Guillermo del Toro names the greatest directorial debut in cinema history: “A perfect first movie”
A director’s first feature isn’t always the barometer of where their career will eventually end up heading, even if Guillermo del Toro initially set out his stall as an auteur who’d build their reputation on marrying beauty, brutality, spirituality, horror, and fantasy.
As a kid who grew up obsessed with Pinocchio and Frankenstein, del Toro knew exactly what kind of movies he wanted to make with 1992’s Cronos. That throughline has been apparent for the last three decades and has changed, with every single one of his 12 movies to date featuring at least one of the elements mentioned above.
However, filmmakers aren’t obliged to spend their professional lives walking a single tonal tightrope, nor are they obligated to announce themselves with an acclaimed debut. James Cameron has changed cinema several times, but history will always remember him as the guy who introduced himself as the director of Piranha II: The Spawning despite his reluctance to embrace it as part of his oeuvre.
For every Quentin Tarantino and Reservoir Dogs, Orson Welles and Citizen Kane, David Lynch and Eraserhead, or Sidney Lumet and 12 Angry Men, there’s a David Fincher and Alien 3, Oliver Stone and Seizure, or Francis Ford Coppola and Dementia 13 to help balance the scales and prove the auteurs who conquer Hollywood aren’t obligated to arrive with a bang.
Joel and Ethan Coen fall firmly into the former camp, though, with the siblings still in their 20s when Blood Simple premiered in October 1984. The brothers faced plenty of obstacles in getting their first feature funded, but when it was released, it was greeted with rapturous acclaim and introduced several of the cinematic characteristics that would define their individual and shared filmographies.
Del Toro was in agreement, celebrating Blood Simple as one of his all-time favourite films to Criterion, where he anointed it as the greatest directorial debut ever. “Blood Simple contains most, if not all, of the preoccupations the Coens will articulate throughout their career,” he offered. “It’s a perfect first movie.”
While it’s incredibly reductive to suggest that anything anyone ever needed to know about the Coens and their filmmaking style, signatures, and aesthetics is present and accounted for in Blood Simple, it’s not untrue either. That’s not to say the duo are one-trick ponies when they’re deservedly lauded among their generation’s definitive writers and directors, but they’ve nonetheless hewed to a template that’s distinctly theirs for over 40 years.
When it comes to naming the greatest directorial debut in cinema history, the accepted answer is typically Citizen Kane because that’s what history has conditioned everyone to think. Of course, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and for del Toro, Blood Simple is about as good as it gets for behind-the-camera debutants looking to make an instant impression.
