15 Movies That Say More About Their Makers Than They Realise

3. The Breakfast Club - John Hughes

The late, great John Hughes was the voice of a generation in the 1980s, despite the fact that it was one he was never actually a part of. He'd first captured the vocal patterns and angst of upper-middle class teens as a director in Sixteen Candles, lighting a sincere but also chucklesome fire in the hearts of a youth that had so far been fed a diet of college frat-boy movies (which Hughes himself helped spawn with his work for National Lampoon) like Animal House and Porky's. Then came The Breakfast Club, a standard-bearer for teen movies that makes up in still-relevant thematic resonance (everyone has a bit of everything in them; don't let adults or anyone else define who you are) for what it lacks in accurate representations of what happens when you smoke marijuana. The film spoke to a great many young people, and it's clear from much of the rest of Hughes' filmography that he identified with the young leads much more than any of the adults in his work, as evidenced in his mentoring of Anthony Michael Hall and Molly Ringwald and the bitter principal who stands for everything ugly about being an adult. Hughes obviously wasn't interested in belonging to the club he was a part of; he'd rather be one of the kids, miserable as they are.