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Top 25 Film Directors

Albino Rover

By Albino Rover
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EdgarusQPFC

EdgarusQPFC

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I totally get it when people refer to Avatar as Fern Gully Meets Aliens, but i still enjoy the film. Cameron was able(in my eyes) to make CG interesting. Now theres not as much CG in Avatar as there is in the last Star wars, but watching Avatar i forgot i was watching a CG fest and just enjoyed the film. Im looking forward to the next one and honestly thought Pandora was a brilliant settiing. The sequels will get far too much hype behind them though.

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Albino Rover

Albino Rover

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20. Clint Eastwood

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He could have retired on being Harry Callaghan and The Man With No Name but, one of the hardest-working men in show business, after becoming one of the most recognised faces in front of the camera, Clint reinvented himself behind it.

He made the transition seamlessly; his first job as director was on psychological thriller Play Misty For Me, in 1971. Eastwood already had the reputation, and his own production company, Malpaoso Productions, so he had no problem with funding and having full creative control of his film. He established his reputation as a very stylish visual director straight away, as well as proving himself as a great actors’ director, able to get formidable performances from all his cast.

They say the director’s first film is always their hardest, and once Eastwood got his out of the way he never looked back. His second directorial effort was bad-ass western High Plains Drifter in 1973, and later that year he worked miracles making romance film Breezy, which he finished three days ahead of schedule, with half the budget to spare.

Some of his 32 feature films have been rather forgettable. One of them is probably 1975 spy adventure The Eiger Sanction, whose poor reception Eastwood blamed on distributors Universal. He fell out with the company and Warner Bros have distributed all but one of his films ever since.

He put his first flop behind him and made post-Civil War western The Outlaw Josey Wales, getting the job as director after Philip Kaufman was fired for not sticking to schedule (the studio were later fined by DGA for unfair dismissal). Blinding, bruising and authentic, Josey Wales remains a classic western to this day, but Eastwood's next film, 1977 cop action movie The Gauntlet, was another one that was quickly forgotten. The film was Eastwood's only to be given an X rating, for its violence.

Busy with acting jobs, Eastwood didn’t direct again for a few years, but in 1980 he came back with a comic western called Bronco Billy. After that came a few more films that have become rare collectors' items: Cold War sci-fi Firefox and Honkytonk Man, a depression-era drama which indulged one of Eastwood’s biggest passions, music. In 1983 he directed Sudden Impact, the penultimate Dirty Harry film.

In 1985 he returned to the western with Pale Rider, a film which was possibly one of the most important in his transformation into a serious director. As well as being so well-directed visually it’s a film with mystery which questions morals, humanity and religion. Needless to say, the critics loved it, and it was an important turning point in Eastwood’s reputation as an artist, rather than just a movie-maker.

He followed it up the next year with action-thriller Heartbreak Ridge and after that, as the ‘80s began to fade, so did Eastwood’s reputation as a movie star, which was being replaced with the perception of him as an actor-director. After the last Dirty Harry film, The Dead Pool, he began working on smaller and more ambitious projects further from his comfort zone, beginning with Bird, a 1988 biopic of jazz legend Charlie Parker. The film combines the disturbingly honest truth about addiction and mental trauma with Parker’s life and music. It was the first film Eastwood directed but didn’t act in, but it has "Clint" stamped all over it in the lighting and camera work.

He came into the '90s with White Hunter Black Heart, a fictionalisation of John Huston’s experiences making The African Queen, and cop action film The Rookie. Neither of those was particularly successful, but his next film would take his directorial status to a different level.

Unforgiven is Clint Eastwood’s masterpiece. He'd directed great westerns before but with this film he took the mythical old West and replaced all those illusions with grave and gritty realism in a way that no one had done before. Everyone and everything in the town of Big Whisky is unforgiving: danger is all around, there are no gun-slinging heroes and killing a man takes more than just a good aim. It’s a mature and complex western, and as well as his clinical work on camera, Eastwood's setting of mood and atmosphere is spot on.

