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Photo: Taxi Driver/Columbia Pictures
The Greatest Directors In Movie History
301.2k votes 26k voters 321.2k views 783 items
List Rules Most important, culturally significant filmmakers of all time who deserve award recognition.
List of the greatest directors in movie history, who are most deserving of Academy Awards and critical recognition. The list includes directors who have already won major awards, those who continue to have the potential to win Oscars and filmmakers who were overlooked by the Academy during their lifetimes. The skill set of a high-level director is massive - everything from working with and managing large teams to a strong aesthetic and artistic sensibility to the ability to sell ideas to studio executives and potential collaborators. Though many have mastered the actual work of getting films made, only a rare few have managed to create truly memorable, important motion pictures that will stand the test of time.
Often, the greatest of these filmmakers will go unrecognized by the Motion Picture Academy, particularly during the most active, vital period of their careers. Alfred Hitchcock famously never took home a statue for Best Director, despite being perhaps the one of the MOST iconic film directors, and certainly one of the most significant contributors to contemporary film language and genre. Martin Another of the best film directors in history, Martin Scorsese, eventually did take home Best Director for his work on The Departed, but this film came long after the movies for which Scorsese will likely be best remembered - Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and so on.
Who is the best film director? Do you think Guillermo del Toro is one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Some say David Lynch is one of the greatest Hollywood directors of all time. If you don't agree that they are some of the best movie directors, make your voice known!
The top 10 people on this list are perhaps the 10 best directors of all time. This list disregards the quibbles over who has won in the past or will win in the future, and instead focuses purely on the quality of the filmmaking and the importance of the films themselves. Vote for the best filmmakers of all time, and if some of your choices for top film directors haven't yet made the list, be sure to add them.
rerankers: 183
Alfred Hitchcock Psycho, The Birds, The Man Who Knew Too Much
Orson Welles Citizen Kane, Don Quixote, Macbeth
Steven Spielberg Munich, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, War of the Worlds
Charlie Chaplin Modern Times, City Lights, The Great Dictator
Akira Kurosawa Rashomon, Hakuchi, The Bad Sleep Well
John Ford The Searchers, The Quiet Man, The Grapes of Wrath
Stanley Kubrick Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Spartacus, 2001: A Space Odyssey
Ingmar Bergman Persona, Cries & Whispers, A Lesson of Love
Federico Fellini 8 1/2, La Dolce Vita, Roma
David Lean Lawrence of Arabia, The Bridge on the River Kwai, A Passage to India
Frank Capra It's A Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, It Happened One Night
Martin Scorsese The Wolf of Wall Street, Hugo, Goodfellas
Billy Wilder Some Like it Hot, Sunset Blvd, The Apartment
Howard Hawks The Big Sleep, His Girl Friday, Rio Bravo
Sergio Leone Once Upon A Time In America, Duck, You Sucker
D. W. Griffith The Birth Of A Nation, Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout The Ages, Broken Blossoms Or The Yellow Man And The Girl
Francis Ford Coppola The Cotton Club, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Apocalypse Now
William Wyler Ben Hur, Roman Holiday, The Best Years Of Our Lives
F. W. Murnau Nosferatu, Sunrise, Faust
John Huston The Asphalt Jungle, Wise Blood, The Red Badge of Courage
Roman Polanski The Pianist, Chinatown, Rosemary's Baby
Jean Renoir Le Grande Illusion, The Rules of The Game, The Lower Depths
Jean-Luc Godard Vivre Sa Vie, Breathless, Pierrot le Fou
Sergei Eisenstein Battleship Potemkin, Alexander Nevsky, Ivan The Terrible
Luis Buñuel The Milky Way, Death in the Garden, The River and Death
not on the list? add item #784
List Rules: Most important, culturally significant filmmakers of all time who deserve award recognition.
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