The 30 Greatest Directorial Debuts

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Director: Larry Clark

L'enfant terrible Harmony Korine was 22 when he penned the screenplay for Kids at the behest of photographer-turned-filmmaker Larry Clark, whose work has always fixated on youth in the raw. They met in Washington Square Park, where Korine was skating.

The park appears in the film, when Telly and Casper, the main male characters, wander through for drugs, skateboarding, and a fight. Telly is 16 and HIV positive.

The film takes no stabs at analysis, it only documents the teens as they go about their business in Manhattan, getting high, having sex, talking, and in Telly's case, spreading HIV. The matter-of-fact attitude may be too cold for some (not to mention ethically questionable), but there's no question of the film's power, or of the comfort of Clark behind the camera.—RS

Director: George Miller

In early 1979, the names Mel Gibson and George Miller were foreign to American audiences, but that quickly changed in April when the Aussie collaborators' hardcore dystopian action flick Mad Max debuted to a slew of negative reviews. The Disapproving critiques called the picture "ugly and coherent," said it had "all the emotional uplift of Mein Kampf."

Unable to look past the film's widespread, surface-level savagery, Mad Max's numerous detractors sound all the more ridiculous today, now that Miller's visionary debut has benefitted from over three decades' worth of revisits, repertory screenings, and the post-'79 legacy amassed by Gibson. The best of all Ozploitation films released throughout the late '70s and early '80s, Mad Max is a Master's class in how to execute bone-crunching violence and dynamite car stunts with an antihero who's an iconic badass without even trying to be one. —MB

Director: Steven Spielberg

Before E.T. ever phoned home, or Indiana Jones saved his first day, there was one randomly pissed-off truck driver. All icons have to start somewhere, and, for Steven Spielberg, the road to filmmaking prominence kicked off with 1972’s Duel, a bare-bones suspense vehicle about a businessman who, for no reason, is terrorized on the open road by the unseen wheelman of an enormous rig. In spots, Duel is just as intense and white-knuckle as Jaws, the now-classic killer shark movie for which Spielberg used Duel as an audition tape of sorts.

The then-24-year-old director certainly had great source material to work with; Duel’s screenplay was written by Richard Matheson, based on his own short story. Matheson, for the genre-illiterate, is one of horror fiction’s most prolific authors, getting his breakthrough as a main writer for Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone and going on to write such seminal books as I Am Legend and The Haunting Of Hell House.

Paired with Spielberg, Matheson delivered a minimalist nightmare with Duel; fast-paced, mean as hell, and well-acted by Dennis Weaver, it’s a pulse-pounder that still holds up nearly 30 years later. —MB

Director: Harmony Korine

Two years after giving Larry Clark the screenplay for Kids (also included here), Harmony Korine directed his first feature. Gummo, set in Xenia, Ohio, is a grotesque parade of Americana: a breast tumor is discovered during backseat necking; roaches scuttle from behind picture frames in living rooms; two teens hunt and kill cats; a man pimps his sister, who has Down's.

There's little connecting the vignettes, nothing more than a warped idea of America. But you can't forget what Korine shows you. —RS

Director: Darren Aronofsky

Before the powerfully depressing Requiem for a Dream, Mickey Rourke's comeback-vehicle The Wrestler, and Natalie Portman's Oscar-winning psycho-horror flick Black Swan, Oscar-nominated director Darren Aronofsky was a struggling first-time filmmaker with little money and huge ideas.

The result of his pre-fame hunger is Pi, a black-and-white mind-warp about an unstable math whiz (Sean Gullette) whose obsessive work gains unwanted attention from Hasidic extremists, Wall Street players, and his own insanity.