As well as being a great film in its own right, Unforgiven was deliberately Eastwood's last western, and the gateway into a new era for his work. In 1993 came one of his most underrated works as director, dramatic cat-and-mouse thriller A Perfect World. He followed that in 1995 with beautifully-shot mid-west romance The Bridges Of Madison County, and showed his improving eye for the cold-blooded thriller in 1997 with Absolute Power.

He had a few forgettable works around the turn of the century with Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, death row drama True Crime, unlikely retired astronaut thriller Space Cowboys and his adaptation of Michael Connelly’s Blood Work, but he came back on top form in 2003 with an ensemble cast in his masterful, disturbing and dark murder-mystery, Mystic River.

He followed it up with another dark masterpiece in the moving drama Million Dollar Baby, and his 2006 war double of Flags Of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima, which told the story of the battle of Iwo Jima from both American and Japanese perspectives, earned him a lot of respect from much of the American film industry for his courage in telling a sympathetic WWII story from the point of view of the enemy.

In 2008 he made two unforgettable dramas in Changeling and Gran Torino, his last film as actor-director. Since then, his recent trio of Invictus, Hereafter and J. Edgar have kept his trend of getting the best out of his actors, but they were all critical misses. He turns 84 in May but he’s still working- his musical biography of The Four Seasons, Jersey Boys, is to be released this Summer.

He’s always been foremost a great and entertaining visual storyteller who knows what his audience wants. He's also always had an old-fashioned style on set, keeping the machine well-oiled and trusting his cast and crew enough to shoot films very quickly, but always to an extremely high standard. At its best, Eastwood’s direction has as much deliberation and gravitas as his finest acting; he's such an experienced hand that you just have to look at the low lighting, deep blacks and silhouettes to feel the mood he wants you to feel, and with that his best films ensure not just guaranteed entertainment, but an authoritative comfort that few directors manage to give their viewers.

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tongue_tied_danny

tongue_tied_danny

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20. Clint Eastwood

Some of his 32 feature films have been rather forgettable. One of them is probably 1975 spy adventure The Eiger Sanction, whose poor reception Eastwood blamed on distributors Universal. He fell out with the company and Warner Bros have distributed all but one of his films ever since.

I wasn't aware of that. Personally I love The Eiger Sanction. It's a fantastic film and classic Clint.

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Albino Rover

Albino Rover

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19. David Lynch

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In at 19 is a director like no other; an enigmatic, secretive man whose work never fails to stun, surprise and stimulate its viewers.

In completely his own style, he has always been able to create something dark and mysterious in his films and portray everything in the extreme, from joy and innocence to exploitative sex and violence.

Many of his films are lined with the dark atmosphere of film-noir combined with the paranoia, suspense and shock factor of horror, intertwined with profanity, surrealism and seduction, but they're never the same. An avant-garde master, he falls under no categories or genres, rather he’s become almost a genre of his own.

Coming from the kind of small-town America that plays a part in many of his films, David Lynch grew up sampling life all over the country, moving among at least 6 states as a child due to his father's job as a research scientist for the Department of Agriculture. A gifted painter, Lynch pursued it as a career and as a young man, after attending a few less inspiring art schools he wound up at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He loved the school but hated the fear and violence of the city of Philadelphia, and ultimately that led to his decision to go west and study film. He was a model pupil at the AFI Conservatory, and right from the start, on the creative side of things he was experimental and self-indulgent with his ideas.

As often with the stories of directors' first feature films, Lynch's is another good one. He had already impressed the Conservatory with many experimental short films (including The Alphabet, in which his wife sees a series of strange images, then recites the alphabet before inexplicably haemorrhaging blood) and, after writing a script, applied for a grant to make something more substantial. As well as using his own savings, he got the $10,000 grant from the AFI, and smalls loan from his father and sister-in-law, Sissy Spacek. Lynch's friends Jack Fisk and Freddie Elmes (who are now a world-class production designer and cinematographer, respectively) joined him to set up a makeshift studio in an abandoned barn. Sissy Spacek helped but pulled out during production after Lynch and his wife started divorce procedures. Lynch began living on-set and after five years all-in, he got the film finished.

