As a member of the Online Film Critics Society, I was recently invited to submit my selection of the top 25 directorial debuts of all time. The votes have now been counted, and today the OFCS announced its list of the top 100 first-time efforts. Perhaps there's no surprise that Citizen Kane ended up in the number one slot – after all, Orson Welles' masterpiece it is routinely hailed as the greatest film of all time – but I was pleasantly surprised by some of the other entries; notably Eraserhead's presence at number 2, and The Iron Giant making the top 20. My own no.1 pick, The Night of the Hunter, came in seventh, and for the record, here is the list I submitted:
1 - The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton)
2 - The Kid (Charles Chaplin)
3 - Citizen Kane (Orson Welles)
4 - L'Atlante (Jean Vigo)
5 - Badlands (Terrence Malick)
6 - Ivan's Childhood (Andrei Tarkovsky)
7 - Toy Story (John Lasseter)
8 - Amores Perros (Alejandro González Iñárritu)
9 - Performance (Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell)
10 - Eraserhead (David Lynch)
11 - The Maltese Falcon (John Huston)
12 - Seul contre tous (Gaspar Noé)
13 - Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett)
14 - Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze)
15 - Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard)
16 - Nil by Mouth (Gary Oldman)
17 - The Great McGinty(Preston Sturges)
18 - Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray)
19 - Withnail and I (Bruce Robinson)
20 - The Iron Giant (Brad Bird)
21 - One-Eyed Jacks (Marlon Brando)
22 - The Return (Andrej Zvjagintsev)
23 - Duel (Steven Spielberg)
24 - Blue Collar (Paul Schrader)
25 - The Duellists (Ridley Scott)
You can see the entire list, including my own contribution for Badlands, here.