For bleak, hypnotic atmosphere, Pi is tough to beat. —MB

Director: Spike Lee

In 1986, when Spike Lee brought African-American cinema into the mainstream with his lo-fi romantic comedy She's Gotta Have It, the general presentation of black people in cinema wasn't the most flattering—more often than not, they were pimps and other undesirable types. And even if they managed to get a complicated, non-stereotypical role, it wouldn't be a leading role. Lee's independently made debut, however, handles its characters with intelligence and sophistication, depicting a go-getting woman's (Tracy Camilla Johns) struggles in pleasing three boyfriends, one of whom is Lee's beloved Mars Blackmon alter-ego.

Granted, the film is not without its problems—see bell hooks on the film's deplorable “Whose pussy is this?” scene—but it's still a work of such talent, it holds up in many other ways. —MB

Director: Claire Denis

Claire Denis, one of the most overlooked filmmakers working today, first came to prominence with Chocolat, her 1988 meditation of colonialism. It's a personal theme for Denis, who spent much of her childhood living in many francophone African countries including Burkina Faso, Somalia, Senegal, and Cameroon.

Chocolat is set in Cameroon, where a French girl becomes friends with a family's household servant, who is a native of the colonized country. As a debut, it demonstrated intense thoughtfulness, establishing Denis as a filmmkaer of remarkable poise and confidence. Hers is a special kind of confidence, the kind that allows you to be still. —RS

Director: Joel Coen

Films like Fargo (1996) and The Big Lebowski (1998) reminded critics that esteemed filmmaking siblings Joel and Ethan Coen are unparalleled when it comes to directing dark, absurd comedies. But the generous humor they developed over hte ayears is significantly less pronounced in their first flick.

Co-written by both brothers and directed by Joel, Blood Simple is a startling exercise in crime noir that, at times, passes as full-blown psychological horror.

The set-up is classic material: A rightfully disgruntled husband (Dan Hedaya) hires a sociopathic detective (M. Emmett Walsh) to kill his cheating wife (Frances McDormand) and her side piece (John Getz). Nothing goes as planned. And it wraps a noose-like grip around your nerves every step of the way. —MB

Director: Mike Nichols

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? could have any single person questioning the idea of marital bliss. It's the ultimate domestic nightmare, capturing the stresses of marriage life that that engulf the lives of a college professor (Richard Burton) and his hard-boozing wife (Elizabeth Taylor). Adapting playwright Edward Albee's successful dramatic work, screenwriter Ernest Lehman nailed the internalized anguish and externalized madness, making things that much easier for first-time director Mike Nichols.

Not that Nichols needed the assistance, though. Setting the precedent for his like-minded later films, the Germany native kept the brooding Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? both darkly comedic and intensely dramatic. That's the kind of tonal tightrope that Nichols continued to perfect in The Graduate (1967), Carnal Knowledge (1971), and Postcards from the Edge (1990). —MB

Director: Sam Raimi

Then-21-year-old filmmaker Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead isn't simply a rollercoaster ride of a movie—it's that flying-off-the-rails coaster from the beginning of Final Destination 3. Out of control from beginning to end, the future Spider-Man franchise director's (who's back in blockbuster form this month with Oz, the Great and Powerful) low-budget first effort is the purveyor of horror's "cabin in the woods" template.

A group of young, likable innocents head to a secluded, wooded crib, find an ancient evil text, and unleash plenty gory slapstick comedy. All, mind you, produced with barely $400,000. The Evil Dead is a glowing testament to the power of imagination over money. —MB

Director: Gaspar Noe

Gaspar Noé's blackout-dark character study I Stand Alone looks and feels like the version of Taxi Driver Martin Scorsese might have made if he were a total sadist back in the '70s. Like Travis Bickle, I Stand Alone's nameless protagonist, known as "the butcher" (a powerhouse performance by Philippe Nahon), hates everything about those around him; he's a racist, cold, cruel human being who harbors an intense sexual attraction to his young daughter and literally beats his mistress's unborn baby to death by ferociously punching her in the stomach.

