My Favorite Directors
by peterchr-rude | created - 18 Oct 2012 | updated - 25 Nov 2015 | PublicThese are the directors whose work I enjoy the most. This list does not include co-directions.
1. 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 ...
Barry Lyndon - 10 Dr. Strangelove - 10 Paths Of Glory - 9 Eyes Wide Shut - 9 2001: A Space Odessey - 9 The Killing - 9 Full Metal Jacket - 8.5 Lolita - 8.5 A Clockwork Orange - 8 The Shining - 8 Spartacus - 8 Killer's Kiss - 7
2. 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 ...
3. 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 ...
Rear Window - 10 Vertigo - 10 Psycho - 9.5 North by Northwest - 9 Strangers on a Train - 9 The Trouble with Harry - 8.5 Notorious - 8.5 Shadow of a Doubt - 8.5 The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) - 8 I Confess - 8 The Wrong Man - 8 Rebecca - 8 The Birds - 8 Frenzy - 7.5 To Catch a Thief - 7 The Lady Vanishes - 7 Dial M for Murder - 7 Marnie - 7 Spellbound - 7 Secret Agent - 6 Topaz - 6
4. Luis Buñuel
Writer | Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie
The father of cinematic Surrealism and one of the most original directors in the history of the film medium, Luis Buñuel was given a strict Jesuit education (which sowed the seeds of his obsession with both religion and subversive behavior), and subsequently moved to Madrid to study at the ...
Belle de Jour - 9.5 Viridiana - 9 Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie - 9 Los Olvidados - 9 Tristana - 9 Simón del desierto - 9 El Ángel Exterminador - 8.5 Cet Obscur Objet du Désir - 8.5 Le Journal d'une Femme de Chambre - 8.5 Nazarín - 8.5 Le Fantôme de la Liberté - 8 Un Chien Andalou - 8 The Young One - 7.5 La Voie Lactée - 7.5
5. 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 ...
Taxi Driver - 10 Goodfellas - 9.5 Mean Streets - 9.5 Raging Bull - 9.5 The Departed - 8.5 The King of Comedy - 8.5 The Wolf of Wall Street - 8.5 The Last Temptation of Christ - 8 After Hours - 8 Italianamerican - 8 Cape Fear - 8 The Age of Innocence - 8 Gangs of New York - 8 Hugo - 8 Casino - 7 The 50 Year Argument - 7
6. Robert Bresson
Writer | Au hasard Balthazar
Robert Bresson trained as a painter before moving into films as a screenwriter, making a short film (atypically a comedy), Public Affairs (1934) in 1934. After spending more than a year as a German POW during World War II, he made his debut with Angels of Sin (1943) in 1943. His next film, The ...
Un condamné à mort s'est échappé - 10 Au hasard Balthazar - 10 Journal d'un curé de campagne - 9.5 Pickpocket - 9 Le diable probablement - 8 Mouchette - 8 Procès de Jeanne d'Arc - 8 Lancelot du Lac - 7
7. 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 ...
Sunset Blvd. - 10 The Apartment - 9.5 Double Indemnity - 9 Some Like It Hot - 9 Witness for the Prosecution - 8.5 The Lost Weekend - 8 The Fortune Cookie - 8 Avanti! - 7 The Seven Year Itch - 7
8. Woody Allen
Writer | Annie Hall
Woody Allen was born on November 30, 1935, as Allen Konigsberg, in The Bronx, NY, the son of Martin Konigsberg and Nettie Konigsberg. He has one younger sister, Letty Aronson. As a young boy, he became intrigued with magic tricks and playing the clarinet, two hobbies that he continues today.
Allen ...
Crimes and Misdemeanors - 9.5 Manhattan - 9.5 Annie Hall - 9.5 Hannah and Her Sisters - 9 Midnight in Paris - 9 Blue Jasmine - 8.5 Husbands and Wives - 8.5 Match Point - 8 Radio Days - 8 Deconstructing Harry - 8 Take the Money and Run - 7.5 Vicky Christina Barcelona - 7.5 Broadway Danny Rose - 7.5 Bullets Over Broadway - 7.5 Cassandra's Dream - 7.5 Mighty Aphrodite - 7 Scoop - 6.5 You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger - 6.5 Love and Death - 6.5 Sleeper - 6.5 The Curse of the Jade Scorpion - 6.5 Small Time Crooks - 6 Hollywood Ending - 6 Whatever Works - 5 Magic in the Moonlight - 5 To Rome with Love - 5 Every Thing You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask - 4
9. Orson Welles
Actor | Citizen Kane
His father, Richard Head Welles, was a well-to-do inventor, his mother, Beatrice (Ives) Welles, a beautiful concert pianist; Orson Welles was gifted in many arts (magic, piano, painting) as a child. When his mother died in 1924 (when he was nine) he traveled the world with his father. He was ...
Citizen Kane - 10 F for Fake - 9 The Trial - 9 The Magnificent Ambersons - 8 Mr. Arkadin - 8 Othello - 8 The Lady from Shanghai - 7.5 Touch of Evil - 7.5 Falstaff - 7
10. 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 ...
The Godfather - 10 The Godfather: Part II - 10 Apocalypse Now - 9 The Conversation - 8.5 The Godfather: Part III - 8.5
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 ...
La Dolce Vita - 10 8½ - 9 Le notti di Cabiria - 8.5 I Vitelloni - 8.5 Il Bidone - 8.5 La Strada - 8 Amarcord - 8
12. Joel Coen
Producer | The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Joel Daniel Coen is an American filmmaker who regularly collaborates with his younger brother Ethan. They made Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, True Grit, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Burn After Reading, A Serious Man, Inside Llewyn Davis, Hail Caesar and other projects. Joel ...
