Age Isn’t Just a Number: My Director Theory
For years I’ve had a little theory about the relation of age to the quality of a director and their films, which simply says: the closer to the age of the 40, the better they were. So I looked up a bunch of directors and their ages when they made their most important films, their masterpieces, or the film that started off their cinematic acclaim. As I had figured, most director’s achieved their greatest success and created their finest films between the ages of 36 and 49.
The theory acquiesces conventional ideas about age in normal society: under a certain age (in this case, 35) you lack the life experience to make wise decisions or have the clairvoyance to understand the nature of humanity, though you would possess the physical strength and willingness to experience life; over a certain age (50) you certainly have acquired the knowledge and understanding of how the world works, but you lack the physical desire or ability to fulfill most incomplete tasks. So, as my theory goes, the ripest age for a filmmaker is from the mid-to-late-30’s to the late 40’s. This seems to be the time when experience, knowledge, ambition, and understanding are able to intersect and create wonderful cinema that displays all those attributes. I’m only 30, so there’s still time for my cinematic revelation. Of course there are exceptions to the theory, those filmmakers who were capable of composing great films at an early age and those older gents who didn’t blossom until they had reached their near-golden years.
As a first for this site, I created a little chart to illustrate what I mean. Folks, I’m not familiar with any kind of graphic artistry nor do I pretend to be even remotely artistic, so I’m aware this is a very crude rendering. But it gets my point across.
Note: The films listed are merely subjective preferences of what their masterpieces or most important films are.