Eraserhead is a nightmarish black-and-white horror show, featuring some of the most shocking and lasting images of the time, which still deliver a blow today. No one knows for certain what the film is about but the lead character's relationships with his girlfriend, child and surroundings point to the film being an exaggerative self-portrait of David Lynch in Philadelphia.

His first film was a massive cult hit but its success was nothing like his next. Producer Stuart Cornfield, who loved Eraserhead, was very keen to work with Lynch on his next project. Cornfield sent Lynch four scripts; and supposedly after reading the first script's title, "The Elephant Man", Lynch was sold. Mel Brooks' production company backed the film, a weird but finally moving drama which portrayed a man, outcast and pointed and laughed at by all those around him, given confidence and dignity by a good doctor, set in "Lynchified" Victorian London.

The success of The Elephant Man gained Lynch the trust to make his first big-budget film, and whatever has been said about it, it was a sci-fi spectacle. Dune, an insane futuristic adventure based on Frank Herbert's novels, carried an expectation to be a financial success but turned out a flop. Lynch turned down an offer from George Lucas to direct Return Of The Jedi in favour of Dune because he believed in it, but his opinion of it 30 years on is that he sold out: it was the only time he didn't have final cut on a film he directed, and it remains the only film he regrets making. He had much higher hopes for the film than the ultimate result, and when Universal released an "extended cut" edition, Lynch wouldn't be associated with it. It is an "Alan Smithee" film, and the screenwriter is credited as "Judas Booth" - Lynch might have thought that was a subtle dig at Universal but it's not a hard one to interpret.

It took Lynch a while to get back to filmmaking; as often happens to a young director recovering from a flop he almost had to start again, choosing to take a few years to concentrate on photography and still art, but he came back with an idea he had been working on for more than ten years. Blue Velvet is a film about casual serious crime and injustice in the face of innocence and fear, which accelerates into a explosive climax, all wrapped up in dark mystery, decorated with strange yet appropriate 1950s pop music, and set in Lynch's comfort zone, the fictional small town of Lumberton. Blue Velvet initially caused a lot of controversy, but from that the positives were two-fold: it got the film a lot of attention from mainstream audiences, and it also became a defining element of the director's identity. After Blue Velvet, "controversial" became David Lynch's middle name.

Over the years, as well as films for cinema release, David Lynch has directed a great number of short films, documentaries and music videos, as well as his paintings, drawings and comic strips, and in the late '80s he added a new medium to his repertoire, entering the small screen with T.V. documentaries Les Francais vus par and American Chronicles, as well as T.V. movie Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream Of The Brokenhearted, but his television work came to prominence with his writing much of and directing 6 episodes of legendary murder mystery series Twin Peaks. It was so popular he wrote the story into a feature film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and although audiences were praying for the film to be a continuation of the story, Lynch made it a prequel, a chronicle of Laura Palmer's last days. The film was much darker than the series, which had contained an element of humour, and although some Peaks fans loved the film, on the whole it was one of Lynch's worse-received ones. His T.V. work in the early '90s continued with episodes of On The Air and Hotel Room, and in amongst it all came Wild At Heart.

Lynch was given the book by his friend, producer Monty Montgomery, who had planned to adapt the book and direct the film and asked Lynch if he was interested in producing. After Lynch read the book they ended up switching roles; knowing and trusting Lynch, Montgomery was happy to concede the directorial duties, but stayed on as producer.

The film is a rollercoaster American road movie centred around a crazy love story. It features allusions to extreme horror and is by no means a comfortable watch; it takes us through hell but it is a beautiful, masterful collage of all things "Lynchian"; his surreal artistry, sleaze, humour, paranoid tension and, again, music. It's violent and scary but, with the darkness often overpowered by a representation of love and fun, perhaps it's a soft-boiled romantic comedy masquerading as a dangerous thriller.

