Akira Kurosawa: So versatile, so accomplished, and so elegant is all I need to say here.
Sir David Lean: Arguably the most important British film director alongside Kubrick. A great "epic" director, but also one who can focus on details or do more intimate kinds of movies, like A Brief Encounter.
Terry Gilliam: One of the great experimental directors along with people like David Lynch and Kubrick (not a true "experimental" director, but close enough). Extremely talented at capturing people's subjective emotions and creating incredibly non-traditional heroes.
Modern directors who still have a lot more to give before their careers are over:
Christopher Nolan
Michel Gondry
Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Richard Linklater
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
