10 Overlooked First Films By Great Directors
Beginners luck? Or just raw talent?
All great artists have to start somewhere.
Every great singer has a low-quality CD of them doing karaoke somewhere in their attic. All the best athletes started out on their pee-wee football teams. Michelangelo probably drew crude pictures of farm animals before he even heard the words "Sistine Chapel".
When it comes to film directors, their first movies are usually a bit sloppy, a little underwhelming, and largely forgettable.
Not these ten though. They basically nailed it first time.
The following men and women behind the camera all made huge first impressions with their debut feature-length films. However, perhaps due to their increased star power in future years, these movies have been long forgotten and overtaken by much more famous flicks.
Not anymore!
Some of these movies will give you a real insight into the early creative workings of some of Hollywood's best minds. Others will leave you scratching your head and saying "Really? They directed that?"
Whatever your response is, make sure to check these ten movies out. Not only will you open your eyes to a world before these people were famous, but you can also lord it over your snobby film friends.
What a treat.
10. Hunger - Steve McQueen
Rather than the actor from The Great Escape, this Steve McQueen is a British film director best known for the Best Picture Oscar winning drama 12 Years A Slave.
Outside of that film, he also directed the TV anthology Small Axe, the heist movie Widows, and the sex addicition thriller Shame. However, McQueen's on-screen career started with a dirty, naked Michael Fassbender.
In 2008, the director brought us Hunger, a story about the 1981 Irish hunger and no-wash strike. Fassbender plays Bobby Sands, a real-life IRA prisoner who died in jail as a result of the action.
Spoilers, but come on. These events happened over forty years ago.
Hunger was almost unanimously well-received by critics upon its debut at the Cannes film festival in 2008. Fassbender was praised for his nuanced performance, whilst McQueen was labelled as an emerging talent for his use of artistic flair to tell a story.
Those critics were correct, as McQueen is now one of the most treasured British film directors. He was even knighted in 2020.
As for Hunger, it's very different from McQueen's later work, but still a very enjoyable if somewhat challenging piece of cinema.