7 great short films to inspire budding directors

Some simple but stunning short films made by directors who'd go on to be famous, to give you inspiration as you embark on a career in film. Or maybe you’re just after something fun to watch while hungover. Either way, these shorts are for you

Feature by Jamie Dunn | 30 Aug 2017

So you’ve landed a place at film school and you’re looking for inspiration. You’d do worse to learn from these seven early shorts by master filmmakers. There are no gimmicks, computer wizardry or flashy plotting here, just simple but vivid filmmaking where image and atmosphere is key.

Lick the Star (dir. Sofia Coppola)

There’s no mistaking Lick the Star as anything but a Sofia Coppola movie, and from the very first frame it’s clear we’re in the hands of a born filmmaker. Many of the Lost in Translation director’s later stylistic and thematic obsessions are here: teen alienation, a dreamy aesthetic, detached voiceover, a killer soundtrack. The ethereal film follows a group of high school girls who take inspiration from Virginia Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic and plan to feed rat poison to the less enlightened boys in their grade.

Things go awry when a game of Chinese whispers drives a wedge between the clique, leaving its effortlessly cool leader isolated and doleful. In less than 14 minutes, Lick the Star is more perceptive about the cruelty of high-school mores than most 90s teen movies combined.

Peluca (dir. Jared Hess)

The DNA for Jared Hess’ Napoleon Dynamite is all here in this offbeat eight minute short. Peluca takes place in the same setting (Hess’s hometown of Preston, Idaho); it features Jon Heder as Seth, who’s basically identical to the eponymous doofus he plays in the later feature; and it trades in the same gentle absurdity.

After a quick introduction to Seth’s school life – eccentric behaviour, merciless bullying, tall tales, terrible meals – the action moves to a thrift store when Seth and his two friends play hooky to go fanny pack and wig shopping. Like in Napoleon Dynamite, Hess is both poking fun at his nerdy hero and paying tribute to his innate individuality and kindheartedness – the latter a quality all too rarely celebrated in cinema.

Small Deaths (dir. Lynne Ramsay)

Few filmmakers can place you within the headspace of a character like Lynne Ramsey, and this evocative tryptic from the Scottish filmmaker suggests she’s had this canny knack from when she first picked up a camera. Like her brilliant feature debut, Ratcatcher, Small Deaths is a child’s eye view of working class Glasgow, set in and around its run down tenements and the wild patches of nature found on the city’s outskirts.

The deaths here are mostly figurative but the emotions are palpably real, told through arresting imagery and Ramsey’s spellbinding use of texture, colour, sound and point of view that creates a rich, almost overpowering sensory experience.

Bottle Rocket (dir. Wes Anderson)

Looking back at this 1994 short, it’s exciting to see what a zesty filmmaker Wes Anderson was before his style calcified towards the fastidious with pictures like The Royal Tenenbaums and The Grand Budapest Hotel, where vitality was sacrificed for pedantic detail. Shot in grainy 16mm black and white, The French New Wave seems to be the chief influence for this loose-limbed heist caper about two best friends (played by brothers Luke and Owen Wilson – the latter also co-wrote) on a low-octane crime spree.

For his debut feature, Anderson extended this short into a cheerful road movie with the same title, throwing in James Caan and a sweet romantic angle, and the result is just as delightfully idiosyncratic and breezy as this 12 minute effort.

Wasp (dir. Andrea Arnold)

Social realism doesn’t get more vivid than in the cinema of Andrea Arnold. Her skill with actors, framing and expressive imagery – obvious in her extraordinary features like Red Road and Fish Tank are all abundant here in the filmmaker’s breakthrough short Wasp. The film centres on a young, penniless single mother with four kids, who thinks she’s found a shaft of light in her life when an old flame asks her for a drink out of the blue.

Shot hand-held by Robbie Ryan, who’s lensed all of Arnold’s films, it’s an unblinking but deeply humanistic look at modern life on a British council estate. Ryan’s roaming camera gets intimately close to the actors, and Arnold’s deeply humanistic eye keeps us invested in her characters, even when they act unconscionably. Remarkably, Arnold also coaxes a nuanced performance from Danny Dyer, who plays a raffish jack-the-lad who gets the young mum’s heart all aflutter.

The Letter (dir. Michel Gondry)

By the time skew-whiff cinema genius Michel Gondry made The Letter, he had a few dozen wildly original music videos under his belt, including his iconic promo for Daft Punk’s Around The World. His first stab at a narrative film is no less inventive. It begins simply enough with two brothers having a hushed late night chat about love, French kissing and the possibility of the end of the world as the millennium approaches.

Gondry’s gift for loopy fantasy is showcased later when the younger brother – a budding photographer who’s keen on photographing one girl in particular – dreams of himself as a human camera attending a turn-of-the-millennium party where the Y2K apocalypse is symbolised by a toppling Eiffel Tower made of card and sticky-backed plastic. For all its surreal flights of fancy, The Letter’s study of puppy love is as potent and heartfelt as in Gondry’s masterpiece, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Two Cars, One Night (dir. Taika Waititi)

Taika Waititi is beloved for films like Boy, Hunt for the Wilderpeople and hilarious vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, but this gorgeous 11 minute short is still the Kiwi filmmaker’s finest achievement thus far. The setup is simple: three kids – all played by local school children with no acting experience – are idling away the night in two cars parked outside a pub where they've been left while their parents are having a few drinks.

In one of the cars are two adolescent brothers, in the other, a young girl. Initially, there’s animosity between the parties (“Don’t look over here. Your ugly face might damage my paintwork,” says the older boy to the girl). But like kids do, they’re fast friends before the night is out. The film is funny and sweetly romantic, but what really marks it out is its balmy mood. It captures the atmosphere of those warm summer nights of childhood that seem to last forever.

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