Alfred Hitchcock
Martin Scorsese
Stanley Kubrick
Quentin Tarantino
Honorable mentions:
Ridley Scott
Steven Spielberg
David Cronenberg
David Lynch
David Fincher
David Twohy
Paul Thomas Anderson
Roman Polanski
James Cameron (for his action direction)
Ang Lee
Oliver Stone
Danny Boyle
Coen Brothers
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Last edited by Patient_Leech on May 16th, 2017 at 01:39 PM
1. Spielberg
2. Scorcese
3. FF Coppola
4. The Coen Brothers
Honorable Mentions: Ridley Scott, Stanley Kubrick, James Cameron, Alfred Hitchcock, Clint Eastwood, Cecil B. Demille, George Miller, and John Carpenter
Last 20-30 years:
1. Nolan
2. Tarantino
3. Fincher
4. Peter Jackson
Honorable Mentions: Alfonso Cuaron, Tim Burton, Sam Mendes, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Edgar Wright, Sam Raimi, John Hughes, Denis Villanueve, and Wes Anderson.
I included the younger list just because the four mentioned will be in the upper discussion one day (agreed that Nolan may already be there; he and Tarantino are the top two modern directors whose names are headliners on par with A-list actors). Maybe not Jackson, but he just needs a few other masterworks to complement the LOTR Trilogy. Fincher has a viciously good filmography as well.
Guys like Villanueve and Edgar Wright have shown they have what it takes, just a matter of time for them to be in the running IMO.
On the top four:
- Ridley Scott is right there and would be my 5th, if I needed to replace Coppola or the Coens he would go in one of their slots. - Haven't seen enough of Kubrick's films, though 2001, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket are the masterpieces I have seen. Hated Eyes Wide Shut. If I watched his whole catalog, he'd be there I'd bet.
- Cameron has T1 and 2 and Aliens, and no matter what you think of them, Titanic and Avatar are still the two biggest movies ever and perhaps the greatest marvels to behold on film if nothing else.
- Seen the Birds and Psycho along with bits and pieces of North by Northwest, Vertigo, and Rear Window from Hitchcock. Again, I'll put in the honorable mention category due to not having seen more of his filmography.
- Clint made the best western ever IMO (Unforgiven), two of my favorite dramas (Million Dollar Baby and Gran Torino), two great war films in one year (Flags of Our Fathers and Letter From Iwo Jima), along with plenty of solid stuff in his filmography (Outlaw Josey Wales, the Dirty Harry films he directed, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Hereafter, American Sniper, haven't seen Sully yet). He's in the running, but the production values of some of his films are on the low-end (fake baby and bad CGI car explosion and sandstorm in American Sniper, for example).
- DeMille was an old-school James Cameron: big time epic productions that may not hold up today, but were forerunners for the special effects-laden blockbusters of today. Samson and Delilah, The Greatest Show on Earth (side note: funny, I just saw that Barnum & Baileys Circus ended its 146-year run last night on May 22nd), and The Ten Commandments.
- George Miller has the four Mad Max movies and the two Happy Feets, but not enough else IMO to put him in one of those 4 top slots.
- John Carpenter is THE master horror slasher director, and he has also worked so many genres into horror (sci-fi with The Thing and They Live, comedy and fantasy with Big Trouble in Little China, and sci-fi action with the two Escape movies).
Really, there are too many to list, I can think of more even as I type.
What is the metric here? If it's influence on the industry I'd say Spielberg, George Lucas and James Cameron are firmly in the top-tiers, with Coppola, Scorsece and Kubrick fighting for fourth place.
If the contest is about sheer talent, Lucas gets dropped in favor of one of the fourth placers.
edit- Hitchcock deserves to be on these lists somewhere, but I don't know where. His movies didn't revolutionize the industry like others listed, but he had a lot less to work with- and that has to be taken into account.
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"The Daemon lied with every breath. It could not help itself but to deceive and dismay, to riddle and ruin. The more we conversed, the closer I drew to one singularly ineluctable fact: I would gain no wisdom here."
Last edited by Tzeentch on May 22nd, 2017 at 11:21 PM
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