MovieMaker Magazine's 25 Most Influential Directors of All-Time (1 Viewer)

[clayton b]

What about Lucas? Cameron was mentioned as being snubbed, but if you're going to mention Cameron then you've got to mention Lucas. He's not that great of a director, but he has changed and continues to change the way movies are made. The technological advances made by both these directors should be enough to give them a spot on this list.

 

[Colin Jacobson]

This is one of the dumbest things I've ever read. Spielberg was only good in the 70s? 1941 came out in 1979 and was atrocious. Raiders... and ET came out in the 80s and are two of the greatest films ever made.

Someone rescue me from snotty, know-it-all cineastes...

 

[Colin Jacobson]

]

Lucas was much more influential as a producer than as a director. Yeah, he was able to BECOME an influential producer due to his hits as a director, but his influence remains most prominent in what he did as a producer...

 

[Adam_S]

Having seen so many of these lists before I only bothered reading the Spielberg bio since his treatment is a pretty damn good barometer of how I'll judge the list. Nothing too surprising in the actual writing, what is surprising is to see it so blatently stated, having looked for critical quotes before on people like Spielberg or Disney, its sometimes surprisingly hard to find quotes that are blatently state the overall tone of nastiness and derision, most carefully couch their language maintain a biased ton and toss off a bit of grudging respect and acknowledgement sort of like a backhanded complement and slap all at once.

No difference here.

The rest of the list. Hitch is pretty much perfect, not who I'd pick for me but damn good, I'd say Griffith is rated too high, Spielberg too low, Lean should be on the list, Kurosawa is too low, Coppola doesn't need to be on the list (Godfather is great, but so is Tokyo Story and I don't see Ozu here, primarily because his films have only become available to western audiences in the last two years). I can't comment on Cassavetes as he's the only filmmaker I've not seen any films by. Missing are Lean, Ozu, and Murnau in my opinion, and I'd gladly swap them in and swap out my bottom three.

Setting aside Cassavetes, here's how I'd order these twenty four in terms of INFLUENCE:

1. Hitchcock
2. John Ford
3. Akira Kurosawa
4. Steven Spielberg
5. Stanley Kubrick (tie)
5. Sergei Eisenstein(tie)
7. Orson Welles (this is where I'd insert Lean and Murnau, most likely)
8. Charlie Chaplin
9. Billy Wilder
10. Howard Hawks
11. Ingmar Bergman
12. Federico Fellini
13. Ernst Lubitsch
14. Fritz Lang
15. Buster Keaton
16. Martin Scorsese
17. Jean Renoir
18. D.W. Griffith
19. John Huston (this is where I'd insert Ozu)
20. Luis Bunuel
21. Jean Luc-Godard
22. Francis Ford Coppola
23. Francois Truffaut
24. Woody Allen

1 - Hitch needs no introduction in this forum, quite simply no other filmmaker is as good as he was, as consistently as he was, with as many films as rich and textured (no matter their pulp or 'low' sources) as he was. The man possessed craft in spades, and I"ve seen probably about 80% of his films and the only misfires for me are Topaz and I Confess (a bigger number than any on this list).

2 - Ford was a master in the form of cinema almost equal to Hitchcock, what he lacked was the sophistication of insane control that Hitch exercised over his films. In terms of influence, only Ford can also rank this highly because he showed so many other filmmakers, like Kurosawa and Spielberg how things were done, even if those others do it better than him. Ford was an inconsistent craftsman and his works are flawed, sometimes it seems deliberate, and it is frustrating. I personally think Ford had a superstition against or a preference for the imperfect form, I think he found perfection boring, but despite the occasional flaw (say some of the narration in How Green was my Valley, the younger Searcher in the Searchers, the lack of a belly on the pregnant girl in Stagecoach [not his fault!] the stages on Liberty Valence, the incoherence of the gun battle in Clementine, StepnFetchit in Judge Priest etc etc)

3 - Kurosawa is every bit the equal of Hitchcock and a better artist than Ford, his craft was more refined and his shadow is one of the longest cast by any director ever. His influence, in my opinion, on cinema craft, cinema language, cinema style and cinema quality is simply uncontestable.

4 - Every single filmmaker who is younger than Spielberg, and every filmmaker of his generation who began in the seventies sits in Spielberg's shadow, perhaps only Scorsese and Eastwood are free of it, and I'd argue against Scorsese. No contemporary filmmaker has more influence than him, his command of technique and craft are impeccable, his film scholarship is brilliant, when he swims in familiar genre waters he does astonishingly innovative work. Spielberg doesn't just analyze and apply cinematic technique or understand intuitively its inner workings and use them better than almost anyone (as Scorsese does), Spielberg develops and writes new cinematic language in the way that Hitchcock did and Ford occasionaly would allow(he follows more in Ford's footsteps than Hitch's). but Spielberg is like having a living working and prolific Tolkien of the cinema with us today, he's giving us new language and the full impact of what he's doing has not yet begun to resound with its full power.

