10 incredible movies made by directors aged 25 and under
Most directors are grizzled movie industry veterans with enough experience and wisdom to see a project through to completion, but they all have to start somewhere, and some start much, much earlier than others.
This list originally started as an exploration of directors who made great movies before turning 30, but that turned out to be too easy, with Paul Thomas Anderson, Sofia Coppola, and Orson Welles all having made terrific films in their 20s, so reducing the limit to 25 made things significantly harder.
It can be done, however, as these ten fine filmmakers prove. While most of us were still getting our parents to do our laundry for us, these lot were making actual, real-life movies, some of which are now stone-cold classics.
Try not to get too jealous!
10 incredible movies by directors 25 and under:
<br>‘The Evil Dead’ (Sam Raimi, 1981)
While most 1980s filmmakers are wrinkly old men, Sam Raimi still has all of his own teeth because he was incredibly young when he started, making his first amateur film, It’s Murder!, when he was still at college.
His follow-up, The Evil Dead, would be the movie that would define his legacy, one that is still held in the highest regard by the horror community and introduced the world to Ash Williams, the Deadites, and a whole host of other nasty things, spawning a franchise. This film cemented Bruce Campbell’s career and routinely appears in lists of the best horrors ever made, and Rami achieved it all at just 21 years old.
‘El Mariachi’ (Robert Rodriguez, 1993)
Robert Rodriguez is one of the most accomplished action filmmakers of all time, but it all started with a little project called El Mariachi, which he made at 24 with a mostly amateur cast in 1993.
This bloody, high-octane finds the title character, played by Carlos Gallardo, a musician, attempting to clear his name when he is mistaken for a dangerous criminal, and made a lot of people take notice of Rodriguez as soon as it hit the screens. He continued the story of El Mariachi with two more films, with Antonio Banderas taking over the lead role in the subsequent instalments of Desperado and Once Upon a Time in Mexico.
‘Shithouse’ (Cooper Raiff, 2020)
While his classmates were partying, Cooper Raiff spent his 2018 spring break making a short film, but that nerdiness paid off in the end, when Raiff sent this 50-minute piece to director Jay Duplass, who encouraged him to make it longer, with the result being Shithouse.
Known as Freshman Year in some territories (for obvious reasons), the film stars a 23-year-old Raiff as a college freshman who overcomes his social anxiety by befriending a group of fellow losers from the worst fraternity on campus. The film was entered into the South by Southwest festival and ended up winning the Grand Jury Prize for ‘Best Narrative Feature’.
‘Allen Sunshine’ (Harley Chamandy, 2024)
‘Allen Sunshine’ might sound like your dad’s dodgy mate who sells balloons to teenagers round the back of the pub, but instead it’s a poignant story of grief and growth from director Harley Charmandy, who was either 24 or 25 when it came out.
Vincent Leclerc plays the title character, a former music executive who, after losing his wife, retreats to his secluded lakeside home, where he finds new meaning in his life through a friendship with two young boys, played by Miles Phoenix Foley and Liam Choiring-Nkindi, standing as a real-life-affirming story.
‘George Washington’<em> </em>(David Gordon Green, 2000)
David Gordon Green is now a big wheel in Hollywood, having recently relaunched the Halloween and Exorcist horror franchises, but it took him a long time and a lot of hard work to get to where he is today, and he owes all of his success to one American president.
George Washington is not a biopic of the wooden-toothed wonder, though, but rather follows a young girl who befriends a boy with a birth defect wherein his skull never fully hardened. A bittersweet depiction of childhood, the film was named one of Roger Ebert’s favourite releases of the year 2000.
‘Clerks’ (Kevin Smith, 1994)
The ‘View Askewniverse’ is the name given to a number of interconnecting films directed by Kevin Smith, an amusing term that was born with the creation of Clerks, his first foray into feature filmmaking.
Set in a convenience store, the movie follows the lives of two, umm, clerks, played by Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson, who, over the course of their day, interact with various weird and colourful characters, including a duo by the name of Jay and Silent Bob (Jason Mewes and Smith). Considering it was made by a 24-year-old on a budget of under $28,000, it’s a miracle this thing has become so iconic.
‘I Killed My Mother’<em> </em>(Xavier Dolan, 2009)
The 2009 drama I Killed My Mother gained notoriety for a) its title, and b) the fact that its director, Xavier Dolan, who also stars in this semi-autobiographical tale, was just 20 years old when it came out.
Dolan picked up three awards at the Cannes Film Festival for his work, which is about a young man and his turbulent relationship with his mother, and by the time his 25th birthday rolled around, he had helmed five different feature films, all of which were received with acclaim. At the time of writing, he is still only in his late 30s, has once announced his retirement from filmmaking, and has since relapsed into the director’s chair for a feature currently in the pre-production stage.
‘Gummo’ (Harmony Korine, 1999)
An extremely experimental piece, Gummo is held together as the loose story of a tornado destroying a town in Ohio, with the various affected characters finding ways to rebuild their lives or, at the very least, make their new reality a little more bearable.
Harmony Korine had already written the script for Larry Clark’s film Kids by the time, and wanted to make something more abstract for his directorial debut, which led to Gummo when he was just 24. Abstract is certainly the word, because this film isn’t for everyone, but it’s remarkable to think that somebody so young made something so striking, especially now that the film is older than he was when he released it into the world.
‘Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles’ (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
By the age of 25, Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman already had two full-length movies under her belt, one of which was Je Tu Il Elle and the other had a very long name, in the form of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a 201-minute slice-of-life story about a widow living a tedious existence in Brussels.
A slow, intricate examination of what it means to be a working class, the film is widely regarded as a feminist masterpiece and one of the harbingers of the slow cinema movement, which, in 2022, was voted the greatest movie ever made by Sight & Sound magazine, the first film made by a woman to ever achieve this honour.
‘Boyz n the Hood’ (John Singleton, 1991)
At age 24, I could still barely make scrambled eggs, but John Singleton was out there being nominated for ‘Best Director’ at the Oscars, granted to him for his work on Boyz n the Hood, which came out when Singleton was only 23. This hard-hitting story of young African-American men living in Los Angeles has become a cornerstone of Black cinema and is widely accepted as one of the best coming-of-age stories of all time.
Singleton, who wrote this script as part of his film school application, tragically passed away in 2019 at just 51 years old, and while he should still be around today, making more incredible movies, what he accomplished in his all-too-brief existence is truly spectacular.
