The “second album syndrome” that plagues musicians — the struggle to come up with enough new material to make a follow-up album after pouring their entire heart and soul into the debut release — also affects filmmakers. The problem with making an unforgettable directorial debut like Get Out or Lady Bird is that it sets an almost impossibly high bar for the filmmaker’s next film to reach.
Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs is one of the most highly acclaimed directorial debuts of all time. In the early ‘90s, the movie singlehandedly revitalized American indie cinema. The director’s second feature, Pulp Fiction, was an even bigger cultural monument.
Quentin Tarantino: Pulp Fiction (1994)
Quentin Tarantino introduced his penchant for lengthy dialogue scenes, nonlinear storytelling, mixing international genre stylings, and juxtaposing pop tracks against disturbing action in his directorial debut Reservoir Dogs.
Then, he perfected that style with Pulp Fiction, which arguably remains the director’s greatest film despite all the stiff competition that followed in the next couple of decades.
Christopher Nolan: Memento (2000)
Christopher Nolan, the man who would later be able to demand a nine-figure budget from Warner Bros. for an original dream heist movie, made his directorial debut on a microbudget of $6,000. Following is a film noir about a writer who follows people around to influence his work.
Nolan’s second film, Memento, was his first to attract Hollywood’s attention. The acclaimed mind-bending thriller stars Guy Pearce as an amnesiac man struggling to solve his wife’s murder.
Sofia Coppola: Lost In Translation (2003)
After making a stellar directorial debut with a sobering adaptation of The Virgin Suicides, Sofia Coppola told her first original story as a writer-director for her sophomore effort Lost in Translation.
A young Scarlett Johansson stars as a recent college graduate milling around Tokyo. She befriends a fading movie star played by Bill Murray who’s in the city to shoot a commercial.
Edgar Wright: Hot Fuzz (2007)
Edgar Wright technically made his directorial debut with the low-budget British western spoof A Fistful of Fingers, but since it never got an official release, Shaun of the Dead is listed as his directorial debut.
Wright and his dream team of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost followed up their spot-on satire of the zombie genre with Hot Fuzz, a masterfully crafted lampoon of the buddy cop genre.
Paul Thomas Anderson: Boogie Nights (1997)
After his directorial debut Hard Eight had been meddled with incessantly by the financiers, Paul Thomas Anderson demanded final cut privilege on his next movie. Although he ended up waiving both, his contract stipulated that he could make a three-hour movie with an NC-17 rating and the producers would have to release it.
With this creative freedom, Anderson brought the ‘70s adult film industry to life in his first of several masterpieces, Boogie Nights. Mark Wahlberg successfully shed his hip hop image and proved his mettle as a dramatic actor in the role of Dirk Diggler.
Mike Nichols: The Graduate (1967)
A year after making his directorial debut with a critically acclaimed film adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Mike Nichols helped to usher in the New Hollywood era with his 1967 coming-of-age masterpiece The Graduate.
Dustin Hoffman stars as a college kid who’s not sure what to do with his life and gets caught in a love triangle with his parents’ alluring friend and her more age-appropriate daughter.
David Lynch: The Elephant Man (1980)
After David Lynch defined his uniquely unsettling filmmaking style with his black-and-white debut feature Eraserhead, Mel Brooks tapped him to follow it up with a biopic of Joseph Merrick (renamed John Merrick in the film), similarly shot in black-and-white.
Anchored by John Hurt’s poignant portrayal of Merrick, The Elephant Man has little in common with Lynch’s later surrealist works like Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, but it remains one of the director’s most sobering and emotionally charged films.
Wes Anderson: Rushmore (1998)
While Wes Anderson’s hilarious directorial debut Bottle Rocket failed to make a splash at the box office, it did make a splash in Hollywood thanks to a glowing review from none other than Martin Scorsese, who declared it to be one of the greatest movies of the decade.
This allowed Anderson to secure the funding for his next film, Rushmore, a coming-of-age comedy starring Jason Schwartzman as precocious high schooler Max Fischer, who develops a serious crush on a teacher and finds himself in a love triangle with his wealthy businessman friend Herman Blume, played by Bill Murray.
Bong Joon-Ho: Memories Of Murder (2003)
Bong Joon-ho made movie history last year when his latest masterwork Parasite became the first-ever non-English-language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. The director’s debut feature was the acclaimed dark comedy Barking Dogs Never Bite.
He followed up this movie with Memories of Murder, one of the greatest thrillers ever made, loosely retelling the story of Korea’s first-ever serial murders.
The Coen Brothers: Raising Arizona (1987)
After proving filmmakers don’t need a big budget to create genre thrills with their neo-noir masterpiece debut Blood Simple, the Coen brothers wanted to make their second movie as tonally different than their first one as possible. The result, Raising Arizona, is one of the funniest slapstick comedies ever made.
Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter star as an ex-con and his cop wife, respectively, who decide to kidnap a baby when they can’t conceive or adopt one.