5. Eisenstein the theorist and incredibly dense filmmaker whose level is so high you can barely wrap your head around it with multiple viewings but whose influence is so massive you can't possibly avoid it. Kubrick is perhaps the cinema's greatest pure artist in the traditional snooty nose-in-the-air manner but his films are incredibly accessible and insanely rewarding to watch. His influence in every genre is unavoidable.

7. One film can get someone this high, but Welles never matched his peak (well the bay knows how good Ambersons is). (In my opinion a better placement here would be Walt Disney but he didn't direct, despite having more control over his films than Thalberg, Selzick, Goldwyn, and Mayer put together). Still Citizen Kane's influence is undeniable and the film gets richer and more rewarding every time I watch it.

8. Charlie Chaplin - This man was so damn good he was still making money making silents 8 years after silents went the way of the dodo. Brilliant at every level and whether or not Keaton is funnier, Chaplin has had more influence, is more remembered and had a larger impact on the history of cinema than any other silent filmmaker (Eisenstein was more successful as a theorist).

9. Billy Wilder - No one has yet matched Wilder in comedy, and he's only had two peers in the history of cinema, Lubitsch and Sturges, and in my opinion Wilder was better than both. Wilder owns the comedy genre like Ford owns the western and Hitch the suspense thriller. on a personal level I can't stand ranking Wilder this low but the above directors really have had a slight edge in the impact department, besides everyone but George would probably squawk at placing him in the top three. (My personal most influential directors are Spielberg, Wilder, Lean, Ford, & Hitch)

10 - Hawks was a man whose genius seems to have been overshadowed by directors that get more publicity, but discovering another Hawks film is like getting handed a geode, you may not know what it looks like inside, but you can't wait to crack it open and see. He's so consistently brilliant and funny and sure that its breathtaking.

11 - Bergman made so many movies that are so intense to experience.

12 - Fellini made so many movies that are almost always as intense an experience

13 - Lubitsch is just incredibly gifted he make a stodgy early talkie like the love parade come alive and dance. He can make Jimmy Stewart into the most convincing romantic lead ever (no mean feat since no one else successfully managed Stewart in a romantic role), and on and on and on. Lubitsch was brilliant and my comments about Hawks apply to Lubitsch--I think he's ranked so low in the main list because "after all, its just comedy! we nodded to Chaplin and dropped Wilder randomly in the middle, what more do you want?!"

14 - Fritz Lang managed the transistion from silent to sound, from country to country, language to language, genre to genre to genre and his storytelling never lagged. Metropolis, M, Mabuse, Fury, the man was incredible.

15 - Keaton is a comic genius who is not at the level of influence of Chaplin but who showed us how supremely rubber and malleable the medium of a human being is when they're on celluloid rather than actual flesh and blood. Chuck Jones took notes.

16 - Scorsese has made consistently brilliant films and three towering works of art in my opinion--Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Last Temptation of Christ (been too long since Goodfellas). His influence and command of the medium is almost unparalleled.

17 - Renoir, how can one of my favorite directors be so low? perhaps because he didn't succeed as much after the thirties and three great films there (grand Illusion, Crime of Monsieur Lange, and Rules of the Game) are about all i can attribute to his credit, however at least two of these films are mammothly influential in wildly different ways. Another artist along the lines of Kubrick.

18 - Griffith took credit for a lot of innovations but he was an incredibly brilliant editor and storyteller. Sensationalist, yes. But he could tell a story much more effectively and better than the filmmakers behind Cabiria. He was quickly surpassed as his intuitions only went so far, his prejudices ran to deep, and his inability to adapt once he rose to the top suddenly threw him to the bottom of the pecking order. he did what he did but he couldn't maintain it, but his influence in skill and manner of storytelling is duly noted.

19 - John Huston is a damned good filmmaker who I have not seen enough of.

20 - Bunuel is the sort of filmmaker who I can only handle in small doses and who I need to mull over a film for a long time discovering new things with each new thought.

21 - Godard is an influential filmmaker who I don't care for and I think is insanely overrated anyways--his inclusion is sort of like including Mike Nichols, I understand his innovations and writings and supposed influence, but I see his star fading faster than Griffiths did as cinema history sorts itself out.

