(Credits: Far Out / De’Andre Bush)
Mon 10 March 2025 16:45, UK
Hollywood has a youth complex, and it’s always sad to see. It’s been talked about more and more lately as stars feel pressure to be young, stay young, or at least look young. There’s always a sense that there is a countdown ticking over everyone, with a new replacement ready in the wings to take their spot the second they get too old. But for directors, it’s the opposite.
Plenty of stars have talked about this. “There’s no doubt that for anybody older, roles are limited — for an actor,” Meg Ryan once said. As Taylor Swift approached her 30s, she worried about it, commenting in her documentary, “I want to work really hard while society is still tolerating me being successful.” Actors, singers, models, and anyone in the creative world who is publically facing have seen this in action. Not only are people subjected to mass onslaughts of opinions on their ageing appearance, but Hollywood is built on fresh blood, meaning that the sense that you’re always about to be replaced lingers around its stars.
Yet, for directors, the opposite is true. Associate professor Shu Han and finance professor S Abraham Ravid from Yeshiva University in New York did a study on this, finding that “directors start directing on average around age 40“.
In general, directing seems to be a thing people build up to. They climb the ladder from the lowest jobs on a film set up to the top, often only coming to direct their first major feature at an older age. Being off-camera is expected or tolerated, as age discrimination is less rife when appearance isn’t involved.
However, in the case of the oldest director to make a feature film, camps are split between total shock and total respect over how a man of this age was physically and mentally strong enough to pull off a big project.
Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira was 103 when he made Gebo and the Shadow and was 104 when it was released, making him the oldest person to direct a film.
He’s one of those incredible film industry figures whose career is truly something to be awed by. Oliveira started making films back in the 1920s, and from then on, he averaged a film a year until he was in his 100s. In his life, he made over 50 movies as well as documentaries, making him one of the most prolific filmmakers in history at the time of his death in 2015. He was 106.
Who is the oldest director to win an Oscar?
Perhaps as the ultimate example of how age doesn’t matter so much in the world of directing, the oldest person to win in the director’s category at the Oscars was 74.
That title goes to Clint Eastwood, the iconic actor-turned-director. After starting out in western flicks, Eastwood opened up a whole new era of his career when he turned to directing in the 1970s. Since, he’s been nominated for best director four times, and won twice.
The first was in 1993 for Unforgiven, but when he won in 2005 for Million Dollar Baby, he became the oldest person to win in that category.
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