And just when you think the butcher can't get any worse, he goes and does the unthinkable, in a scene that Noé—who's since directed the equally challenging Irreversible (2002) and Enter the Void (2009)—cleverly prefaces with a "Warning" sign and a 30-second countdown meant to give the viewer time to turn the movie off before it really goes off the rails. How it derails is something we're not about to spoil here, but, trust us, it's an image that'll stain itself into your brains for a long time after. —MB

Director: John Singleton

Before the then-23-year-old John Singleton emerged with the poignant Boyz n the Hood, filmmakers stayed clear of the urban black life.

For critics and moviegoers alike who'd only heard about ghetto hardships in rap songs, Boyz n the Hood exposed them to a real world where dreams don't seem attainable. A world where a promising, college-bound high school athlete gets needlessly gunned down; one where a charismatic and intelligent teenager choose drug-dealing over school because, well, school doesn't offer the same kinds of financial rewards.

Singleton lets his characters act genuinely in the most challenging of situations, never leading them down sentimental paths in ways that lesser filmmakers very well could have. Boyz n the Hood works as a slice-of-life film that just so happens to take place in the mean streets of South Central Los Angeles, which, back in 1991, was a setting that had yet to get any mainstream attention from the movies. And the powers that be rewarded Singleton handsomely: He became both the youngest person ever and the first African-American filmmaker to be nominated for Best Director at the Oscars. —MB

Director: Steven Soderbergh

In 1989, American independent cinema got the boost it needed to create such works as Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption. The boost came in the form of sex, lies, and videotape, Steven Soderbergh's Palme d'Or winner at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival. From there, all the major studios wanted in. Independent movies as we know them today—especially as a kind of genre, with a specific style and tropes—came into being.

Truthfully, sex, lies, and videotape feels tame today. Which makes it all the more important to see. It follows Ann, (Andie MacDowell) a woman in a bloodless marriage with John (Peter Gallagher). When John's old college buddy (James Spader) comes to town with a video camera and rocks to get off, everything changes. —RS

Director: John Cassavetes

It only cost John Cassavetes a mere $40,000—which equals pennies in terms of film budgets—to revolutionize the independent movie business. A wholly engaging blend of improv-style acting performances and the writer-director's signature facial close-ups, the black-and-white romantic drama Shadows invigorated critics and art-house moviegoers alike with its experimental nature and assured presentation.

Plot wise, it's fairly straightforward, following the love connection shared by a black woman and a white man as he starts meeting the members of her disapproving family. Thematically, however, the New York City-set Shadows—shot run-and-gun with a 16mm handheld camera—was a landmark achievement for its time, tackling the then-unapproachable subject of interracial love with a stern confidence.

And just like that, Cassavetes established himself as a powerful and necessary voice in indie cinema. —MB

Directors: Allen and Albert Hughes

The debate will rage on forever between which is the all-time crowning achievement in "hood cinema": John Singleton's Boyz n the Hood or the Hughes Brothers' Menace II Society. Both films are quality films, but in very different ways. For instance, Menace is the tougher film, relentlessly bleak and devoid of sentiment.

This Watts-set debut from siblings Allen and Albert Hughes holds nothing back. The body-count is high, the characters (even the protagonist, actor Tyrin Turner's Caine) are equal parts sympathetic and terrifying, and the payoff is fearlessly tragic.

In the end, Menace II Society forces viewers to draw their own conclusions about who's right, who's wrong, and who the good guys are, if any even existed in the first place. For a couple of filmmaking novices, that's remarkable. —MB

Director: Rob Reiner

You don't have to be an undying Mötley Crüe fan to appreciate This Is Spinal Tap, director Rob Reiner's (When Harry Met Sally…, A Few Good Men) hilarious and sharp send-up of the music industry, particularly the hair metal culture of the 1980s.

