The Best Directorial Debuts in Film History

Welles had shot film before — a sixty-six-minute work print called Too Much Johnson, made in 1938 as projected inserts for a Mercury Theatre stage show and never publicly screened at the time — but this was his first feature, and it won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay with Herman J. Mankiewicz. The breakfast-table montage compresses sixteen years of a marriage into roughly two minutes across five scenes.

Exactly one film, and then he stopped — it failed with reviewers and at the box office in 1955, and Charles Laughton never directed again. James Agee took the screenplay credit, adapting Davis Grubb's 1953 novel. Willa's body sits in a submerged Model T with her hair drifting in the current, shot in a studio tank using a mannequin masked to resemble Shelley Winters.

Nearly three years of stop-start shooting, paid for out of Satyajit Ray's own savings whenever the funding dried up, and he had directed nothing at all before it. Ravi Shankar wrote most of the score in a single session lasting about eleven hours. In Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay's novel the children go looking for the train and never manage to see it; Apu and Durga reach it here, and that one change is the whole adaptation.

Two shorts, Une visite in 1955 and Les Mistons in 1957, were all François Truffaut had made before Cannes gave him its Best Director award in 1959. Antoine reaches the sea he has never seen, turns, and the image freezes and pushes in on his face — an optical effect rather than a held frame, and the ancestor of every ambiguous ending since.

Before this there were five shorts, beginning with Opération béton and ending with Une histoire d'eau, assembled out of footage Truffaut had abandoned. Jean-Luc Godard shot for twenty-three days in August and September 1959, hand-held, writing dialogue into a notebook each morning; the jump cuts everyone quotes were an editing decision taken after the shoot, not a plan. Deep in the long hotel-room stretch, Patricia reads Faulkner aloud: between grief and nothing, she would take grief.

Holly narrates a killing spree in the flat voice of a girl summarising a magazine story, and that gap is the whole trick. Terrence Malick had directed one short, Lanton Mills, in 1969, then wrote, produced and directed this himself. Kit setting the house alight and the long look at it burning, dollhouse and all, says more about him than any line of dialogue does.

A twenty-one-page script convinced the American Film Institute the thing would run about twenty minutes, so they green-lit it; photography then stretched over several years, funded partly by David Lynch's paper round and by Jack Fisk and Sissy Spacek. Everything he had made before was a short. The lady in the radiator singing In Heaven while she stamps on the little creatures is where it stops being a student project.

Raising $1.5 million took the Coens a year and a homemade trailer to show investors. Directors Guild rules meant only Joel could be credited as director and only Ethan as producer, which is why the debut of two people looks on paper like the debut of one. Marty, half-dead in a shallow grave, pulls a revolver on Ray and gets three empty chambers.

Sketch television was the whole résumé, with no feature behind it, and then $4.5 million bought an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay at the 90th ceremony in 2018. Missy stirring a teaspoon against a china cup while Chris drops into the Sunken Place turns an ordinary domestic sound into a trigger, and Jordan Peele never explains the metaphor twice.

Commercials and industrial shorts came first, including a Mister Rogers' Neighborhood segment about Fred Rogers having his tonsils out. Image Ten raised roughly $114,000 for George A. Romero's first feature. Barbra and Johnny bickering in the Evans City cemetery, moments before a man in a tattered suit walks over and kills him, is the coldest opening in horror and nothing gets explained for another ninety minutes.

Glumov's Diary, a 1923 short made for a stage production, came first; this was Sergei Eisenstein's first full-length feature and it arrived months ahead of Battleship Potemkin, rougher and angrier than the film that eclipsed it. Soldiers drive the workers into a field and open fire, and the massacre is cut against footage of a cow being slaughtered.

A Yes concert video called 9012Live, made in 1985, was the only thing of any length Steven Soderbergh had directed before he took the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1989 with a $1.2 million picture about four people talking. Ann sets up the camcorder to interview Graham and ends up turning it on him, and power in the room changes hands without a raised voice.

Straight out of film school at USC, John Singleton wrote and directed his first feature and was nominated for Best Director at the 64th Academy Awards in 1992, the first Black filmmaker nominated in that category. Furious Styles standing on a Compton corner under a billboard, explaining to a gathering crowd who profits when a neighbourhood empties out, is a lecture that should not work and does.

Gallery video art was the apprenticeship — Bear in 1993, Deadpan in 1997 — and Steve McQueen had made no feature before this one, which took the Caméra d'Or at Cannes in 2008. Conversation between Bobby Sands and Father Dominic Moran runs seventeen minutes in one unbroken shot with the camera fixed; Liam Cunningham moved in with Michael Fassbender to rehearse it.

Three student shorts came first — Tuesday in 2015, Laps and Blue Christmas in 2017 — and then Charlotte Wells made this, which won Outstanding Debut at the 76th BAFTA Awards. Adult Sophie pushing through a strobe-lit rave toward her father, catching him in fragments and losing him again, is the only place the film says out loud what it has spent ninety minutes circling.