Learn More From the Failures: Why the Films Nobody Remembers Made Better Directors

Every film program in America has some version of the same canon. Citizen Kane. The Godfather. 2001. Breathless. Rashomon. You know the list. You've probably watched most of it. And watching those films is genuinely valuable — nobody's disputing that.

But here's the thing nobody tells you in that same classroom: you can't learn how to fail from a masterpiece. And learning how to fail — specifically, learning to recognize why something fails, and how it fails, and what the people involved were trying to do before it all went sideways — is some of the most practically useful education a filmmaker can get.

The reference graveyard is where that education lives.

Why Perfect Films Are Hard to Learn From

When something works completely, it can be difficult to isolate what's actually doing the work. Everything is integrated. The performances support the script, the script supports the structure, the structure supports the visual language, and all of it adds up to something that feels inevitable. That inevitability is beautiful to watch and nearly impossible to reverse-engineer.

Flawed films, on the other hand, are transparent in ways that masterpieces aren't. When something isn't working, you can usually feel exactly where it breaks. The seams are visible. The choices that didn't pay off stand out like load-bearing walls that forgot to bear any load. And because you can see the mechanism, you can actually understand it.

Studying a film that almost worked is, in many ways, more instructive than studying one that worked perfectly.

The Box Office Bomb as Textbook

Take Heaven's Gate, the 1980 western that famously bankrupted United Artists and became shorthand for Hollywood excess. For decades it was treated primarily as a cautionary tale about runaway budgets and directorial ego. But watch it now — really watch it — and something more interesting emerges.

Michael Cimino was attempting something genuinely ambitious: a revisionist epic that wanted to indict the mythology of American expansion. The visual language is extraordinary in places. The scope is real. What collapsed wasn't the vision — it was the execution of the narrative, the inability to translate a sprawling idea into a structure an audience could hold onto.

For a filmmaker studying it today, that's a masterclass in the gap between ambition and craft. You can see exactly where the film trusted its imagery to do work that its storytelling hadn't earned. That's a lesson you cannot get from watching The Godfather, because The Godfather never makes that mistake.

Cult Failures and the Innovation They Contain

Some of the most formally interesting work in American film history sits in the cult failure category — movies that found small, devoted audiences precisely because they were doing something that mainstream audiences weren't ready for, or that was executed just slightly wrong in ways that made the work feel unstable and strange.

John Carpenter's The Thing was a critical and commercial disaster in 1982. Today it's considered a horror masterpiece, but that reappraisal took decades. What changed wasn't the film — it was the audience's capacity to understand what Carpenter was doing with paranoia, practical effects, and the deliberate refusal of a conventional hero narrative.

Studying that film in the context of its original failure teaches something that studying it as a celebrated classic doesn't: that being ahead of the curve is genuinely costly in the short term, and that critical consensus is a lagging indicator of creative quality. That's a practical lesson for anyone making work that doesn't fit neatly into existing categories.

The Forgotten Film as Creative Permission

There's another category worth spending time with: the films that weren't ambitious failures or misunderstood masterpieces, but simply didn't work — the mid-budget studio films from the late '80s and '90s that tried to hit a formula and missed, the indie dramas that got distribution and then quietly disappeared, the genre films that were competent in every department except the one that mattered.

These films are useful in a different way. They show you the floor — the minimum level of execution required for a film to feel like something rather than nothing. They also show you how close to that floor a lot of working filmmakers operate, which is both sobering and weirdly encouraging.

When you watch a film that had a real budget, real actors, real craft behind the camera, and still managed to feel hollow — you start to understand that technical competence is not the same as creative conviction. That's a distinction that's easy to articulate and hard to internalize until you've seen it fail in practice.

Building a Personal Reference Graveyard

The practical application here isn't complicated. It just requires a willingness to spend time with material that isn't going to be fun to watch in the way that a great film is fun to watch.

Start by identifying a few films from genres you work in that are known for underperforming — critically, commercially, or both. Watch them with the sound off first. Then with the picture off. Then all the way through, pausing whenever something feels wrong, and asking yourself specifically: what decision led to this moment, and what would have to change for it to work?

Keep notes. Not summary notes — diagnostic notes. What was the film trying to do in this scene? What did it actually do? Where did those two things diverge?

Over time, you'll develop a vocabulary for failure that most filmmakers don't have, because most filmmakers only study success. And that vocabulary will show up in your own work in ways that are hard to predict but very easy to feel — in the moment where you catch yourself about to make a choice you've seen go wrong before, and you know why, and you make a different one.

The Classics Aren't Going Anywhere

None of this is an argument against watching great films. Watch them constantly. Love them. Let them set the bar.

But supplement that diet with the work that didn't make it — the ambitious misfires, the forgotten experiments, the films that were one good decision away from being something and weren't. That's where you'll find the most honest picture of what filmmaking actually is: a process full of choices, many of which don't work, and all of which are worth understanding.

The reference graveyard isn't a place to wallow. It's a place to learn. And it's a lot less crowded than the canon.