10 Directors Who Made One Feature Film and Then Left Moviemaking

Most directors build careers one film at a time. A few step behind the camera once, deliver something people still talk about decades later, and then never come back.

The reasons vary. Some were hurt by a poor reception, some ran out of time, and some simply had a day job to return to. Here are ten directors whose filmographies stop at a single feature.

Charles Laughton and The Night of the Hunter

Laughton was an Academy Award winning actor known for films such as Mutiny on the Bounty and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. In 1955 he directed his only feature, the film noir The Night of the Hunter. The story follows a self-proclaimed preacher who hunts for money hidden by two children.

Laughton used expressionist shadows and off-kilter angles to lift minimalist, selectively lit sets into a stranger and more vivid realm. After the commercial failure, he couldn’t get another directing project off the ground, and he died seven years later. The film is now widely treated as a classic.

Herk Harvey and Carnival of Souls

Harvey is said to have directed more than 400 movies over three decades, nearly all of them educational and industrial films for the Centron Corporation in Lawrence, Kansas. His only feature was the 1962 horror story Carnival of Souls. It’s a good example of how a one film director can also be a very busy working filmmaker.

Audiences ignored the movie, the distributor went bankrupt, and Harvey returned to his day job. He tried to direct several more features, but none came to fruition. Complex, Paste, and Slant Magazine have all named the film among cinema’s greatest horror pictures.

Marlon Brando and One-Eyed Jacks

Brando was already one of the most famous actors alive when he moved into the director’s chair. He directed One-Eyed Jacks in 1961, stepping in after Stanley Kubrick dropped out. The western was a troubled production from the start.

He faced challenges during production and never directed again, despite the film’s positive reception. It remains the only film he ever made from behind the camera. Brando went on to focus on acting for the rest of his career.

Barbara Loden and Wanda

Loden wrote and produced Wanda as well as directing it, and she stars as the title character, who drifts through mining country after several abusive relationships. The 1970 film is a quiet, minimalist portrait of a woman with nowhere to go. It has since become a landmark of American independent cinema.

Despite winning Best Foreign Film at the Venice International Film Festival, Wanda never received a national theatrical release. Loden died of cancer at age 48, which ensured Wanda would remain her only film. The ending to her directing career was cut short by illness rather than choice.

Dalton Trumbo and Johnny Got His Gun

Trumbo is better known as a screenwriter than as a director. In 1971 he adapted and directed his own antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun, about a soldier left severely wounded by the First World War.

Trumbo never directed again but continued writing screenplays until he died in 1976. So his case is a little different from the others here. He didn’t leave the film business, only the director’s chair.

Leonard Kastle and The Honeymoon Killers

Kastle was a composer, and his 1970 film The Honeymoon Killers was a surprising detour. The finished work was marked by blunt violence and a refusal to soften its characters, and its banality created a deeply unsettling feeling. It has since become a cult favorite.

Kastle didn’t dabble in direction again and left the film as his only directorial moment. One account says he found the process too emotionally exhausting. He returned to music, the field where he had built his reputation.

Rémy Belvaux and Man Bites Dog

Man Bites Dog was a Belgian mockumentary about a film crew following a serial killer. It became one of the most controversial films of the 1990s, and many countries banned it or drastically cut its extreme violence. Belvaux co-directed it with André Bonzel.

Belvaux and Bonzel never worked together again, and neither directed another feature film. Bonzel occasionally worked as a cinematographer before directing a documentary in 2021. That documentary is not a feature of the same kind, so the one film label still holds.

Eddie Murphy and Harlem Nights

By the late 1980s Murphy was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. He directed and starred in Harlem Nights, which cost thirty million dollars to produce. The 1989 gangster comedy was a personal project with an ensemble cast.

Because of the poor reception, Harlem Nights remained the only film he directed. He kept acting and became a comedy star again in later decades. Directing was simply a chapter he didn’t revisit.

Bo Welch and The Cat in the Hat

As a production designer, Welch worked with Steven Spielberg, Tim Burton, Mike Nichols, and Barry Sonnenfeld. His visual skill made him an obvious candidate for a family fantasy. In 2003 he directed his first feature, which ended up being his last: a live action adaptation of Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat, with Mike Myers in the title role.

He was nominated for the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Director. He never directed another movie, though he did helm a few episodes of Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. Film was not entirely closed to him, but the feature door was.

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Jack Goes Boating

Hoffman was known for working with filmmakers such as Paul Thomas Anderson and the Coen brothers, and is considered one of the most revered character actors in cinema. In 2010 he made his directing debut with Jack Goes Boating, a small romantic drama in which he also starred. It was adapted from a play he had worked on onstage.

Before his death in 2014, Hoffman directed just one film. His directing career ended because his life did, not because he walked away. Jack Goes Boating stands as the only feature he made from behind the camera.