After his mixed success in television and a few more documentaries, Lynch teamed up with Wild At Heart author Barry Gifford again, on an original screenplay for a film which took his unusual style to another level. Lost Highway is another bizarre road movie layered with mystery and thrills, in which, among other strange things, the lead character mysteriously transforms into someone else at a key moment in the plot.

The Straight Story is perhaps his most surprising film. There are no frills, just a sentimental geriatric man crossing a state, by lawnmower, to reconcile with his sick brother. Among his weird and psychedelic body of work, The Straight Story is a refreshing moment of clarity in David Lynch's career. It’s a simple and fundamentally American road movie, in a setting clearly very dear to Lynch, photographed and scored lovingly in testament to the many places he calls home.

Perhaps thankfully, that moment of clarity was a one-off and Lynch took no time to cloud up our minds once again. He’s made many iconic films but his most original, and possibly his most recognised, is Mulholland Drive. The film tells a Hollywood story in an seriously non-Hollywood fashion, using "dream (and nightmare) logic" throughout its non-linear plot in such a way that we're aware of what's going on but we're unable to interpret between what the main character is dreaming and what, if anything, is meant to be real. Although carefully pieced together, and a very deliberate assembly of images and music, it's completely structureless: what it all means, only he knows, but just as Eraserhead was Lynch's depiction of living in gritty '60s Philadelphia, this was his abstract portrait of Los Angeles.

After that, Lynch entered the film media of the 21st century, establishing davidlynch.com and making dozens of films and short series for online viewing. In 2002 he released a “sitcom”, Rabbits, which featured three rabbit-headed human beings in human clothes talking nonsense, occasionally interrupted by a laughter track.

His last feature film, Inland Empire, was released in 2006. With a running time of 180 minutes it is by far his longest film, and follows the same messy, dream-like nature of Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive before it. It deals with an actress who becomes obsessive over her latest film role, discovering coincidences and bad omens about the production, and although the film escalates into much more than that, at its heart it's a character study of a troubled woman.

After finishing the film Lynch went on record as having decided he’s had enough of making films, and no longer enjoys it. He's since made countless more shorts and videos, but it is a disappointing thought that his work won't hit our cinemas again. Years later he qualified that statement with "If I fall in love with an idea again I'll get to work straight away.", perhaps a sign he has itchy feet to get back into filmmaking. Nothing would surprise you.

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yoda

yoda

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He has some weak films but he's a fascinating filmmaker. My main issue with Lynch, and a reason I think he's low down the list, is that his films can be infuriating to watch resulting in an isolated audience. At times he overcomplicates his films and it's because he accepts that he is smarter than the average audience member, not always a characteristic that endears itself to the viewer.

That criticism aside, he's one of the few directors where I take care to go and read about the themes contained within his films. For me he's the face of acceptable horror: it's easy to scare people with a monster or gore but he does something different. I saw a good quote on the internet:

Lynch’s most powerful tools of fear are not supernatural predators (Jason, Freddie Kruger, the clown from It) or psychotic serial killers (Hannibal Lector, Jigsaw, Norman Bates). Instead, what makes his films so disturbing is that they exist in worlds very similar to ours but that are run by dream-logic. His films don’t just give us nightmares; they are nightmares.

I didn't vote for Eastwood but I'm pleased that he made the list. A few of his recent films were instantly forgettable but Million Dollar Baby is one of the most touching films I've ever seen and as mentioned by others, Unforgiven is arguably the finest Western filmed.

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WhiteRoseKillie

WhiteRoseKillie

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I didn't vote for Eastwood or Lynch, although Clint, in hindsight, probably should have been in there. Interesting to see that on here, as well as generally, Changeling merits only a passing mention - probably because of it's release at around the same time as Gran Torino. I thought it was one of his best.

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