22 - Coppola made two Godfather films and a Vietnam flick and gets a spot on this list, they're powerful incredible films but I don't think he has a distinctive style that has influenced the craft of filmmaking in a particularly lasting way. His best three films are incredible to watch, but when he gets arty (The Conversation) he's even more pointlessly pretenious than Godard.

23. Truffaut is a favorite filmmaker and I"ve not seen enough of his films, but his influence is much less than that of Godard and despite liking his films a lot more, it's clear to see that distinction.

24 - Woody Allen has made a bunch of funny movies but he's more of a writer than a filmmaker, I respect what he does and tend to enjoy his films and I definitely need to see more of them. But I think he has about the same merit to be on this list as Coppola and Truffaut.

Adam

 

[Chuck Mayer]

No one said Cameron was snubbed. I specifically stated I would not remove any of the folks on the list for him. Therefore, he was not snubbed. I merely stated I'd put him above Tarantino, and even that is close, probably colored by my personal opinion.

Just an FYI...I brought up Cameron, and he does NOT belong on that list.

Take care,
Chuck

 

[Eric Peterson]

Overall, I think this is a pretty solid list. I think some people are having a problem differentiating impact and popularity though. One can have great impact on a field without their work lasting throughout the years.

If this were a popularity only issue, then I'd have Wilder at #1 by a long shot, but in all reality he didn't have as much impact as Hitch, Ford, Welles, Kurosawa, etc....

As for Spielberg, I'm not really a fan of his work, and only consider four of his movies to be worth re-watching and those only marginally so. (Duel, Jaws, Raiders, Minority Report). He may be a great entertainer, but I don't see that he's really done anything new or caused any lasting impact beyond the box office. I would put John Huston in a similar category, but his films are infintely more entertaining (IMHO)

I'm a huge fan of Keaton & Chaplin, but consider their impact to be more in performance than in directing.

I'm not familiar with the work of Griffith, Godard, Bergman, & Cassavetes. Neither have I seen enough work by Eisenstein, Fellini, Truffaut, and several others. I would love to make my own list, but this prevents me.

As for people who were slighted:

Frank Capra - One of the originators of the screwball comedy, and who's style is still refered to as Capra-esque. His great films are virtually timeless and still extremely entertaining today.

Sergio Leone - A much better and more stylish director than Coppola. "Once Upon a Time" in America is everybit as good as "The Godfather", and in my book considerably better. Leone's use of close-ups and cutting edge editing techniques alone should qualify him for this list.

Preston Sturges - Sturges fits into a similar role as Lubitsch. Both were extremely popular and were huge influences in finally allowing the writer to have some impact in Hollywood. Before Sturges broke through, many film sets were closed to the writer, and his success opened the door for Wilder, Huston, and many other great film scribes.

Neither Tarantino, Cameron, Scott, or any other modern director has had near the impact of the other 25 yet!!

 

[Tim Glover]

I would add Cameron on that list. Or maybe not. "Influential" is the list criteria though.

now a Most Important to me list...

Cameron, Lucas, Jackson and others that I'll think of later. :b

 

[Ernest Rister]

This is one of the dumbest things I've ever read.

Spielberg has the stench of the common man about him. How can he be a great artist, when so many like his work? How can critics be exceptional, special, unique, and intelligent if they like what the reeking masses like as well? No, Spielberg needs to be put in his place, he needs to be blamed for creating the modern blockbuster, and while we can toss a bone to Schindler's List, we need to make sure that his place in art history is that of a compromised entertainer, not a real artist.

And where is William Shatner on this list? His body of work constantly references the common man standing against the forces of organized religion, capitalism, infantile tropes about democracy, and American post-neo-imperialism. He shall one day be seen as the true poet of 21st Century memes. What does God need with a Starship? Shatner asks, and in so doing, he calls into question the dependence of Man on oblique disestablismentarianistic social mores threaded through the collective omniverse of conscious relations. I call shenanigans on MovieMaker Magazine.

 

[Brook K]

I'm not going to argue about Griffith again, but the title is Tabu and Flaherty had very little to do with the actual filming and nothing to do with the editing. It was the work of one of the list's neglected filmmakers, F.W. Murnau.

The list is pretty good for what it is. I could certainly argue for favorites or "better" directors or whatnot, but as far as influence on the medium, it is covered pretty well from the somewhat narrow perspective it was created in. Add Murnau, Rosselini or De Sica, the Archers, and Lars Von Trier and it would be even better.

 

[TheLongshot]

Well, creating the modern blockbuster is his influence on film. You may not like it, but you can't say that he wasn't inflential.

