Martin Scorsese’s recent musings about mortality—inspired by thoughts from director Akira Kurosawa a generation ago—inspire even more thoughts, and not just because Kurosawa’s Dreams, starring Scorsese as Vincent Van Gogh, is coming to 4K Criterion disc this August. The great directors are aging, and soon enough will have aged out altogether.
Steven Spielberg, 76, clearly feels his remaining time is too short to spend directing a final Indiana Jones movie. Francis Ford Coppola, 84, recently marshaled all his resources to fund and film his own dream project, Megalopolis, which he realized would not likely ever happen through traditional means. Ridley Scott, at 85, continues to work at a remarkable rate, balancing one-for-me movies like The Last Duel with studio paychecks for Alien prequels and a Gladiator sequel. Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, who continue to work overseas on movies nobody will distribute stateside for obvious reasons, will both will be 90 soon.
The point here is not to diminish any director with age—most of those mentioned above are currently doing some of their best work. It’s to examine the pipeline for future individual cinematic voices. Where are the younger voices changing cinema the way the current auteurs did in their earlier years? As it turns out, young, visionary directors who aren’t just waiting for a call from Marvel are still out there. And they’re learning their craft and honing their love of storytelling in two unexpected places.
Look to the horror ranks
Horror and exploitation films make great training grounds for directors. They teach filmmakers how to tell a story on a budget, and create mood using simple techniques. Coppola, Scorsese, James Cameron, John Sayles, and the late Jonathan Demme got early starts from Roger Corman, the B-movie producer behind the likes of Little Shop Of Horrors, The Raven, and Death Race 2000. (Full disclosure: this writer interned for Corman, circa 1996.) Even Steven Spielberg used horror to break big—first with Duel, his feature directorial debut for TV, and later with Jaws, which created the summer blockbuster template.
Horror may be the blood-soaked wellspring from whence the next generation of visionary directors will emerge. Ti West, 42, has been steadily cranking out successful horror movies since the age of 25, while his affinity for the drawn-out slow burn suggests he’d be well suited to dramas as well. Parker Finn, 36, recently scored a major original hit with his frightening feature debut Smile, adapted from his short. Mike Flanagan, 45, has been making horror features since his 30s, and is now the go-to guy for Stephen King adaptations, pleasing both the author and fans with a Doctor Sleep adaptation that worked both as a version of the book and a sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, without embarrassing either. James Gunn, recently named the co-chairman and co-CEO of DC Films, famously came up through the ultra-low-budget exploitation company Troma Entertainment, writing gross-out horror comedies like Tromeo And Juliet, whose aesthetic he only mildly toned down in adapting to science fiction.
David F. Sandberg, 42, came out of horror, and YouTube, to make Shazam! in his late 30s, arguably the most family-and-critic-pleasing DC movie to date (having completed the sequel, he’s now headed back to horror for a bit). Ted Geoghegan, 43, has been writing and directing innovative horror films since 2001, while maintaining his day job as a publicist—he has a knack for building tension by withholding his monsters, then showing them to be even more terrifying than expected. Lucky McKee, 47, who was embraced by veteran horror filmmakers as a fellow “master of horror” on the basis of his 2002 film May, has been steadily cranking out quality lower-budget, under-the-radar work ever since. To paraphrase the title of Geoghegan’s best-reviewed film, they can all say We Are Still Here.
From acting to “action!”
Coming up through the horror ranks may be the most promising path for the next generation of Scorseses, but it’s not the only route. Some actors have turned out to have great talent behind the camera, and in this economy, they have the advantage of already making a living in the business that’s harder than ever for newcomers to crack.
Such is the case with Marielle Heller, whose Diary Of A Teenage Girl, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, and It’s A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood mark her as a distinctively compassionate yet unflinching voice batting a perfect three-for-three. Greta Gerwig, Jordan Peele, and Bo Burnham arguably garner more anticipation these days from their directorial choices—which, save Gerwig’s Barbie, are mostly non-franchise material—than their next acting roles. And none of the above-named actor-directors are over 45 years old. Peele, who began as a sketch comic, is now his own brand as a reliable maker of social allegory suspense features with fantastical elements; Gerwig, who began in mumblecore, is becoming similarly so for female coming-of-age dramedies.
Meanwhile, Michael B. Jordan and Emerald Fennell recently used their acting heft to make directorial debuts with the boxing sequel Creed III and the female revenge flick Promising Young Woman, respectively. Jordan added unexpected anime inspirations to make his sequel his own; Fennell subverted the typical revenge tropes to deliver unexpected twists. In both cases, seemingly predictable products became something much more. And there are always commercials as a breeding ground. At one time, they gave us Michael Bay; more recently, we got the Everything Everywhere All At Once duo, the Daniels. A generational improvement, most would say.
Avoiding or surviving the franchise trap
One would argue that to be an auteur in the Scorsese, Wes Anderson, or David Lynch mode is to avoid getting eaten up by the franchise machine. It’s a cautionary tale whose main characters have included Jon Watts, who earned acclaim for Cop Car in his early 30s, and was instantly plucked by Marvel Studios to make a trilogy of Spider-Man films. Now he’s working in television—he recently directed two episodes of FX’s The Old Man—where there’s more opportunity to stretch creatively. Before him, Marc Webb made the delightful 500 Days Of Summer and then two Spider-films that were less liked. Like Watts, he’s also mostly retreated to television although he’s directing Disney’s upcoming live action version of Snow White, a corporate creation that will presumably be as auteur-averse as they come.
Christopher Nolan, 52, who alternates between expensive personal projects and more studio-friendly sci-fi managed to be the exception that proves the rule with his Batman trilogy. And Taika Waititi, 47, and Rian Johnson, 49, have distinct voices that even the biggest franchises didn’t silence, and they’ve both either created or co-created their own franchises with What We Do In The Shadows and Knives Out, respectively.
Other uber-auteurs who presumably still have greatness left in them include the Coen brothers (who appear to have separated for now), Wes Anderson, David Fincher, David O. Russell, Spike Lee, Alexander Payne, and Quentin Tarantino, who claims he’ll retire after his next film. These are the artists we’ll miss the most when they’re gone because, much like Scorsese and Clint Eastwood, they’ll someday be winding down their careers with no more gifts to bestow upon us except those we’ve already unwrapped. And new Hollywood—obsessed with streaming and IP—seems less inclined to replenish their big-screen ranks. But fear not movie lovers, a new generation of beloved directors who are either learning their craft in the low-budget horror world, or spending most of their time currently in front of the camera, will soon be called upon to unleash their vision upon an eager public and—hopefully—create the new classics.