Presented as a "real" documentary, it's a work of committed brilliance; as the self-centered, at times delusional, members of the fictional heavy metal group Spinal Tap, actors Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer deliver every ridiculous bit of dialogue and perform each exaggerated song with such all-in vigor that This Is Spinal Tap feels like the funniest episode of Behind The Music ever made. —MB

Director: Richard Kelly

By now, it's safe to call writer-director Richard Kelly a one-hit wonder, but, man, his only movie worth talking about is a knockout.

Catching critics and moviegoers totally off guard back in 2001, Donnie Darko, a then-26-year-old Kelly's feature debut, introduced a fearless young director who wore his geek stripes proudly. It's an '80s-set teen drama subverted, centering on a super-smart high school loner, Donnie Darko (a terrifically sardonic Jake Gyllenhaal), who hallucinates that a dude in a bunny suit warned him about the world's end and begins to accept time travel as a viable practice.

There's much more at stake than that, but we'll fall back from any further summarizing; it's best to experience Donnie Darko with as little pre-existing knowledge as possible. Kelly's feat is all the more remarkable when you realize that an unproven guy in his mid-20s was capable of conceiving such a large-scale, witty, and disturbing fever dream. It's just a damn shame that Kelly's talents aged more like unrefrigerated cheese than fine wine. —MB

Director: Barry Levinson

Looking back at the last 10 years in film, who's responsible for the medium's most talked about comedies? Super-producer Judd Apatow, of course, a maverick who wisely grounds his best works (The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up) with grounded male characters talking about everyday topics (typically sex, sex, and sex).

Without Barry Levinson's seminal dramedy Diner, the Apatow zeitgeist may have never happened. Diner's about a group of twenty-something buddies (played by Mickey Rourke, Kevin Bacon, Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, and Timothy Daly) who congregate inside a Baltimore diner every night for some good-natured ribbing, confessions, and time-killing conversations. And in the process of carrying on nighttime tradition, they slowly reveal the layers of their evolving personalities.

Diner is insightful, hilarious, and subtle. The only Apatow movie that even comes close to matching its excellence is The 40 Year Old Virgin. —MB

Director: Peter Bogdanovich

Targets is the byproduct of one shrewd and crafty imagination. In the years immediately preceding 1968, Peter Bogdanovich (later responsible for the classic dramas The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon) was a movie critic who befriended mega-producer Roger Corman and impressed the B-movie titan enough to earn his shot at directing his own feature film. Only, there was a catch: Bogdanovich had to cast the one-time horror movie staple, but then near-has-been, Boris Karloff (because Corman owed Karloff two days' work), and he had to somehow incorporate footage from a junky 1963 Corman picture called The Terror (starring a young Jack Nicholson and Karloff).

Working against those constraints, Bogdanovich was able to make whatever kind of movie he wanted; rather than follow in Corman's campy footsteps, though, he cleverly wrote a character for Karloff (that of an aging movie star) and subverted the horror genre by centering Targets around a cold-blooded, motive-free sniper (played by Tim O'Kelly) who's scarier than any monster Karloff could've ever portrayed.

As a horror film rooted in real-life, not the supernatural, Targets is a proficient, sneakily brutal chiller. As a look at how the scariest of homicidal maniacs kill for no discernible reason, it's incredibly profound. —MB

Director: Quentin Tarantino

There's no way critics at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival could've anticipated what was about to happen. Written and directed by a young, unknown former video store employee named Quentin Tarantino, Reservoir Dogs upended everything the film community knew about independent cinema.

All of its components would become touchstones in Tarantino's universe: snappy pop-culture references (forever marring Madonna's "Like a Virgin"), foul language, a shuffled chronology, and criminals simultaneously acting hilariously and violently.

In the film's wake, a string of wannabe Tarantinos emerged, mostly at the behest of rival studios hoping to ride the coattails of Harvey and Bob Weinstein's new golden goose, who went on to make the superior Pulp Fiction. But never forget that it all started with Reservoir Dogs. —MB

Director: Steve McQueen

British visual artist Steve McQueen's debut focuses on the 1981 hunger strike staged by imprisoned IRA agent Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender). The film's power lies in the attention to physical detail rather than the dialogue (of which there is very, very little): the expression of the guards before a controlled beating, the cleaning of a hallway filled with piss, the labored breaths of a dying man.

