The Online Film Critics Society has just released its list of the 100 Best Directorial Debuts in film history. Some predictable heavyweights (not intended to be a Welles’ joke, FYI) are predictably in the top 10. And not surprisingly, Coppola made the list…but it’s Sofia, not Francis Ford. A few other notables pop out to me like finding Night of the Living Dead above The Maltese Falcon. I think I personally might have put The Iron Giant above Toy Story; and I’m stunned as shit to find The Blair Witch Project on the list at all, let alone at #35?? Over Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf at #36??! Wow. But I suppose that’s the nice thing about a list like this: endless opinions and debate. It’s also not frontloaded with pre-1950s classics, which doubtful AFI would ever not do.
The entire list is below, and you can click over to OFCS.org for a breakdown on the top 20.
1. Citizen Kane (directed by Orson Welles)
2. Eraserhead (David Lynch)
3. Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero)
4. The Maltese Falcon (John Huston)
5. Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard)
6. Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino)
7. The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton)
8. Blood Simple (Joel and Ethan Coen)
9. The 400 Blows (François Truffaut)
10. 12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet)
11. L’Atalante (Jean Vigo)
12. Toy Story (John Lasseter)
13. Badlands (Terrence Malick)
14. Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze)
15. This Is Spinal Tap (Marty DiBergi; co-directed by Rob Reiner)
16. Gates of Heaven (Errol Morris)
17. Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais)
18. Airplane! (Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, David Zucker)
19. Duel (Steven Spielberg)
20. The Iron Giant (Brad Bird)
21. The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi)
22. The Producers (Mel Brooks)
23. Knife in the Water (Roman Polanksi)
24. The Shawshank Redemption (Frank Darabont)
25. The Kid (Charles Chaplin)
26. District 9 (Neill Blomkamp)
27. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones)
28. Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly)
29. L’Age d’Or (Luis Buñuel)
30. Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman)
31. Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray)
32. Henry V (Kenneth Branagh)
33. Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper)
34. Clerks (Kevin Smith)
35. The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez)
36. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Mike Nichols)
37. Gattaca (Andrew Niccol)
38. Primer (Shane Carruth)
39. Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (Tim Burton)
40. Brick (Rian Johnson)
41. Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett)
42. Sex, Lies, and Videotape (Steven Soderbergh)
43. Mad Max (George Miller)
44. Pi (Darren Aronofsky)
45. In Bruges (Martin McDonagh)
46. Harlan County U.S.A. (Barbara Kopple)
47. American Beauty (Sam Mendes)
48. Boyz N the Hood (John Singleton)
49. Hedwig and the Angry Inch (John Cameron Mitchell)
50. Delicatessen (Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet)
51. Elevator to the Gallows (aka Frantic) (Louis Malle)
52. Bottle Rocket (Wes Anderson)
53. Titicut Follies (Frederick Wiseman)
54. She’s Gotta Have It (Spike Lee)
55. Shadows (John Cassavetes)
56. Moon (Duncan Jones)
57. Monsters Inc. (Pete Docter)
58. Slacker (Richard Linklater)
59. Say Anything… (Cameron Crowe)
60. Shallow Grave (Danny Boyle)
61. Closely Watched Trains (Jiri Menzel)
62. Gone Baby Gone (Ben Affleck)
63. Repo Man (Alex Cox)
64. The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola)
65. Amores Perros (Alejandro González Iñárritu)
66. On the Town (Stanley Donan and Gene Kelly)
67. The Triplets of Belleville (Sylvain Chomet)
68. Ivan’s Childhood (aka My Name Is Ivan) (Andrei Tarkovsky)
69. My Favorite Year (Richard Benjamin)
70. El Mariachi (Robert Rodriguez)
71. Performance (Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell)
72. In the Company of Men (Neil LaBute)
73. They Live By Night (Nicholas Ray)
74. Love Actually (Richard Curtis)
75. Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling)
76. One-Eyed Jacks (Marlon Brando)
77. Hard Eight (Paul Thomas Anderson)
78. Following (Christopher Nolan)
79. Cabin in the Sky (Vincente Minnelli)
80. George Washington (David Gordon Green)
81. Blood of a Poet (Jean Cocteau)
82. The Station Agent (Thomas McCarthy)
83. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Shane Black)
84. Away from Her (Sarah Polley)
85. Thank You for Smoking (Jason Reitman)
86. The Orphanage (Juan Antonio Bayona)
87. Chicago (Rob Marshall)
88. The 40-Year-Old Virgin (Judd Apatow)
89. Pleasantville (Gary Ross)
90. Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky)
91. Drugstore Cowboy (Gus Van Sant)
92. Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty)
93. Heathers (Michael Lehmann)
94. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (Guy Ritchie)
95. Strictly Ballroom (Baz Luhrmann)
96. Dances with Wolves (Kevin Costner)
97. The Falls (Peter Greenaway)
98. Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio)
99. Get Carter (Mike Hodges)
100. Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay)
21 comments
Hmm, neither Drug Store Cowboy or She's Gotta Have It are technically debut features. Laughton also directed pieces of The Man on the Eiffel Tower and (I thought) O. Henry's Full House before Night of The Hunter.
