Mike Nichols – “Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?” (1966)
Though arriving nine years later, “Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?” had a similar impact to “12 Angry Men” — an adaptation of a stage hit that launched its filmmaker, the late, great Mike Nichols, to a five-decade career numbering among one of Hollywood’s most memorable. By the time he was offered the movie, Nichols had gone from comedy superstar (in a double-act with Elaine May) to stage director, winning Tony awards for “Barefoot In The Park” and “The Odd Couple.” He hadn’t directed ‘Virginia Woolf,’ also a Tony winner, but took over for the movie version, which saw tumultuous real-life couple Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor aging up to play George and Martha, a college professor and his wife, who have a drunken, provocative evening with a younger couple. Nichols’ film doesn’t expand the scope, as such, but Ernest Lehmann’s screenplay cunningly keeps it mostly in one house and cuts the running time down while making it cinematic. What strikes you now is how confident and fully-formed a debut it is for Nichols himself, wrestling the movie-star titans and a well-established source material and yet still putting his stamp on it. Taboo-breaking for the time (it was one of a number of movies that helped put the final stake in the heart of the Production Code), it’s aged remarkably well, still as funny, scabrous as raw as it was half a century ago. It got a staggering 13 Oscar nominations, every one it was eligible for, and Nichols would win the Director Oscar the following year for his outstanding follow-up, “The Graduate.”
Warren Beatty & Buck Henry – “Heaven Can Wait” (1978)
Notable for being both somewhat ignored these days, and for marking not just one directorial debut but two, “Heaven Can Wait” is admittedly kind of a trifle, but it’s an incredibly delicious trifle at that. A remake not of the Ernst Lubitsch film of the same name but of 1941’s “Here Comes Mr. Jordan” (itself a version of Harry Segall’s play), it saw superstar Warren Beatty (who’d been a hands-on producer regularly, but hadn’t directed before), and “The Graduate” writer Buck Henry team up to direct, from a script by Beatty and his friend Elaine May. Beatty also stars as a star quarterback who dies in an accident, only to be reincarnated in the body of a scumbag millionaire who’s just been murdered by his wife, going on to fall in love with environmentalist, Julie Christie. It’s unashamedly commercial stuff, but works like gangbusters as a romantic comedy, with Beatty and Christie’s usual chemistry giving a real soul to their affair, and the May-isms of the script (“There is nothing to be frightened of. There’s plenty to be worried about, but nothing to be frightened of.”) providing more laughs than the average. The debut helmers swiftly prove their chops too, with a Powell & Pressburger-ish magic realism that can feel regularly swoonsome. Beatty would go on to better with his next movie, “Reds” (Henry would only direct one further feature, underwhelming satire “First Family”), but this still marked a pretty good start.
READ MORE: 12 Indie Directors Who Jumped To Blockbuster Budgets
Roland Joffé – “The Killing Fields” (1984)
He’s fallen on harder times recently (one of his most recent movies was a torture-porn horror starring Elisha Cuthbert), but Roland Joffé couldn’t have asked for a better start to his feature film directing career, with Best Director nominations for his first two movies. He’d gotten his start on British TV (including long-running soap “Coronation Street”), before “Chariots Of Fire” producer David Puttnam picked him to direct “The Killing Fields.” Adapted by future “Withnail & I” helmer Bruce Robinson from New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg’s memoirs, it follows Schanberg (an excellent Sam Waterston) on assignment in Cambodia during the Civil War, where he forms a bond with Dith Pran (Haing S. Ngor), a local journalist and interpreter, only to leave him behind when he’s captured by the Khmer Rouge. It’s a remarkably honest and unsparing look at the way that Western journalists can use their subjects, and shine a valuable light on conflicts and atrocities that are often overshadowed by the war in Vietnam. Joffé helms with a confidence that belies his being a first-timer, and uses the prestige-picture trappings in a more subversive way, subtly shifting perspective from Schanberg’s moral conflict to Pran’s gruelling survival tale over time. It was nominated for seven Oscars altogether, winning three, including one for real-life Khmer Rouge labor-camp survivor Ngor (who sadly would be murdered in L.A. twelve years after the film’s release), and Joffé went on to follow it up with the Palme D’or-winning “The Mission” and another Oscar nod.
John Singleton – “Boyz N The Hood” (1991)
Though it failed to get in the Best Picture mix (clearly it was far more important for the Academy to nominate “Bugsy” and “The Prince Of Tides” instead), John Singleton’s “Boyz N The Hood” stomped all over Oscar records: when the helmer was nominated in the best director category, he was both the first ever African-American filmmaker to do so, but also overtook Orson Welles as the youngest nominated. It’s a landmark, but no more so than the film itself. A deceptively old-fashioned melodrama, a sort of updating of “Rebel Without A Cause” or “The Wild One” in some respects, the film centers on a trio of childhood friends in South Central L.A: Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr), kept on the tracks by his father, Furious (Laurence Fishburne, only seven years older than his on-screen son), Ricky, a college football prospect who’s mostly stayed out of trouble, and Doughboy (Ice Cube, in his first movie), a hot-tempered Crip. Their flirtations with the gang lifestyle goes on to lead to tragedy, and there’s a force and anger to the way that Singleton gathers momentum that makes it seem like his voice is exploding off the screen, even if it’s a little clumsy or moralistic in places. And he draws out phenomenal performances from his cast, with Cube particularly impressive, especially given his relatively green status as an actor. Singleton’s sadly been more recently reduced to dim-witted actioners: hopefully his upcoming FX show “Snowfall” will be a return to form.