Shot with a painterly eye for composition, Hunger is an ordeal. Viewers are made to endure the realities of the human body under duress, and there is nothing else like it. McQueen won numerous awards and grants for his first feature including a BAFTA award for "Special Achievement by a British Director." —GT

Director: Roman Polanski

Knife in the Water proved that Roman Polanski is a natural-born master of suspense. In later films like Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby, the controversial filmmaker generated overwhelming tension from confined, one-setting locations, with a mentally disturbed woman's apartment in the former and a New York City high-rise in the former. Polanski's ability to pound pulses can be traced back to this quiet yet subtly explosive 1962 thriller.

Staged largely on a boat, Knife in the Water proceeds with the kind of anticipatory nervousness one associates with a ticking bomb. A married couple, hoping for some R&R on the waterfront, brings a hitchhiker onto their boat, a decision that results in a dangerous pissing contest between the two men.

Sexual tension leads to violence, with Polanski exhibiting a veteran's control despite the fact that he was feature-film rookie at the time of the film's production. —MB

Director: John Huston

By 1956, John Huston had emerged in Hollywood as a go-to guy for film producers looking to make credible, thought-provoking genre fare, a reputation triggered by masterworks like The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948), The Red Badge of Courage (1951), and The African Queen (1952). The common link shared between those three films is an expansive, period-set scope, which was a far cry from the 1941 debut that launched Huston's career and still holds up as one of the greatest noir movies ever made: The Maltese Falcon.

The only adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's 1930 detective novel worth viewing, Huston's take is a talky, twisty melodrama about a humorless private eye (played by Humphrey Bogart) who entertains sultry dames and outwits crafty criminals while protecting a certain falcon statue.

Huston, a former screenwriter-for-hire, knew that the key to telling a memorable potboiler, no matter what era you're telling it in, is to give the characters, from the hero to the villains, as much weight as the unpredictable narrative. The Maltese Falcon hooks you into its thrills because you actually give a damn about what happens to its characters. —MB

Director: Francois Truffaut

After spending nearly a decade working as a film critic, Francois Truffaut knew what made film work, and when it came to sit down and write his feature debut, The 400 Blows, the auteur kept things personal. A key piece of the Nouvelle Vague, Truffaut's best known film treats adolescence with a respect and restraint.

The film's preteen protagonist, Antoine (Jean-Pierre Leaud), is a deeply unhappy kid who, following accusations of plagiarism at school, gets sent by his asshole father to live behind bars.

Thanks to Leaud's controlled performance, The 400 Blows never descends into the goofiness you've come to associate with movies about precocious youngsters. —MB

Director: Charles Burnett

For 30 years, Charles Burnett's debut was a ghost. Though the first-time director shot Killer of Sheep in his childhood home of Watts in the '70s, finally finishing in 1977, it went unreleased because Burnett didn't have the rights to the music used. In 2007, the rights were finally purchased for $150,000, roughly 15 times the film's budget.  For the first time, Burnett's masterpiece received a proper release.

Killer of Sheep's center is Watts; the plot is barely there, with little narrative connecting the haunting black-and-white images of the Los Angeles neighborhood. Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), the titular character, works at a slaughterhouse. The money supports his family, his wife (Kaycee Moore) and their two children. The monotonous hours of slaughter are killing him. There's little life left in his eyes.

