On what makes a great film debut and what great debuts tell us about directors' careers.

The debut film is the film a director makes before they have to defend a reputation. They have not been successful enough to be given resources they can't handle, and they have not been successful enough to be given deference they can't use. What they have is the project they have been wanting to make.

The greatest debuts — Blood Simple, Reservoir Dogs, Clerks, Me and You and Everyone We Know, Dogtooth — share a quality of formal confidence that is not sophistication. They are not films that know all the conventions and are choosing to ignore them. They are films made by people who have thought deeply about a specific problem and solved it without the encumbrance of professional habit.

The career after the debut is the test: which directors found, in their first film, a formal vocabulary they could build on, and which directors found a moment they couldn't sustain?

The Coens sustained it. PTA sustained it. Greta Gerwig sustained it. The debut told you that each of these directors had something specific to say and the equipment to say it. The career has been the working-out of what that something is.