I’m surprised to be the first to mention Paul Thomas Anderson. He’s my only automatic “must-see” director.
Here’s an incomplete list, roughly in order top to bottom, with some ties and overlaps.
Andrei Tarkovsky
Carl Theodore Dryer
Kenji Mizoguchi
Yasujiro Ozu
Jean Renoir
John Ford
Howard Hawks
Ingmar Bergman
FW Murnau
Charles Chaplin
Lars Von Trier
Douglas Sirk
David Lynch
Stanley Kubrick
William Wyler
Sergio Leone
Terrence Davies
Chantal Ackerman
Terrence Malick
Francis Ford Coppola
Todd Haynes
Martin Scorsese
Quentin Tarantino
Spike Lee
Brian DePalma
David Cronenberg
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Great list! I forgot Ulmer, Tourneur, Borzage, von Sternberg
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Great list!
( I wish there were a like button so I didn’t have to quote in order to applaud)
Aaaaaand I deleted Verhoeven somehow when I was reordering. Here’s the corrected list. I’ll try not to add any others.
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Not yet mentioned:
Jacques Tati, Jean-Luc Godard, Masaki Kobayashi, Agnès Varda, Andrzej Wajda, Michel Haneke, Peter Greenaway, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Quentin Dupieux, Lucrecia Martel, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Fabián Bielinsky, Jûzô Itami, Jean-Pierre Jeunet (with and without Marc Caro), Takashi Miike, Gus Van Sant, Milos Forman, Laurent Cantet, Debra Granik, Jeff Nichols, Szabolcs Hajdu, Richard Linklater, Claude Chabrol, Lili Fini Zanuck, Thomas Vinterberg, Park Chan-Wook, Patrice Leconte, Martin McDonagh, John Michael McDonagh, George Roy Hill, Chang-dong Lee, Adam Curtis, Masayuki Suo, Albert and David Maysles, Alain Corneau, Takeshi Kitano, Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz, Sean Baker, Michel Brault, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Ildikó Enyedi, Sofia Coppola, Shane Carruth, Frederick Wiseman, Andrzej Wajda, Bertrand Blier, Luc Besson, Michel Deville
He’s my favorite director.
The license plate on the back of the car in my avatar says ZSSOU. (It’s a Nissan 300ZX, aka Z31.) My other car has a Steve Zissou sticker - specifically this one - peeking over the rear glass. This poster is on the wall behind me right now. I regularly read, and occasionally post on, the Accidental Wes Anderson Reddit.
I personally think the guy is brilliant in every way. I love the way he frames his shots and designs his sets, I love the way he writes and casts his characters, I think his sense of world-building is absolutely top notch. Everything is meticulously ordered visually, follows a coherent logic of colors and shapes, he loves dressing people up in uniforms and creating weird little cliques and societies within his worlds, I think it all just “fits together” perfectly, for lack of a better phrase. But I also understand that a lot of people don’t like his whole aesthetic at all. I guess it’s not for everyone.
For me a personal favorite of mine is Kevin Smith particularly his earlier work in the 90s. Though I can definitely understand why some people don’t like his work.
Yes, we definitely have different tastes, even though I like a couple of movies by the directors you mentioned.
One of my current favorites. I adore how his movies are in the same style as films from the late 60’s and early 70’s. He pulls this off without the end product seeming hokey.
In no order:
John Sayles
Either Coen Brother
John Carpenter
Martin Scorcese
So you might go with Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker?
I’m just joshin’, because all my favorites have been mentioned.
.
Interesting thought: Mine would be very different at different points of my life. When I met my now-wife, she HAD to see The Seventh Seal (because I was “deep” then…and loved Ingmar “Berrrrg’mon”)
Then I lightened up and fell in love with Jacques Tati and Hayao Miyazaki.
Now it’s the Coens and Wes and Edgar*, but I’m not sure I’d call them the “best” directors. Just current favorites…
*Edgar Wright, directed the trilogy Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End.
If I look at a list of my 100 favorite movies, I find that Woody Allen, Richard Linklater, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Curtiz, Ridley Scott, Stanley Kubrick, Spike Jonze, Federico Fellini, Roman Polanski, Terry Jones, Alfred Hitchcock, Sam Peckinpah, John Carpenter, and Charles Chaplin are the ones with at least two on the list. But I don’t choose my favorite movies based on their directors, their screenwriters, their actors, or any other single contributor to them. I choose according to my overall feeling about the movie. Some of my favorite movies are ones that I know almost nothing about the director’s other works.
I agree, plus add Shakes the Clown: “The Citizen Kane of alcoholic clown movies”
There’s my favourites:
Luc Beeson, John Carpenter, Sam Raimi, Taika Waititi, David Fincher, Drew Goddard, Harold Ramis, John Landis.