And yet life doesn't stop. Burnett captures that life, making for unforgettable shot after unforgettable shot (Mos Def used one for the cover of his album The Ecstatic). That the film went unseen by so many for so long is a bitter shame. —RS

Director: Terrence Malick

Cinematic crime and homicide have rarely been this haunting. Written and directed by a 30-year-old Terrence Malick, the Bonnie and Clyde-esque Badlands signaled the arrival of a singular voice in American filmmaking. Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek play young lovers who follow up killing her pops with several more murders and the unexpected fame that comes when she turns herself into the authorities.

In the hands of a filmmaker like, say, Quentin Tarantino, that's a plot ripe for bloody, bullet-happy exploitation, but Malick—as he's continued to demonstrate in the equally poetic films Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), and The Tree of Life (2011)—prefers to meditate rather than escalate. Spacek's melodramatic, high-minded narration (taken from her character's own diary) merges with Malick's keen eye for nature and extended sequences that favor the mundane over the spectacular. —MB

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Godard's first feature is one of the best known artifacts of the French New Wave movement of the '50s and '60s. Breathless expressed the director's love for American pulp and Italian Neorealism, while using formally-challenging techniques (jump cuts, long takes) and experimenting with narrative.

What's best about Godard, especially in his early work, is that his intellectualism never becomes too serious. Breathless features a larger than life Jean-Paul Belmondo, a man-sized child in gangster's clothes, who runs around Paris as if it were a playground, chasing pleasure while running from boredom (and the law). He  shoots a cop, meets a woman (Jean Seberg). On paper, the plot sounds unfinished, but the film is so in love with the possibilities of film, it gains a vitality that transcends what can be written with words. —GT

Director: George A. Romero

George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead is a national treasure; shot on a shoestring budget in and around Evans City, Pennsylvania, the zombie classic stands as a crucial milestone for independent cinema, an untouchable gem amongst horror purists, and an intelligent, thought-provoking time capsule from the Civil Rights era. Not bad for a movie about corpses devouring humans.

Ask The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman or original series showrunner Frank Darabont—George A. Romero's genre-defining Night of the Living Dead is the most important zombie movie of all time. It's also one of the most important horror movies of all time.

The set-up is basic: Seven random people barricade themselves inside a nondescript farmhouse as flesh-eating corpses stalk around outside. Independently made back in 1968, Night Of The Living Dead pushed horror's boundaries with extraordinarily graphic scenes of cannibalism and the ballsy choice to have a black leading man during the Civil Rights era.

Above all else, though, it's still scary as hell. —MB

Director: David Lynch

Happens all the time: Someone says to you, "Hey, what's David Lynch's Eraserhead about?" You can summarize the plot—as much as there is one—but you can't do it justice. Only the experience matters. 

Starring Jack Nance, Eraserhead is about a guy who has a horribly deformed baby with a woman who soon leaves him to raise the thing on his own.

Misshapen and bizarre characters populate this dreamlike world as the movie moves from scene to scene with an approach that's closer to poetry and experimental cinema than anything in traditional narrative filmmaking.

It’s not particularly violent or gruesome, but nearly every shot finds an open wound in the viewer's psyche to poke at, making for one of cinema's most unsettling and transcendent experiences. —JS

Director: Orson Welles

Don’t let its many accolades and firmly planted position as The Greatest Movie Ever Made scare you—Citizen Kane lives up to the hype.

After scaring the hell out of the country with his War of the Worlds broadcast, Orson Welles was able to write his own ticket to Hollywood. And what he wanted was simple: total control—from beginning to end, from pre-production to post. And he got it. Including final cut. Welles used the opportunity to create a compelling tale of the American Dream in the form of the fictional Charles Foster Kane, a media magnate (and thinly veiled version of William Randolph Hearst) on the ultimate search for power.

The film moved filmmaking forward by employing a flashback-heavy narrative that was formally reflected through the incredible deep focus cinematography, among other innovations. 

Unfortunately for Welles, his peak came too early. After all, how can one top a film that's widely considered to be the all-time greatest? Welles spent his final years putting his booming voice to work, narrating everything from Shogun to The Transformers: The Movie. —JW