Best Directorial Debuts

A great directorial debut is one of cinema's most-discussed achievements — partly because it's a verifiable display of talent without the cushion of an existing reputation, partly because it sometimes turns out to be the director's best work. Citizen Kane is the obvious case of the latter; Welles never matched his first feature.

Our ten across nine decades, weighted toward debuts that announced directors who became significant.

The picks

• Citizen Kane (1941) — Orson Welles at twenty-five. Still in the running for the greatest film ever made.
• Reservoir Dogs (1992) — Quentin Tarantino. The film that announced American independent cinema's 1990s wave.
• Get Out (2017) — Jordan Peele's first feature. Won Best Original Screenplay.
• Lady Bird (2017) — Greta Gerwig's first solo feature. Five Oscar nominations.
• Hard Eight (1996) — Paul Thomas Anderson's first feature. Already shows the style that would mature in Boogie Nights and Magnolia.
• The 400 Blows (1959) — François Truffaut's first feature. Foundational French New Wave.
• Memories of Murder (2003) — Bong Joon-ho's second feature (effectively, since the first did not travel internationally). The film that announced him to the world.
• Bottle Rocket (1996) — Wes Anderson's first feature. The trial run for everything to come.
• She's Gotta Have It (1986) — Spike Lee's first feature. $175,000, edited in his Brooklyn apartment.
• Whiplash (2014) — Damien Chazelle's second feature, but his first proper feature after Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench. The film that won three Oscars and led to La La Land.

What makes a great debut

A great debut feature usually shares three properties. First, the director has chosen material small enough to control — Reservoir Dogs has one main location, Get Out has one main household, Lady Bird's setting is one teenage girl's life. The constraint is the point.

Second, the director has worked with the material long enough that the screenplay is ready to be shot. Tarantino had been writing Reservoir Dogs for years. Gerwig had been writing Lady Bird for years. Peele had been working on Get Out's structure for years. The debut feature is rarely the script the director thought up six months ago.

Third, the debut tends to be the film the director most-clearly wanted to make. There is no second feature to back up to; the debut has to stand alone. Most great first features carry a slightly compressed urgency the director's later, larger-budget work sometimes loses.