Everybody has to start from somewhere, and this applies to even the best and most famous directors working in the industry today. While some directors quickly made a splash, others' careers had a less than stellar beginning.
While these movies may not be the best representations of their respective directorial skills and perspectives, they still provide an interesting insight into where they got their ideas from and how much they've changed as people.
10 David F. Sandberg's Viral Horror Short Got Him Noticed By Hollywood
When he's not contributing to the DC Extended Universe by directing Shazam's adventures, Sandberg makes horror movies like Annabelle: Creation. Sandberg got his start with Lights Out, which was one of the most successful horror movies of 2016 and an impressive debut for a then-untested filmmaker.
Lights Out may seem familiar to those who binge YouTube shorts. Lights Out was originally a 3-minute short on Sandberg's YouTube channel, and it racked up more than 15 million views and even won awards. The short went viral and caught New Line Cinema's eye, and Sandberg was given $4.9 million to expand it into a movie.
9 Edgar Wright's First Movie Was An Amateur Cowboy Spoof
Wright is rightfully considered to be a comedic genius, directing movies that are clever and smart send-offs to some of the most popular genres around. Some of the most famous include Baby Driver and Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, an adaptation of a non-superhero comic book series. That said, he had a lot of artistic evolving to do since his first movie, A Fistful Of Fingers, is uncharacteristically basic and surface-level.
Released to a single screen in 1995, A Fistful Of Fingers lampooned the Spaghetti Western by means of puns and non-sequiturs. By today's standards, the parody wouldn't feel out of place among equally lowbrow YouTube comedies. Wright learned from his movie's shortcomings as seen in his next movie, Shaun Of The Dead.
8 James Cameron Was Responsible For That Horror Movie About Flying Fish
Cameron is best known as a pioneer of special effects as seen in Avatar and Titanic, so it's oddly fitting that he got his start as the special effects director of Piranha II: The Spawning, the sequel to a Jaws parody that only cult movie aficionados remember. After the sequel's director was fired, Cameron was promoted and it became his debut film.
Piranha II's claim to fame was its flying winged piranha, leading to Cameron cheekily declaring it to be the "finest flying killer fish horror/comedy ever made." He also claimed that working on the fish sequel was so bad that it gave him the nightmares that would be the genesis of his most famous creation, the terrifying Terminator.
7 George Lucas's First Sci-Fi Movie Was A Bleak Dystopia
Even if he didn't direct all of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies, Lucas is still associated with them because he helped create and conceptualize them, even the bad parts. Because of these movies' boyish appeal and pulpy sense of adventure, it may seem weird to newcomers that Lucas started his storytelling career with the bleak THX1138.
THX1138 is a dystopian sci-fi movie about a world with no freedom, and Lucas followed it up with his watershed ode to lost youth, American Graffiti. Lucas then directed and produced blockbusters for most of his career, and he's said he'd like to return to his experimental indie roots now that he's effectively retired from big-budget movies.
6 Michael Bay Made A Name For Himself With Award-Winning Commercials & Music Videos
Today, Bay is synonymous with explosive cinematic excess. His bombastic style of filmmaking is incredibly divisive, with many critics denouncing him for making shameless feature-length commercials and music videos. Thing is, this was always Bay's style. In fact, he got his start with flashy ads and MTV videos.
Before debuting with Bad Boys, Bay caught the attention of Hollywood with his Meat Loaf music videos and award-winning "Got Milk?" commercial. Even though they lacked the budget of Transformers, Bay's non-cinematic works already had his signature flair, with rapid-fire editing, Americana aesthetics, an affinity for cool vehicles, and more.
5 Ari Aster's Thesis Movie Was About Incest
Aster is no stranger to disturbing movies and stories, but even the most graphic scenes from Hereditary and Midsommar pale in comparison to everything that transpired in his thesis movie, The Strange Thing About The Johnsons. Screened in 2011, the 29-minute short tackles son-on-father incest and sexual assault.
According to Aster, the movie's genesis cropped up when he discussed taboos with friends and decided to make the most transgressive movie he could at university. Unsurprisingly, the movie sparked polarizing reactions, with detractors calling it tasteless while its defenders saw it as the daring debut of an auteur filmmaker.
4 Steven Spielberg's First Movie Cost $500 & Was Lost To Time
Spielberg may be responsible for helping create the modern blockbuster, but even the director behind groundbreaking long-running movie franchises Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park started out small. Spielberg's first movie was Firelight, an incredibly low-budget sci-fi movie about scientists investigating the connection between missing people and lights in the sky.
Released in 1964 and made when Spielberg was 17-years old, Firelight cost $500 and earned a profit of $1. To date, only three minutes of its roughly 110-minute runtime survived. Spielberg basically remade his home movie around a decade later with Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, which became a massive critical and financial success.
3 Quentin Tarantino's First Movie Was Destroyed In A Lab Fire
Long before Reservoir Dogs turned him into a household name, Tarantino made My Best Friend's Wedding in 1987. The movie was a black comedy about unassuming people whose escapades spiral out of control, meaning it's a typical Tarantino movie. What's really interesting about it is its legacy, or the lack thereof.
The movie clocked in at 70 minutes and took around three years to shoot, but only 36 minutes worth of footage saw the light of day because it barely escaped a fire that broke out in the lab it was being developed in. What remains of My Best Friend's Birthday has been shown in film festivals, while a book about its making was published in 2019.
2 M. Night Shyamalan's First Movie Was An Autobiographical Biopic
Shyamalan is best known for his polarizing plot twists, which literally make or break his movies' receptions. That said, his signature plot device is actually absent in his first movie Praying With Anger, a semi-autobiographical movie from 1992 that retold his experiences as an Indian American college student.
Praying With Anger was as straightforward as an angsty student film could be, though it showed signs of Shyamalan's other quirks. Uncanny flat acting, Shyamalan's obvious self-insert being the most enlightened character, unsubtle philosophical discussions, and more showed up here, long before they resurfaced for the worst in Lady In The Water.
1 Ben Affleck Made A Trashy Short Movie That He's Since Disowned
When he isn't starring in blockbusters like the rather contentious Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice or dramas such as Gone Girl, Affleck directs, writes, and often stars in his own movies, like Argo. To most people, Affleck started directing in 2007 with Gone Baby Gone, but he's been behind the camera as far back as 1993.
Affleck first directed I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her On A Meat Hook, And Now I Have A Three-Picture Deal At Disney, a 16-minute short that's as edgy and immature as the title implies. The schlocky dark comedy was received negatively, and Affleck himself was its biggest critic. He's called it "atrocious" and wants nothing to do with it anymore.