Fargo - 9 No Country for Old Men - 9 Inside Llewyn Davis - 9 The Big Lebowski - 9 Miller's Crossing - 9 True Grit - 8 Burn After Reading - 8 The Man Who Wasn't There - 8 Barton Fink - 8 O Brother, Where Art Thou? - 8 A Serious Man - 7 Blood Simple - 7
13. Nicholas Ray
Director | Rebel Without a Cause
Nicholas Ray was born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle in 1911, in small-town Galesville, Wisconsin, to Lena (Toppen) and Raymond Joseph Kienzle, a contractor and builder. He was of German and Norwegian descent. Ray's early experience with film came with some radio broadcasting in high school. He left the ...
In A Lonely Place - 9 Johnny Guitar - 8.5 Bigger Than Life - 7.5 Rebel Without a Cause - 7
14. Luchino Visconti
Writer | Il gattopardo
Born in his ancestral palazzo, situated in the same Milanese square as both the opera house La Scala and the Milan Cathedral, Luchino Visconti (1906 - 1976) was raised under the auspices of aristocratic privilege, theater and Catholicism. This triangulation of monuments would create an equally ...
Il gattopardo - 10 Rocco e i suoi fratelli - 8.5 Le notti bianche - 8 Morte a Venezia - 8 Senso - 8
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,...
16. Satyajit Ray
Writer | Pather Panchali
Satyajit Ray was born in Calcutta on May 2, 1921. His father, Late Sukumar Ray was an eminent poet and writer in the history of Bengali literature. In 1940, after receiving his degree in science and economics from Calcutta University, he attended Tagore's Viswa-Bharati University. His first movie ...
Pather Panchali - 9 Aparajito - 9 Apur Sansar - 9 Jalsaghar - 8.5
17. François Truffaut
Writer | La nuit américaine
French director François Truffaut began to assiduously go to the movies at age seven. He was also a great reader but not a good pupil. He left school at 14 and started working. In 1947, aged 15, he founded a film club and met André Bazin, a French critic, who became his protector. Bazin helped the ...
Les quatre cents coups - 9 Jules et Jim - 9 Fahrenheit 451 - 8.5 L'argent de poche - 8.5 La peau douce - 8.5 Antoine et Colette (short film) - 8.5 Tirez sur le pianiste - 8 La sirène du Mississipi - 8 L'homme qui aimait les femmes - 7.5 La chambre verte - 7 Le dernier métro - 7 L'histoire d'Adèle H. - 5
18. Sidney Lumet
Director | 12 Angry Men
Sidney Lumet was a master of cinema, best known for his technical knowledge and his skill at getting first-rate performances from his actors -- and for shooting most of his films in his beloved New York. He made over 40 movies, often complex and emotional, but seldom overly sentimental. Although ...
12 Angry Men - 9 Dog Day Afternoon - 9 Network - 9 Serpico - 8
19. Lars von Trier
Writer | Dancer in the Dark
Probably the most ambitious and visually distinctive filmmaker to emerge from Denmark since Carl Theodor Dreyer over 60 years earlier, Lars von Trier studied film at the Danish Film School and attracted international attention with his very first feature, The Element of Crime (1984). A highly ...
Breaking the Waves - 10 Europa - 8.5 Nymphomaniac: Vol. I + Vol. II - 8.5 Melancholia - 8.5 Direktøren for det hele - 3
20. Paul Thomas Anderson
Director | Punch-Drunk Love
Anderson was born in 1970. He was one of the first of the "video store" generation of film-makers. His father was the first man on his block to own a V.C.R., and from a very early age Anderson had an infinite number of titles available to him. While film-makers like Spielberg cut their teeth making...
Magnolia - 9 There Will Be Blood - 9 Boogie Nights - 8 Inherent Vice - 6.5 The Master - 6
21. Jean-Luc Godard
Director | Bande à part
Jean-Luc Godard was born in Paris on December 3, 1930, the second of four children in a bourgeois Franco-Swiss family. His father was a doctor who owned a private clinic, and his mother came from a preeminent family of Swiss bankers. During World War II Godard became a naturalized citizen of ...
À bout de souffle - 9.5 Le petit soldat - 8.5 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle - 8.5 Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux - 8.5 Pierrot le fou - 7.5 Prénom Carmen - 6.5 Bande à part - 6 Meetin' WA (short) - 5
22. Clint Eastwood
Actor | Million Dollar Baby
Clint Eastwood was born May 31, 1930 in San Francisco, to Clinton Eastwood Sr., a bond salesman and later manufacturing executive for Georgia-Pacific Corporation, and Ruth Wood (née Margret Ruth Runner), a housewife turned IBM clerk. He grew up in nearby Piedmont. At school Clint took interest in ...
Unforgiven - 9 Mystic River - 8.5 Letters from Iwo Jima - 8.5 Gran Torino - 8.5 The Outlaw Josey Wales - 8 High Plains Drifter - 7.5 Flags of Our Fathers - 7
23. Quentin Tarantino
Writer | Reservoir Dogs
Quentin Jerome Tarantino was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. His father, Tony Tarantino, is an Italian-American actor and musician from New York, and his mother, Connie (McHugh), is a nurse from Tennessee. Quentin moved with his mother to Torrance, California, when he was four years old.
In January of...
Pulp Fiction - 9 Inglourious Basterds - 8 Jackie Brown - 8 Django Unchained - 7.5 Reservoir Dogs - 6
Tell Your Friends