Hitchcock - Allen - Almodóvar - Tarantino - Wyler - Fassbinder - Kurosawa - Lee - Chaplin - Coppola - Fellini - Truffaut - Bertolucci - Zinnemann - Lang - Welles - Miyazaki - Clément - Minnelli - Leone - Bergman - Jarmush - Keaton - Cukor - Lumet - Wilder - Lubitsch - Hawks - Murnau - Pollack - Kubrick - Huston - Lean - Peckinpah - Cassavetes - Scorsese - Coen - Verneuil - Kazan - Renoir - Malle - Visconti - Kaurismäki - Godard - Melville - Bresson - Kieślowski - de Sica - Wajda - Altman - Capra - Kar-Wai - Curtiz - Forman - Hill - Horne - Lasseter - Lynch - Polanski - Buñuel - Reisner - Reitherman - Rossen - Roach - Schlesinger - Scott - Donen - McCarey- Kitano - Costa-Gavras
This list of my favorite directors (taken from my DVD list) reminds me that outside of Hollywood there once was a great European - and especially French - cinema. Those were the days when Europe put some effort in their movies.
We had a similar thread some months ago and my top 3 of my favorite directors mentioned above are still
- Charlie Chaplin
- Billy Wilder
- Ernst Lubitsch
I'll add two more to make my top 5:
- François Truffaut
- Alfred Hitchcock
The best worldwide contemporary directors (and writers) are in my opinion Hayao Miyazaki and the Pixar guys (Lasseter/Stanton/Docter/Bird).
I always wondered why there are so few female directors of international or even national fame - even today. Lina Wertmüller, Margarethe von Trotta, Susanne Bier, Susan Seidelman, Kathryn Bigelow are the only ones I've seen movies from, Lone Scherfig and Mai Zetterling are two other ones I've heard of and I bet most of them are lesser known than any male director of some random Schrott action movie.
All hail Christopher Nolan - the next one who left his own unique path to follow the Yellow Brick Road...
