’ve got to go back in there and keep pulling these pieces out.’ It was sometimes like surgery to get it to where I felt it had a rhythm that is genuinely what David had intended. To me, that’s the essence of good directing, to really realize the writer’s intent.”

As a director, Williams says, his purpose was to tell a story well that someone wrote. His favorite directors, he adds, are not “the fancy shooters. I mention William Wyler. When you see his films, they can be any period. You never know who was directing, you just see the novel realized. He’s my role model. I really want to be a a guy who is a conduit. You take the material and you walk on the set and your job is to realize you are helping the actors be these people in the story. Once you get the camera put where it is supposed to be, you have done your homework. When you work with the actors, man, it’s heaven.”

“Directed By” premieres Sunday at 10 p.m. on Showtime with David Mamet’s “Texan,” directed by Treat Williams, followed by JoBeth Williams’ “On Hope” at 10:30 p.m.