There’s ones which I think are overrated: Kubrick (all technical, trying too much, I only watch about one of them a second time, more ability in a John Carpenter movie), Spielberg (coasted off a bunch of overrated kids movies and a rubber shark movie from the 70s, for gods sake cut an hour off every movie he’s done in the last 20 years). Coen brothers (love a lot, hated too many to rate then, Barton Fink, Inside Llewyn Davis).
And ones I thought were good which faded: Darren Aronofsky, Christopher Nolan.
Hope this doesn’t come off as pedantic or nit-pickety. “Favorite” is easy, because I can just think of my favorite films and list those directors. Maybe I’ve only seen one or two films of those who are on my list or very few films of those who aren’t. I think it takes a lot of knowledge about cinema—more than I have—to make a well-informed list of favorites. As art, it’s always going to be subjective, but if we try to make it a little more objective (and a lot more interesting), we could mention why we like certain directors, as some of you have done upthread. Because it seems to me that many directors focus more than others on one or more aspects of filmmaking: screenplay (Huston, Mamet), photography (Hitchcock, Kubrick), etc.
I love cinema but I don’t know all that much about it (I’m just a regular guy).
So here are a few of my favorites:
Hitchcock for his overall skills and especially his ability to get inside the viewer’s head. Like a sociopathic psychiatrist or something.
Polanski for his pacing, cynicism and sense of humor. I also enjoy the tone of most of his films. I might be missing something, but I don’t remember any with garish colors, harsh lighting, jarring editing, inappropriate music, etc. Good storyteller, too.
Kubrick for his photography. I’ve never seen anyone get so much mileage from empty space. The hotel in The Shining or the boot camp and battle scenes in Full Metal Jacket are obvious examples. There’s a scene in Spartacus in which a large part of the screen is occupied by an empty cabinet or wardrobe or something, and IIRC, it’s when Spartacus and Varinia are getting to know each other. Weird moment for that unique thing of his, but it works. Odd combination of crudeness and finesse.
Coppola for overall skills and ability to put it all together. In my opinion, when he’s good, it’s about as good as it can get. In his better films, there isn’t a wasted moment. Better said, those films are loaded with details that heighten the viewer’s interest. Actors aside, one example that I can’t get out of my head is in Apocalypse Now in a particular shot of the patrol boat cruising across the screen from right to left. There are similar shots in the film, but the dim lighting (or subsequent processing) makes it look incredibly sinister, and it happens at just the right moment: when we have a sense of who the characters are and why they’re there and as we realize that they’re on a collision course with a horrendous foe, but they’re killers, too.
Former film nerd here, but with a penchant for old b-movies, so my list is a strange mix:
Wim Wenders, Michael Winterbottom, Wong Kar-Wai, Abel Ferrara, Mario Bava, Jacques Tati, John Carpenter, Dario Argento, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Paul Schrader, Hal Hartley, David Cronenberg.
I used to be a big Scorsese acolyte, but he somehow lost me after Casino, which I think was his last real masterpiece. I kind of feel the same about Oliver Stone: Nixon was the culmination of all his agitprop skills, then he started making films that were either weird genre exercises or totally failed experiments.
In movies from the era when every emotion presented had to have an underlying musical cue, I notice those that stand out for their absence.
It’s a Wonderful Life, when they drive up to tell George his dad has died, a big sad swelling orchestra was required to break the mood of the “Go ahead and kiss her” scene. But when the run on the bank is starting as George is attempting to leave on his honeymoon, Frank Capra chose dead silence except for the sounds of the crowd’s building panic. No need to segue from one emotion to the other, since most of the audience had lived through the real thing.
Fred Zinnemann was was unique in leaving the music out, in both The Nun’s Story and A Man for All Seasons. Some events have standard background music, but when something intense is occurring, as when Audrey Hepburn is packing it in at the end, the schmaltz factor is eliminated by respectful silence.
No one mentioned Teshigahara… I don’t think he made THAT many great movies…
I think “Woman In The Dunes” is on YouTube for free…
I like Wim Wenders, too… Have you seen his documentary featuring other directors… Room 237 I think?
Scorsese was in my Top 3 twenty years ago, but I have to agree with you on “Casino”… The few movies I’ve seen of his since were AWFUL, especially “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “The Irishman”, which I can honestly say are some of the worst movies I’ve seen, and I’ve seen thousands. I didn’t like “The Departed”, despite Jack Nicholson being one of my favorite actors, and I didn’t like “The Aviator”, despite the intrigue about Howard Hughes… I think the late 70s movies with Tommy Lee Jones is much better… Speaking of better biographies, the closest story that fit Jimmy Hoffa was “F.I.S.T.” - the first half is almost word for word the Jimmy Hoffa biography, even the entire honking of the horn for the first date. I think one of his biographies are available for free on archives.org (a wonderful site)
Paul Schrader is very underrated as a writer and director (and think he and De Niro were most responsible for “Taxi Driver”), but the most recent movie I saw of his stunk badly, “First Reformed”…