5 Favorite Directors

1) Martin Scorcese, 2)Stanley Kubrick, 3)Alfred Hitchcock, 4)Quentin Tarantino and
5)Steven Spielberg


I have wanted to be a director since I was 12. So I have studied directors, their different styles and their influences over society. So, since I'm un-original, when Kyle did a blog about his favorite directors I decided to do my own, shorter, list. Here it is. This was very difficult each director I had to judge on how many of their films I've enjoyed, who I think is the best, and who has inspired me the most to be a director

5) Steven Spielberg:

This man has rocked since his first movie "Duel" and to this day the man continues making great films. Spielberg is probably the most known director in the world. Very little people know even what a director does, but everybody knows Spielberg. His name is synonomous with great films. He has done comedies ("The Terminal") to well... any other genre. Not only has he done every genre, but everytime he does he creates a great film, if not a classic, for each genre. He has created the two best World War II films ("Schindler's List", "Saving Private Ryan"), one of the best horror films ever ("Jaws"), the best action trilogy ever (Indiana Jones trilogy), and some of the best scifi films ever ("Close Encounters of the Third Kind", "E.T".) Even his "bad" films are extremely entertaining and the man seems to just turn crap into gold even this late in his career. I cannot simply wait for "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull."

4) Quentin Tarantino

The early 90's showed a great outflowing of great young directors: Rich Linklater, Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez and the Coen Brothers. Some were visually oriented (Robert Rodriguez), some were dialouge oriented (Kevin Smith, Rich Linklater) there were two that had both, the Coen Brothers and Quentin Tarantino. It was a hard choice for this slot between the two, but I made my choice and it is Tarantino because well... I just perfer Tarantino. This guy knows plot structure and he knows how to manipulate it and he knows how to write great dialouge. Every line he writes pops, it is lucky he has always had great actors to surround him. I mean, this is a guy who got Harvey Keitel to produce his first film ("Reservoir Dogs") because Keitel wanted to play a role in it so badly that he was willing to do whatever possible to get it made. His use of story structure is what gained him fame and what keeps him going today. In "Reservoir Dogs" he tells us the entire story in the first scene in what seems like a simple little discussion about pop culture. Then he tells the story in chunks and allows us to become more and more involved with these characters. Pulp Fiction mixes three different story lines at one time and what appears in one scene might be totally different than what it appears. Foxy Brown... was a regular movie and the Kill Bill debacle was just that... a debacle. Then he returned to form with "Death Proof" where he messed with the formula for a slasher film and created one intense second half.

3) Alfred Hitchcock

What is there to be said about a man who has film classes dedicated to his work. He always knows what to do with the camera and he creates deep solid characters. This is a man who did two films that are set in one room and made them incredibly scary. "Rear Window" in the hands of any other man would have failed miserably. It would have lost steam very early, but Hitchcock keeps us with the character, we know all that we know, until half way through where he shows us more than the main character. From that point on we are one step ahead and it makes us more terrified for our main character concluding in the explosive finale. In Pyscho we are watching a fairly basic crime thriller for the first 30 minutes until our main character and star, who we grow to love, is murdered in the shower sequence. From that point on we are left with who we think is a very nice guy left in a crappy situation. Hitchcock did have some failures in his early career and that is why he is so low on the list for this master.

2) Stanely Kubrick

Fans of literature who feel that books need to be directly translated should HATE this man. He made his career off of being an incredible director while "mutilating books." Truthfully, while his books are bad WORD FOR WORD translations, they are great thematic translations (except for "The Shining" but that is still an incredible movie). This is a man who turned a book about the realistic chances of a nuclear war to one of the best comedies of all time ("Dr. Strangelove") and took over "Spartacus" half way through and created one of the best epics of all time. He olds, in my opinion, the award for the best scifi movie of all time: "Clockwork Orange." All of his movies are dark facinating looks at strange circumstances surrounding regular people of the world they are in and the effects of the circumstances. It is always about the characters and he has done many awesome films and even though he went out with a failure (the soft core porno wrapped as a movie "Eyes Wide Shut") he will always be known as a pure and utter genious.

1) Martin Scorcese:

Yes, Scorcese began with two bad movies, but his career really began with "Mean Streets" the first of his unofficial italian gangster trilogy. Scorcese is best when he is given a character to get to deeply know. "Mean Streets" was all about somebody who wanted to be a gangster, but couldn't, "GoodFellas" was about a middle class gangster and "Casino" was about upper class gangsters. Even though he is known for his gangster films, his best film, which is also the best movie of all time in my opinion, is "Raging Bull." Scorcese crafted such a deeply tragic film about a man who will do whatever to become the middle-class champ and once he gets it, how his life no longer has a point. This is one of his 8 collaborations with DeNiro and it gave DeNiro one of his Oscars. This film expands on everything that Scorcese had set up with "Taxi Driver" another film. Both films work as great companion pieces with each other as well as "The Last King of Comedy" and "The Aviator" but niether of these films are as good. The reason "Taxi Driver" and "Raging Bull" work so well together though, is it shows Scorcese's great symbolism. In "Raging Bull" each boxing scene symbolized the time in his life. In fact, the scene where he throws the fight was show with flames in front of the lenses to make it seem like he was boxing in his own hell. In "Taxi Driver" there is a scene where DeNiro is on the phone begging his girlfriend to come back to him and the camera quickly focuses on the hall next to him because the phone call was "too hard to watch."

So there they are, my 5 favorite directors of all time. Go out and rent a film of theirs.

My recommendations:

5 - Spielberg - "Schindler's List"

4 - Tarantino - "Reservoir Dogs"

3 - Hitchcock - "Rear Window"

2 - Kubrick - "A Clockwork Orange"

1 - Scorcese - "Raging Bull"