A Collection of Film Directors
by axel97 | created - 14 Jun 2012 | updated - 05 Aug 2012 | PublicThe list is ranked by the amount of films I've watched from each director. The list only contains masters. I've seen lots of films from other directors that couldn't measure with these. These are also directors I would like to see more of.
1. Buster Keaton
Actor | The General
Joseph Frank Keaton was born on October 4, 1895 in Piqua, Kansas, to Joe Keaton and Myra Keaton. Joe and Myra were Vaudevillian comedians with a popular, ever-changing variety act, giving Keaton an eclectic and interesting upbringing. In the earliest days on stage, they traveled with a medicine ...
WATCHED: Our Hospitality - 10 Sherlock Jr. - 10 * The Cameraman - 9,5 Steamboat Bill .Jr - 9,5 Seven Chances - 9 The General - 9 One Week - 9 The Navigator - 9 Cops - 9 Convict 13 - 8 Day Dreams - 8 -
2. Martin Scorsese
Producer | Killers of the Flower Moon
Martin Charles Scorsese was born on November 17, 1942 in Queens, New York City, to Catherine Scorsese (née Cappa) and Charles Scorsese, who both worked in Manhattan's garment district, and whose families both came from Palermo, Sicily. He was raised in the neighborhood of Little Italy, which later ...
WATCHED: Taxi Driver - 10 * Bob Dylan: No Direction Home - 10 Goodfellas - 9,5 The King of Comedy - 9 Casino - 9 Mean Streets - 8,5 The Aviator - 8,5 The Departed - 8 Hugo - 8 Shutter Island - 7 Gangs of New York - 7 Raging Bull - ( Need To Rewatch ) -
3. Steven Spielberg
Producer | Schindler's List
One of the most influential personalities in the history of cinema, Steven Spielberg is Hollywood's best known director and one of the wealthiest filmmakers in the world. He has an extraordinary number of commercially successful and critically acclaimed credits to his name, either as a director, ...
WATCHED: Jaws - 10 Indiana Jones: The Temple of Doom - 9 Raiders of the Lost Ark* - 10 Indiana Jones: The Last Crusade - 9 Indiana Jones: The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull - 5 Catch Me If you Can - 9 E.T - 9,5 Shindler's list - 10 Saving Private Ryan - 9 Jurassic Park - 8 -
4. Stanley Kubrick
Director | 2001: A Space Odyssey
Stanley Kubrick was born in Manhattan, New York City, to Sadie Gertrude (Perveler) and Jacob Leonard Kubrick, a physician. His family were Jewish immigrants (from Austria, Romania, and Russia). Stanley was considered intelligent, despite poor grades at school. Hoping that a change of scenery would ...
WATCHED: A Clockwork Orange - 10 * 2001: a space odyssey - 10 The Shining - 10 Paths of Glory - 9,5 Spartacus - 9,5 Barry Lyndon - 9 Full Metal Jacket - 8,5 Eyes Wide Shut - 8,5 Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb - 7 -
5. Charles Chaplin
Writer | The Great Dictator
Considered to be one of the most pivotal stars of the early days of Hollywood, Charlie Chaplin lived an interesting life both in his films and behind the camera. He is most recognized as an icon of the silent film era, often associated with his popular character, the Little Tramp; the man with the ...
WATCHED: City Lights - 10 * The Gold Rush - 10 The Great Dictator - 10 Modern Times - 10 The Circus - 9,5 Limelight - 9 The Kid - 9 The Adventurer - 9 -
6. Francis Ford Coppola
Producer | Apocalypse Now
Francis Ford Coppola was born in 1939 in Detroit, Michigan, but grew up in a New York suburb in a creative, supportive Italian-American family. His father, Carmine Coppola, was a composer and musician. His mother, Italia Coppola (née Pennino), had been an actress. Francis Ford Coppola graduated ...
WATCHED: The Godfather* - 10 The Godfather II - 10 Apocalypse Now - 10 The Outsiders - 8,5 Rumble Fish - 7 -
7. Sergio Leone
Writer | Once Upon a Time in America
Sergio Leone was virtually born into the cinema - he was the son of Roberto Roberti (A.K.A. Vincenzo Leone), one of Italy's cinema pioneers, and actress Bice Valerian. Leone entered films in his late teens, working as an assistant director to both Italian directors and U.S. directors working in ...
WATCHED: Once Upon a Time in America - 9,5 Once Upon a Time in The West* - 10 The Good, The Bad, The Ugly - 10 For a Few Dollars More - 9 A Fistfull of Dollars - 8,5 -
8. Alfred Hitchcock
Director | Psycho
Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born in Leytonstone, Essex, England. He was the son of Emma Jane (Whelan; 1863 - 1942) and East End greengrocer William Hitchcock (1862 - 1914). His parents were both of half English and half Irish ancestry. He had two older siblings, William Hitchcock (born 1890) and ...
