Summary
- Some filmmakers, like David Lynch and Greta Gerwig, achieve greatness with their debut films, while others take a few tries to find their voice.
- Debut films like "The Evil Dead" and "Reservoir Dogs" have inspired future generations of filmmakers and reshaped entire genres.
- "Citizen Kane" and "Night of the Living Dead" are still considered groundbreaking and influential movies, showcasing the power of social commentary and technical innovation in filmmaking.
Most filmmakers take a couple of movies to really find their voice, but some directors – like David Lynch and Greta Gerwig – have knocked it out of the park on their very first try. Even the greats can stumble with their debut feature. Christopher Nolan didn’t helm a true masterpiece until his second movie, Memento. For Martin Scorsese, it was his third movie, Mean Streets. It’s not easy to deliver a knockout right out of the gate.
Sam Raimi’s debut feature inspired a generation of filmmakers to make their own homemade horror movies. Quentin Tarantino’s debut feature convinced every obsessive movie buff that they have a great film in them. Orson Welles’ debut feature is still, to this day, considered to be one of the greatest and most technically groundbreaking movies ever made. There are plenty of great filmmakers whose first movie still stands as one of their best.
10 Directors Who Only Made One Movie
Not every filmmaker makes multiple movies. Some directors, like Charles Laughton, Herk Harvey, and Eddie Murphy, have only ever directed one movie.
10 Sam Raimi
The Evil Dead, 1981
Sam Raimi inspired a generation of filmmakers to pick up a camera and shoot their own horror movies with his homemade masterpiece The Evil Dead. The Evil Dead spawned its own horror subgenre with the story of a group of friends who travel to a cabin in the woods and unwittingly awaken long-dormant demonic forces. The special effects are cheap and slapdash, and some of the amateur cast’s performances are a bit rough around the edges, but that’s all part of the movie’s D.I.Y. charm.
9 Emma Seligman
Shiva Baby, 2020
Before making the ultimate Gen Z comedy with Bottoms, Emma Seligman burst onto the festival circuit with an astonishing debut movie. Shiva Baby is a typically small-scale first film, set almost entirely in one location, but it has the perfect hook to keep audiences invested all the way: college senior Danielle, played spectacularly by Rachel Sennott, goes to a shiva observance attended by her parents, her ex-girlfriend, and her sugar daddy, who also brought his wife and baby. Seligman threads a palpable sense of Hitchcockian tension throughout this sharply scripted cringe caper.
8 Quentin Tarantino
Reservoir Dogs, 1992
Quentin Tarantino’s journey from video store clerk to world-renowned auteur filmmaker has practically earned mythic status in the cinephile community. Synthesizing all the different styles of crime film from all over the globe, Reservoir Dogs deals with the aftermath of a heist gone wrong as the robbers try to determine who among them is an undercover cop. With its verbose dialogue, its twisty, nonlinear plotting, and its subversive use of whimsical needle-drops over scenes of graphic violence, Reservoir Dogs still stands as one of Tarantino’s finest efforts.
7 George A. Romero
Night of the Living Dead, 1968
George A. Romero’s debut feature, Night of the Living Dead, didn’t just create the concept of the modern zombie and the narrative framework that zombie movies have copied ever since; it also demonstrated how the horror genre could be used as a vehicle for poignant social commentary. Romero used a spooky story about the dead rising from their graves to feast on the brains of the living to comment on the racial tensions that divided America. Night of the Living Dead is just as powerful today, both in its scares and in its satire, as it was in 1968.
6 Celine Song
Past Lives, 2023
With her debut movie Past Lives, Celine Song came out of the gate with a deeply personal story that flies in the face of clichés and conventions. Past Lives is a touching, semi-autobiographical love story about childhood sweethearts who were separated at a young age and reconnected years later, all building up to spending a weekend in New York together, where they wonder what could have been. Now, the challenge is for Song to come up with a second movie to follow it up; she seems to have poured her entire heart and soul into her first film.
5 Jordan Peele
Get Out, 2017
Jordan Peele already had a reputation as one of the world’s greatest sketch comedians before he switched his attention to filmmaking and earned a second reputation as one of the world’s greatest horror directors. Get Out revitalized the social thriller genre with its chilling tale of an unsuspecting Black man being lured into his white girlfriend’s parents’ sinister gated community. With his Oscar-winning work on Get Out, Peele proved he could deliver both a terrifying horror movie and a timely message about race relations in modern America.
4 David Lynch
Eraserhead, 1977
David Lynch introduced his penchant for draping a surreal layer over mundane situations with his debut movie Eraserhead, in which a man’s fear of fatherhood is extrapolated into a black-and-white monster movie. Eraserhead has all the Lynchian hallmarks: magic realism, disturbing ambient noise all over the soundtrack, and an ambiguous ending that’s open to interpretation. Eraserhead became a staple of the midnight movie circuit and instantly established Lynch as a living legend among cinephiles.
3 Jean-Luc Godard
Breathless, 1960
Jean-Luc Godard didn’t just kickstart his own filmmaking career with Breathless (or À bout de souffle, its original French title); he also kickstarted one of the most influential movements in the history of cinema: the French New Wave. Breathless revolves around a small-time crook who deals with the fallout of impulsively killing a police officer. With its jumpy editing and sly subversion of American noir tropes, Breathless introduced a whole new film language that continues to influence filmmakers to this day.
2 Greta Gerwig
Lady Bird, 2017
Greta Gerwig co-directed Nights and Weekends with Joe Swanberg in 2008, but she made her solo directorial debut with Lady Bird in 2017. Set in Gerwig’s hometown of Sacramento in 2002, Lady Bird follows the friendships and romances of an angsty teenager through the lens of her troubled love/hate relationship with her mother. Gerwig masterfully balances laugh-out-loud comedic moments with devastating dramatic moments in a movie that proves the old adage that the more specific and personal a story is, the more universally relatable it will be.
1 Orson Welles
Citizen Kane, 1941
Orson Welles credits the success of his first movie, Citizen Kane, to sheer ignorance. Since he’d never made a movie before, he didn’t know what was or wasn’t possible with the technology of the time. So, he just described his vision to his ultra-talented crew and if there was something they couldn’t do yet – like deep focus – then they just figured out a way to invent it. With its technical breakthroughs and its timeless tale of an unscrupulous tycoon reckoning with a lifetime of misdeeds, Citizen Kane is still hailed as one of the greatest movies ever made.
