Metzger's second directorial effort, "The Dirty Girls" (shot in 1963 and released in 1965), marked his emergence as a major auteur in the adult erotic film genre. His subsequent films were often shot in Europe and adapted from novels or other literary sources, including "Carmen" (by Prosper Mérimée), "La Dame aux Camélias" (by Alexandre Dumas), "L'image" (by Catherine Robbe-Grillet), "Naked Came the Stranger" (by Penelope Ashe), "Pygmalion" (by George Bernard Shaw), "Six Characters in Search of an Author" (by Luigi Pirandello), "The Cat and the Canary" (by John Willard), and "Thérèse et Isabelle" (by Violette Leduc). He cites John Farrow, Claude Lelouch, Michael Powell, Alain Resnais and Orson Welles as influencing his work. Metzger worked with the French film director Jean Renoir, as well as the American actor Hal Linden. Andy Warhol, who helped begin the Golden Age of Porn with his 1969 film "Blue Movie", was a fan of Metzger's film work and commented that Metzger's 1970 film, "The Lickerish Quartet", was “an outrageously kinky masterpiece”. In 1972, Metzger directed the film "Score", based on an erotic off-Broadway play that included Sylvester Stallone. Films directed by Metzger included musical scores composed by Georges Auric, Stelvio Cipriani, Georges Delerue, and Piero Piccioni. Metzger's signature film style of his "elegant erotica" had developed into being "a Euro-centric combination of stylish decadence, wealth and the aristocratic".