The youngest movie director of all time
A director often tends to get better with age, which is a natural by-product of gaining more experience, but history has proven countless times that it can be nothing more than a number when it comes to cinematic excellence.
Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, and Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash were all released when their directors hadn’t yet hit 30, but they’re still nowhere near being the youngest filmmakers to ever call action on their debut features.
Xavier Dolan was 20 when I Killed My Mother premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009, Phillip Youmans was a year younger when Burning Cane premiered at Tribeca ten years later, and Emily Hagins was 12 years old when she helmed zombie flick Pathogen, with her fifth feature releasing at the age of 26 when crime thriller Coin Heist premiered on Netflix in January 2017.
And yet, they’re all long in the tooth compared to the youngest movie director in history, when seven-year-old Saugat Bista’s Love You Baba was released in December 2014. An intimate family drama, the story follows a single father’s attempts to take care of his ten-year-old daughter and the challenges that come with raising a child alone since day one after young Chanchal’s mother died during childbirth.
Unsurprisingly, that makes Bista the youngest-ever filmmaker to take the reins on a feature-length production, which was shot over the course of 27 days across Nepal. Deciding that he wanted to be a director when he was five years old, nobody could have expected that he’d make good on his promise so soon.
“I thought my son was joking when he first told me that he wants to direct a movie,” Saugat’s father Gajit Bista understandably explained to Guinness World Records. “But when he showed intense interest to become a professional director, I gave him all my support”. As an established actor himself, having such a respected father inevitably helped convince the local industry that Love You Baba wasn’t intended to be a joke or gimmick of any kind.
The curiosity factor didn’t guarantee the seven-year-old’s film success, though, after it was noted Love You Baba “failed to hit at the box office”. Still, it’s doubtful somebody of such tender years would be too concerned with the bottom line when even making a movie in the first place is a remarkable achievement for somebody so young.
Bista was even welcomed into the Film Directors Guild of Nepal to solidify his credentials and would follow up his history-making contributions from behind the camera with 2010’s Hairaan. A seven-year-old director is a difficult thing to comprehend, but from all accounts, he took to it like a natural.
