The Best Films Made by Directors Over 80 — and the Myth of Creative Decline

UPDATED: My 12-year-old IndieWire list of the Best Films By Directors Over 80 has significantly grown. We’ve seen a total boom of older filmmakers churning out great work over the last few years.

The Wrap also published a list of the 80-plus-year-old filmmakers who are still busy making films. It’s a recent phenomenon that we haven’t seen much of in prior decades. It used to be that older directors were deemed expendable and too risky to invest in, but now the tide has clearly turned, and with science advancing, the limit of aging in directors in directors feels less like a hard stop and more like a moving goalpost—one that the industry seems increasingly willing to push.

For a few years now, Quentin Tarantino has been insisting that he plans to quit making movies after his 10th feature. He’s just 63 years old.

This whole notion of retiring after 10 movies comes from Tarantino’s theory that a director’s quality of work can only get worse as he ages. Tarantino wants his filmography to be perfect or, as he puts it, “without a misfire.”

“I guess I do feel that directing is a young man’s game. I do feel that cinema is changing, and I’m a little bit part of the old guard.”

The problem is that it’s a flawed theory. Forget the fact that some filmmakers have released their best films in their 60s. Altman directed “Gosford Park” at 76. Kurosawa directed “Ran” at 75. Scorsese gave us “The Wolf of Wall Street” at 72. Hitchcock released “Frenzy” at 74. Buñuel turned 77 when “The Obscure Object of Desire” shocked audiences.

Hell, Jerzy Skolimowski won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2022 for his donkey tale “EO.” The Polish writer-director was 84 at the time. Many zeroed in on Skolimowski’s age in their reviews; I don’t know how many times I had to read that “EO” felt like the work of a young filmmaker.

In terms of that age range, might I direct Mr. Tarantino to the following legendary directors releasing superb films during the twilight of their careers, all aged over 80:

Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese, 81)
The Dead (John Huston, 81)
Prairie Home Companion (Robert Altman, 81)
Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven, 82)
L’Argent (Robert Bresson, 82)
The Boy and the Heron (Hayao Miyazaki, 82)
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (Sidney Lumet, 83)
Close Your Eyes (Victor Erice, 83)
Madadayo (Akira Kurosawa, 83)
Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard, 84)
Saraband (Ingmar Bergman, 85)
Wild Grass (Alain Resnais, 86)
An Officer and a Spy (Roman Polanski, 86)
The Mule & Richard Jewell (Clint Eastwood, 89)
I’m Going Home (Manoel de Oliveira, 93)
Faces Places (Agnes Varda, 88)

That list might be growing soon. We’ve been seeing a lot of filmmakers aged 80 years and older still very much active over the last decade, including Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Brian De Palma, Woody Allen, Hayao Miyazaki, Terrence Malick, David Cronenberg, Ridley Scott, Francis Ford Coppola, Frederick Wiseman, Werner Herzog, and Stephen Frears. Then there is Steven Spielberg, who will be turning 80 this year. Ditto Paul Schrader in July.

There are other filmmakers who could have been added, but the likes of Peter Weir, Jerry Schatzberg, Mel Brooks, James Ivory, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Elaine May have, in all likelihood, retired from the game.