The Director: Spike Lee
Age: 20
How Did They Get Their Break?
Since 1983, Spike Lee’s film company 40 Acres & A Mule has managed to squeeze out an epic 35 films, including Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X.

While studying at Morehouse College, he produced short film Last Hustle in Brooklyn, and graduated with a BA in Mass Communication before enrolling at the same New York film school where Scorsese cut his teeth.

Lee’s thesis film Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads went down in history as the first student film ever to be aired at the Lincoln Center's New Directors New Films Festival.

The Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Age: 21
How Did They Get Their Break?
At just 10-years-old, Francis Ford Coppola took up his father’s 8mm camera and started exploring the visual world.

His first official credit came when he was 21, on sci-fi Nebo zovyot - except he went under the pseudonym Thomas Colchart.

A Russian film made in 1959, the legendary Roger Corman bought the flick’s US rights and enlisted a young Coppola to re-edit it for an American audience.

The result is messy but fascinating.

Working under Corman’s nurturing wing, Coppola made his first important film just three years later when he directed Dementia 13, a gory horror that boasted an impressively Gothic atmosphere. 

The Director: George Lucas
Age: 21
How Did They Get Their Break?
George Lucas... race car driver? Yep, that’s the career a wee Lucas was intent on (not that the pod race scene in Phantom Menace gives it away).

Lucky for us, Lucas had a near-fatal crash in 1962 that made him realise that choreographed smashes and bashes were probably safer.

As a teenager, Lucas was weaned on the 16 mm films of Jordan Belson and Bruce Conner.

His first film, Look at Life, was a Connor-inspired montage that pieced together images from the year.

Later, Lucas managed to impress cinematographer Haskell Wexler with his camera-handling skills before a fortuitous meeting with fellow student filmmaker Steven Spielberg cemented his future in film. Which might be overly simplistic, but isn’t it a dreamy story?

The Director: Kevin Smith
Age: 22
How Did They Get Their Break?
Smith’s first film, Mae Day: The Crumbling of a Documentary, was shot with co-director Scott Mosier while the pair were at the Vancouver Film School.

The latter dubbed it “the greatest documentary that never was”. It followed the duo’s failed attempt to made a documentary about the titular Mae Day, who was going through a sex change.

Just two years later, Smith made Clerks.

Next: Polanski, Hitchcock, Cronenberg and Tarantino