Michael Curtiz really put Bogart and Cagney on the map with Angels With Dirty Faces in ‘38, the same year that The Adventures Of Robin Hood achieved perfection — and then, in ‘42, it was Casablanca for Bogart and Yankee Doodle Dandy for Cagney.
Steven Soderbergh released both Erin Brockovich and Traffic in 2000.
Robert Zemeckis released both What Lies Beneath and Cast Away in 2000 as well. I’m not his biggest fan, but his box office prowess was pretty unassailable for a few years.
Takashi Miike has made over a hundred feature films, so obviously he tends to release several in each calendar year. That said, his hit-and-miss ratio is basically what you’d expect, but there have been a few years when more than one piece of brilliant work rolled off the assembly line: Audition and Dead or Alive both came out in 1999, City of Lost Souls and Dead or Alive 2 came out the next year, and 2001 saw the release of both Ichi the Killer and The Happiness of the Katakuris (I’ll leave defending Visitor Q to someone else).
Fair 'nuff. Not that box office is a reliable marker of quality, it did make nearly $300M so somebody liked it. I’m still impressed at the work ethic that made two big-budget, big star movies back to back (or sandwiched…if memory serves, What Lies Beneath was shot while Cast Away took a break for Hanks to lose a ton of weight for the second half of the shoot),
There only been two directors nominated for two Best Director Oscars in the same year:
Michael Curtiz for Angels with Dirty Faces and Four Daughters
Steven Soderbergh for Erin Brockovich and Traffic
But note that for a few years two nominations in that category for one year were allowed, then it wasn’t allowed for a long time, and then it once again was allowed.
Kim Ki Duk. I think all of his films are brilliant. He also wrote all his movies, often rewriting as he filmed. *Films on which he was also the producer.
Damn, that’s a good one. Got me reminiscing about my HK action cinema fandom days and looking up filmographies. So I’ll match that with Yuen Woo Ping, who released both Wing Chun and Iron Monkey in 1993 (though that’s sullied somewhat by Last Hero in China coming out the same year, and I still can’t believe Jet Li accepted the role of Wong Fei Fung with a script that had him dressing up like a chicken).
Not to mention Tsui Hark, who did it repeatedly in 1992 as yet another uncredited co-director on Dragon Inn as well as helming Once Upon a Time in China parts 2 and 3
Clint Eastwood has released two movies the same year eight (!) times, and yet, as far as I can tell, not once have both been great (although one of them often is). That’s got to be some kind of record.