Nit picking aside, interesting list. No where near what I would rank them, but who cares?
19. Duel was not Spielberg's directorial debut. Sugarland Express was.
The inclusion of Hard Eight effectively discredits this list. It's not a bad film, but a better debut than, well, everything else on the list? Surely not.
I know most people probably won't agree but I feel David Fincher's first film was Seven just like James Cameron considers his first film The Terminator because Piranha 2 was taken over by the producer. I don't count Alien 3 as it was raped by FOX. So I would put Fincher on that list as well as Cameron as Seven and terminator are both incredible directorial debuts from two master auteurs.
Where the heck is Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and his debut, The Lives of Others???
@Cobb
I don't know how you're considering Fincher to be an auteur. He didn't write on any of his features.
Hey @Matt, the auteur theory doesn't extend to just directors who write all of their own work. If it did it wouldn't count John Ford, Sam Peckinpah, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, etc., etc. Get the fucking point? No? Fincher is an auteur!
Being an auteur has zero to do with writing, but it also means more than just "great filmmaker." It has to do with the thematic/aesthetic concerns of the artist. It's director as distinctive "author" of a film. On THAT level, as much as I love a lot of his work, I wouldn't call Fincher an auteur. A damn fine filmmaker? Yes. But I see no distinctly "Fincherian" stamp in his work beyond similar use of color. I'm not totally opposed to there being an auteur case for Fincher, but I don't see it and I haven't seen it articulated by anyone.
Cobb—With all the heat that "Alien 3" got back in the day, you can't even pretend to ignore the fact that Fincher directed it. It doesn't get an asterisk by the title and Fincher doesn't get a do-over because of studio politics or because the movie got away from him. Hell, some of the first-timers on this list may have even been HELPED by studio interference/intervention. Very few first-time directors SHOULD get complete control of their projects anyway. Did you ever see the film "Overnight", which is about a director that started with complete control that should never be anywhere near a list like this? If you go by the "this is the first time we really got to see their vision" rule, it becomes like the Grammys, where someone can get "Best New Artist" after having been the busines for 20 years, because that was the first project of theirs that anyone really took notice of.
No Todd Field for "In the Bedroom"? That's a shame.
No Piranha by Joe Dante?
Can't believe that Play Misty for Me from Clint Eastwood is not on this list. That was a brilliant debut and one of Clint's best films. It's 100x better than Chicago for chrissakes.
I hate to see "Boyz N the Hood" on this list when "Menace II Society" is miles ahead of it. The Hughes Brother debut is unbelievably impressive, especially when you consider they were only 21 years old at the time. "Boyz" is a afterschool special by comparison.
It's a great read and certainly provokes some interesting discussion.
i don't care about debating. this list is great. obviously no one will agree 100% but I am fine with what it is.
Um, #62…..really?
I don't know how someone can't see more in common between Fincher's films than mere color schemes. There are lots of patterns that his films have in common. I feel bad for anyone who watches movies without the perception necessary to see that; I don't know what movies must be like for you, but you're not getting what I am out of them.
And how many times am I going to have to put the verification code in here before it posts?!
afterschool deserves a place on this list
@BStiglets- very much really. It's better than- at least- 96,94,89,88,87, 74,72,65, 60,48,47,42,37,35,34, and 24.
Yeah… the genius here… Thank you for Not smoking is a crowning achievement worthy of a higher rank than Dances with Wolves. Nonsense by people sitting in the dark.
Nice to see Marty DiBergi finally get the credit he deserves.
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