The Best Second Films from Famous Directors

Quentin Tarantino burst onto the indie scene with Reservoir Dogs in 1992, then pretty much single-handedly launched the independent film movement into the mainstream two years later with Pulp Fiction (1994).

Tarantino, who won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Pulp Fiction, redefined storytelling with his nonlinear tale of a boxer, two gangsters, a mob boss's pretty wife, and two diner robbers, while turning lowbrow genres into high art. Pulp Fiction is unapologetically violent, but with each drop of blood comes a shard of humor. The auteur's signature visual style and clever winks at old school Hollywood, couched in the language of the French New Wave, only add to what has to be considered one of the most original movies ever made.

Steven Spielberg made a few TV Movies in the early 1970s before hitting the big screen with The Sugarland Express in 1974. A year later, the 27-year-old director's make-or-break sophomore film arrived in theaters. It was Jaws, and we all know how that played out. The film is an arresting hybrid of '70s drama, '50s monster movie, and procedural thriller that not only scared beachgoers for generations to come, but invented the concept of the summer blockbuster.

Sergio Leone came flying out of nowhere with his second feature, A Fistful of Dollars. The first part in his spaghetti western trilogy also featuring For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, the film is a heinous and totally unabashed remake of Kurosawa's Yojimbo, without actually being a remake (Toho Studio sued, Kurosawa's name is on the credits now, it's a whole thing). Of course, Yojimbo is basically an unofficial adaptation of Dasheill Hammet's novel Red Harvest, so it's kind of a moot point. 

The real point is, with A Fistful of Dollars, Sergio Leone made one of the most influential films of the '60s - it created a genre; was a huge influence on the likes of Quentin Taratino, Robert Rodriguez, and Sam Raimi; and flung Clint Eastwood headfirst into international stardom. All this for a rumored budget of $200,000, from a director who's first film, The Colossus of Rhodes, is all but forgotten.

Ridley Scott's first film was The Duellists (1977), a decent debut that set him up to direct the first installment of one of the greatest sci-fi franchises in cinema history. Alien (1979), however, was not just a sci-fi movie. It was a horror movie in space, and a rich exploration of character and the existential effects of extreme isolation. The film was dark, visually stark, and truly frightening. How could anyone ever forget the famous chestburster scene?

Did you know you have George Lucas to thank for Alien? As it turns out, Scott was planning on following up The Duelists with an adaptation of Tristan and Isolde, a medieval love story. The Scott saw Star Wars.

"I never saw or felt audience participation like that, in my life. The theater was shaking. When that Death Star came in at the beginning, I thought, I can’t possibly do Tristan and Isolde, I have to find something else. By the time the movie was finished, it was so stunning that it made me miserable. That’s the highest compliment I can give it; I was miserable for week. I hadn’t met George at that point, but I thought, 'Fu*k George.' Then, somebody sent me this script called Alien. I said, 'Wow. I’ll do it.'"

After Paul Thomas Anderson's debut Hard Eight (1996), a low budget crime drama starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Philip Baker Hall, John C Reilly, and Samuel L Jackson, the young writer-director took on a much more ambitious project with Boogie Nights, released in 1997. The nearly-epic, two-and-a-half-hour story of Dirk Diggler's (Mark Wahlberg) rise to fame and fall from grace in the LA porn industry cemented Anderson as an auteur capable of making artistic films that could crossover to mainstream audiences.

Anderson was only 27 at the time of the film's release, and had made a 30-minute mockumentary-style version of Boogie Nights, called The Dirk Diggler story, on VHS when he was only 17. The story of the film's production and release is also almost as interesting as the movie.

Not many people saw Christopher Nolan's first movie, Following (1998), but every cinephile and film student knows his neo-noir follow-up, Memento (2000). The film tells the story of a man named Leonard (Guy Pearce), who can't make new memories. An unreliable narrator, Leonard sets out to find his wife's rapist and murderer on the sinister streets of Los Angeles. Nolan challenged conventional movie narrative by telling Leonard's story backwards, in order to place spectator and protagonist within the same confused state as the protagonist. 

The narrative device of Memento is so well known and loved fans have started doing crazy things, like re-editing the movie in chronological order, so the backwards movie can be seen backwards. The script for Memento was written by Nolan and his brother, Jonathan. Christopher went on to direct some of the biggest blockbusters of the 21st century so far, including The Dark Knight Trilogy, Inception (2010), and Interstellar (2014).