WATCHED: North By Northwest - 10 ( Need To Rewatch ) Psycho* - 10 Rear Window - 10 Vertigo - 9,5 The Birds - 9 -
9. Billy Wilder
Writer | The Apartment
Originally planning to become a lawyer, Billy Wilder abandoned that career in favor of working as a reporter for a Viennese newspaper, using this experience to move to Berlin, where he worked for the city's largest tabloid. He broke into films as a screenwriter in 1929 and wrote scripts for many ...
WATCHED: Some Like It Hot - 10 The Apartment - 10 Double Indemnity - 10 Sunset Boulevard* - 10 -
10. David Lynch
Writer | Twin Peaks
Born in precisely the kind of small-town American setting so familiar from his films, David Lynch spent his childhood being shunted from one state to another as his research scientist father kept getting relocated. He attended various art schools, married Peggy Lynch and then fathered future ...
WATCHED: Blue Velvet* - 10 Mulholland Drive - 10 The Elephant Man - 10 Eraserhead - 10 -
11. Federico Fellini
Writer | Le notti di Cabiria
The women who both attracted and frightened him and an Italy dominated in his youth by Mussolini and Pope Pius XII - inspired the dreams that Fellini started recording in notebooks in the 1960s. Life and dreams were raw material for his films. His native Rimini and characters like Saraghina (the ...
WATCHED: 8½ - 10* Amarcord - 10 La Strada - 10 La Dolce Vita - 10 -
12. Ingmar Bergman
Writer | Smultronstället
Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born July 14, 1918, the son of a priest. The film and T.V. series, The Best Intentions (1992) is biographical and shows the early marriage of his parents. The film Sunday's Children (1992) depicts a bicycle journey with his father. In the miniseries Private Confessions (...
WATCHED: Smultronstället - 10 * - Personal Favorite of All Time! Det Sjunde Inseglet - 10 Viskningar och Rop - 8 -
13. Howard Hawks
Director | Rio Bravo
What do the classic films Scarface (1932), Twentieth Century (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), His Girl Friday (1940), Sergeant York (1941), To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Red River (1948) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and Rio Bravo (1959) have in...
WATCHED: Scarface - 10 Rio Bravo - 10* -
14. David Lean
Director | Lawrence of Arabia
An important British filmmaker, David Lean was born in Croydon on March 25, 1908 and brought up in a strict Quaker family (ironically, as a child he wasn't allowed to go to the movies). During the 1920s, he briefly considered the possibility of becoming an accountant like his father before finding ...
Lawrence of Arabia - 10 The Bridge Over River Kwai - 10* -
15. John Huston
Director | The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
An eccentric rebel of epic proportions, this Hollywood titan reigned supreme as director, screenwriter and character actor in a career that endured over five decades. The ten-time Oscar-nominated legend was born John Marcellus Huston in Nevada, Missouri, on August 5, 1906. His ancestry was English,...
WATCHED: The Treasure of The Sierra Madre - 10 ( Need to Rewatch ) The Maltese Falcon - 10 -
16. Vittorio De Sica
Director | Ladri di biciclette
Vittorio De Sica grew up in Naples, and started out as an office clerk in order to raise money to support his poor family. He was increasingly drawn towards acting, and made his screen debut while still in his teens, joining a stage company in 1923. By the late 1920s he was a successful matinee ...
WATCHED: Bicycle Thief - 9,5 Umberto D. - 10 * -
17. Fritz Lang
Actor | Le mépris
Fritz Lang was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1890. His father managed a construction company. His mother, Pauline Schlesinger, was Jewish but converted to Catholicism when Lang was ten. After high school, he enrolled briefly at the Technische Hochschule Wien and then started to train as a painter. ...
WATCHED: M - 10 * -
18. Akira Kurosawa
Writer | Kakushi-toride no san-akunin
After training as a painter (he storyboards his films as full-scale paintings), Kurosawa entered the film industry in 1936 as an assistant director, eventually making his directorial debut with Sanshiro Sugata (1943). Within a few years, Kurosawa had achieved sufficient stature to allow him greater...
WATCHED: Seven Samourai - 10 * Rashomon - 10 * Yojimbo - 9,5 Throne of Blood - 8,5 -
19. Andrei Tarkovsky
Writer | Offret
The most famous Soviet film-maker since Sergei Eisenstein, Andrei Tarkovsky (the son of noted poet Arseniy Tarkovsky) studied music and Arabic in Moscow before enrolling in the Soviet film school VGIK. He shot to international attention with his first feature, Ivan's Childhood (1962), which won the...
WATCHED: Ivan's Childhood - 8,5 Andrei Rublyov - 10 * -
20. Michelangelo Antonioni
Writer | Blow-Up
Together with Fellini, Bergman and Kurosawa, Michelangelo Antonioni is credited with defining the modern art film. And yet Antonioni's cinema is also recognized today for defying any easy categorization, with his films ultimately seeming to belong to their own distinctive genre. Indeed, the ...
Blowup - 10 *
21. F.W. Murnau
Director | Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
F.W. Murnau was a German film director. He was greatly influenced by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Shakespeare and Ibsen plays he had seen at the age of 12, and became a friend of director Max Reinhardt. During World War I he served as a company commander at the eastern front and was in the German air ...
The Last Laugh - 9,5 *
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