Your FIVE FAVOURITE DIRECTORS!

[Penk!]

Go on then!

I've been thinking about this a bit; specifically how my film-viewing tends to leap around so erratically between genre, period, nation and style, so that I very rarely discover a director and devour all their films. I more often watch one film and love it (or otherwise) then don't see another for ages.

Can you easily name five favourites off the top of your head?

[driftin]

Krzysztof Kieślowski 
David Lynch
David Cronenberg
Andrei Tarkovsky
Park Chan-wook

Maybe. Probably. Actually, I dunno. I'll change my mind if I don't press submit.

[naughty boy]

John Cassavetes
Martin Scorsese
Milos Forman
Richard Linklater
Robert Altman

and Billy Wilder and Ken Loach and Mike Leigh and Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Paul Thomas Anderson

[Darkness_Fish]

Off the top of my head, only three really spring immediately to mind:

Coen Brothers
Park Chan-Wook
Hitchcock

After that, I'm kinda scrabbling around a bit for directors by whom I've seen a few films, but haven't really enjoyed a massive run of films. People like William Friedkin, Kieslowski, Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Haneke, Kurosawa, Scorcese, Michael Bay, etc.

[Rayge]

Bergman Hitchcock peckinpah welles Eisenstein were the first five to come to mind. Bunuel, Dreyer and Coens maybe as runners-up.
dog I'm getting old

[Darkness_Fish]

Corn brothers

Not my kind of film, but each to their own...

[Jimbly]

Orson Welles
Alfred Hitchcock
David Lean
Stanley Kubrick
Sergio Leone

[toomanyhatz]

Off the top of my head:

Hitchcock
Ford
Chaplin
Capra
Bergman

...or something like that.

[toomanyhatz]

Not sure how I forgot Lean and Welles, though Welles was inconsistent (usually due to production decisions beyond his control, to be fair, but his maverick tendencies probably worked against him in a way that Ford and Hitchcock, for example, who got involved in the production end themselves early on, did a better job of working around).

Lean should probably be there, though I'm not sure who I'd replace. Maybe Capra, as much as I admire him.

[joels344]

1. Andrei Tarkovsky
2. Ingmar Bergman
3. Béla Tarr
4. Michelangelo Antonioni
5. Hiroshi Teshigahara

[toomanyhatz]

Resnais is 'bubbling under' on my list too, just based on the few I've seen. I really need to see more to properly judge how high up he'd be.

I need at least ten...

[algroth]

Probably something like...

1. Andrei Tarkovsky
2. Shohei Imamura
3. Bela Tarr
4. Wojciech Has
5. Masaki Kobayashi

Next five would be...

6. Alain Resnais
7. Hayao Miyazaki
8. Carl Th. Dreyer
9. Jacques Tati
10. Akira Kurosawa

[The Modernist]

1. Alfred Hitchcock
2. Jean - Pierre Melville
3. Nicholas Roeg
4. Billy Wilder
5. Martin Scorcese

[Snarfyguy]

Nicholas Roeg

Good call. I'll have him, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Kubrick and either Fritz Lang or David Lynch, I can't decide.

[GoogaMooga]

I have only decided on my top two, the ones I am fanatical about:

!. Howard Hawks
2. Nicholas Ray




One the master of genre filmmaking, and the other the master of widescreen and tormented souls.

[borofan]

Billy Wilder
Eric Rohmer
Jacques Tati
Luis Bunuel
Michael Powell

[Matt Wilson]

Ten would've been easier. However...

Welles
Hitchcock
Kubrick
Scorsese
Ford

[Brickyard Jack]

Truffaut
Coppola
Schlesinger
Huston
Hallstrom

[Samoan]

Terrence Malick
Robert Altman
Jane Campion
Francis Ford Coppola
Mike Leigh

[Jumper K]

Lindsay Anderson
Lewis Gilbert
Martin Ritt
Akira Kurasawa
Sergio Leone