I think Tarantino needs a few more films and more time under his belt before we consider him for such a list.

Jason

 

[Eric Peterson]

I suppose, but like I said, that's more of an impact on box office than an impact on the art form.
...and it's not that I'm categorically against block-busters, I just find Spielberg's work in general to be bland and uninteresting. I know that I'm in the minority, but I find "Duel" to be his best film by a significant margin. I've seen all of his theatrical releases except for "Sugarland Express", "Empire of the Sun", "Always", & "The Lost World: JP2"

 

[Adam_S]

Spielberg was responsible for the Paramount anti trust decision in 1948? And Ben-Hur? And Sound of Music? And Exorcist? And Godfather?


WOW!!!

The repercussions of the court case that prevented vertical integration of Production, Distribution, and Exhibition by the majors affected the entire industry and directly led to the 'modern blockbuster.'

The head of 20th Century Fox at the time declared they would stop producing 'B' pictures (you know those noir thingies amongst others) to focus their resources only on A list major properties--it was believed there was no longer a guarenteed market to support their production. Studios began laying off their massive salaried staffs in every area of the industry from costume and makeup to directors--the industry shifted to a free agent type of system. By the 60s the studios were no longer capable of the innovation and quality along the lines of the MGM musicals of the forties and early fifties--the staff on hand was no longer there producing all the time. At the same time the studios gradually fell into limited beaurocratic chaos as the long time moguls were retiring, dying or cashing out. This meant a lot of wild decisions were made, and because some independent fellows with a bike movie connected BIG with the teenagers, other younger people who said they could do something like that again were given a chance for a short span of years before studio beaurocracy reasserted its iron control by the end of the seventies.

A lot of directors and producers started setting up their own shingles to produce and control films following World War II. John Ford and Capra both did this, amongst many others. Companies like AIP were able to take advantage of the growing youth car culture, drive-ins, and a lack of cheap movies from the studios and made a killing. In the meantime the studios were slowly consuming themselves to death. Massive amounts of money began to be pumped into blockbuster style rereleases that would end up as road shows: Films like Ben-Hur, Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia etc. Without the stable income and profit of a monopoly's protected, (usually) risk-free product the studios turned to the strategy of hitting it big every now and then. Consider, before Sound of Music the two films to carry the highest grossing film of all time were Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Gone with the Wind, both produced by independent producers who took risks and developed a GREAT product, rather than producing an average-highquality product with little to no risk as the studios did. Suddenly the studios had to take bigger and bigger risks, to keep up with the blockbuster market. This one-up-manship soon resulted in some studios gambling their entire assets on one film (like Cleopatra), combine this with the executive chaos and no clear studio leadership and you had the potential for disaster. After Sound of Music the title changed relatively swiftly, Exorcist, The Godfather, Jaws, Star Wars, E.T.

Every single one of those films are genre pictures, the B pictures the studios had stopped producing. There was a hunger for strong genre material, like horror or Gangster films (or scifi) of a higher caliber, and a few filmmakers delivered. What Friedkin, Coppola, Spielberg, and Lucas did was deliver entertaining B-genre movies with A-caliber/quality/satisfaction for a fraction the price of bloated budget A-list epic productions (intended for the road show venue) that could be distributed WIDELY. The studios noticed they made more money more quickly when they opened in more theatres. So they started doing that more.

But notice that the 80s are not exactly a glut of films mimicking the success of the seventies. That's because films like Star Wars and Jaws were still very expensive to make, the studios couldn't make only those, or they would repeat exactly the mistakes that nearly deep sixed the industry when their predecessors took the studios sky diving with only one parachute.

Enter President Ronald Reagan. Ahh the glories of de-regulation, kids can now be programmed and wired with virtually unlimited advertisements (saturday morning cartoons are born, while the saturday morning matinee dies out quickly) and mergers that those pesky old laws Teddy Roosevelt enacted (hundreds of years ago!) would have prevented are suddenly possible via the loophole (aka special interest grease/legalized bribery). Disney swallows ABC, Turner Warner and MGM go crazy, billionaires get all mixed up... cycle and repeat to the modern mutlinational corporation. Movie studios are now only a division of a much larger daddy organization that sees Golden $ in giant profit-engorged hits like T2, Jurassic Park, and Titanic. It's in the late nineties that we start seeing the modern blockbuster, the moment when studios have the ability to absorb losses and protect their product from risks in a manner that hadn't been available for fifty years.

But after all it's all Steven Spielberg's fault.

---
Adam

 

[Robert Crawford]

A decision that basically sounded the death march for the studio system.

Adam,
You sound just like a real film school student.







Crawdaddy