100 Greatest Directors (and Leone's Recommendation)

1. Charles Chaplin (Limelight)
2. Jean Renoir (Le Marseillaise)
3. Carl Theodore Dreyer (Gertrud)
4. Orson Welles (The Magnificent Ambersons)
5. Alfred Hitchcock (The 39 Steps)
6. John Ford (Young Mr. Lincoln)
7. Akira Kurosawa (Dersu Uzala)
8. Stanley Kubrick (Eyes Wide Shut)
9. Sergei Eisenstein (Alexander Nevsky)
10. F.W. Murnau (Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans)
11. D.W. Griffith (Intolerance)
12. Federico Fellini (Fellini’s Roma)
13. Jean-Luc Godard (First Name: Carmen)
14. Luis Bunuel (That Obscure Object of Desire)
15. Ingmar Bergman (Shame)
16. Billy Wilder (The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes)
17. Robert Bresson (A Gentle Woman)
18. Andrei Tarkovsky (Nostalghia)
19. Fritz Lang (Dr. Mabuse The Gambler)
20. Howard Hawkes (Only Angels Have Wings)
21. John Cassavetes (Love Streams)
22. Buster Keaton (Steamboat Bill Jr.)
23. Martin Scorsese (Boxcar Bertha)
24. David Lean (Brief Encounter)
25. Vittorio De Sica (Garden of the Finzi-Continis)
26. Yasujiro Ozu (A Story of Floating Weeds)
27. Michelangelo Antonioni (The Passenger)
28. Francois Truffaut (The Last Metro)
29. Kenji Mizoguchi (The Crucified Lovers)
30. Steven Spielberg (The Sugarland Express)
31. John Huston (Under the Volcano)
32. Francis Ford Coppola (Apocalypse Now)
33. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger (The Red Shoes)
34. Satyajit Ray (Panther Panchali)
35. Woody Allen (Radio Days)
36. Luchino Visconti (Death in Venice)
37. Frank Capra (Pocketful of Miracles)
38. Kon Ichikawa (Fires on the Plain)
39. Roberto Rossellini (The Taking of Power by Louis XIV)
40. Roman Polanski (Repulsion)
41. Sergei Parajanov (Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors)
42. Michael Curtiz (The Mad Genius)
43. Ernst Lubitsch (The Smiling Lieutenant)
44. Erich von Stroheim (Foolish Wives)
45. Frank Borzage (Man’s Castle)
46. Stan Brakhage (Dog Star Man)
47. Stanley Donen (Charade)
48. Max Ophuls (Le Plaisir)
49. Louis Malle (Lacombe, Lucien)
50. Sergio Leone (Duck You Sucker)
51. George Cukor (Camille)
52. Shohei Imamura (Vengeance is Mine)
53. Jean Vigo (L’Atalante)
54. Robert Altman (Short Cuts)
55. Victor Fleming (Joan of Arc)
56. Alain Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad)
57. Rainer Werner Fassbinder (The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant)
58. Hiroshi Teshigahara (The Face of Another)
59. Krzysztof Kieslowski (Camera Buff)
60. G.W. Pabst (The Threepenny Opera)
61. Douglas Sirk (Imitation of Life)
62. Preston Sturges (Hail the Conquering Hero)
63. Werner Herzog (Nosferatu the Vampire)
64. Sam Peckinpah (Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia)
65. Nicholas Ray (The Savage Innocents)
66. Jacques Tati (Mon Oncle)
67. Pier Paolo Pasolini (Accattone!)
68. Jean Cocteau (Blood of a Poet)
69. Rene Clair (Le Million)
70. Leo McCarey (Going My Way)
71. Milos Forman (Loves of a Blonde)
72. Ridley Scott (Alien)
73. Bernardo Bertolucci (Novencento)
74. Carol Reed (Oliver!)
75. Alexander Dovzhenko (Arsenal)
76. Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock)
77. Mike Leigh (All or Nothing)
78. Vsevelod Pudovkin (Mother)
79. Josef von Sternberg (The Devil is a Woman)
80. David Lynch (Twin Peaks)
81. Quentin Tarantino (Jackie Brown)
82. Elia Kazan (A Face in the Crowd)
83. Mario Bava (Blood and Black Lace)
84. Jacques Rivette (Celine and Julie Go Boating)
85. Bela Tarr (The Prefab People)
86. Eric Rohmer (Claire’s Knee)
87. Theo Angelopoulos (Landscape in the Mist)
88. Vincent Minnelli (The Bad and the Beautiful)
89. Jean Pierre Melville (Le Doulos)
90. Abbas Kiarostami (Close Up)
91. Mike Nichols (Silkwood)
92. John Frankenheimer (Seconds)
93. Wong Kar Wai (Happy Together)
94. Terrence Malick (The Thin Red Line)
95. Nicholas Roeg (Don’t Look Now)
96. Wim Wenders (Until the End of the World)
97. Lars von Trier (The Idiots)
98. Charles Burnett (To Sleep With Anger)
99. Chantal Akerman (Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles)
100. Andrzej Wajda (Danton)
101. Victor Sjostrom (The Phantom Carriage)
102. Hou Hsiao Hsien (City of Sadness)
103. Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man)
104. Paul Thomas Anderson (Punch Drunk Love)
105. Marcel Carne (Children of Paradise)

Honorable Mentions (in no particular order)

Mohsen Makhmalbaf (A Moment of Innocence)
Hal Ashby (The Last Detail)
Alejandro Jodorowsky (Santa Sangre)
Guy Maddin (My Winnipeg)
John Woo (Hard Boiled)
Sidney Lumet (The Pawn Broker)
The Coen Brothers (Raising Arizona)
Edward Yang (A Brighter Summer’s Day)
Mikio Naruse (When a Woman Ascends the Stairs)
Nagisa Oshima (Empire of Passion)
Miklos Jansco (Red Psalm)
Jerzy Skolimowski (Deep End)
Elim Klimov (Come and See)
Dario Argento (Demons)
Ousmane Sembene (Baraka)
Peter Greenaway (A Zed & Two Noughts)
Tsai Ming Liang (The Wayward Cloud)
Senjin Suzuki (Tokyo Drifter)
Paul Morrissey (Trash)
Jan Svankmajer (Faust)
Pedro Almodovar (Matador)
Jacques Tourneur (The Leopard Man)
John Schlesinger (Billy Liar)
Claire Denis (Beau Travail)
David Cronenberg (Crash)
Spike Lee (Jungle Fever)
Steve James (Stevie)
Aleksandr Sokurov (Alexandria)
Aki Kaurismaki (I Hired a Contract Killer)
Carlos Saura (Carmen)
Jacques Demy (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg)
Patrick Bokanowski (L’Ange)
Santiago Alvarez (Hora de los hornos)
Viktor Kosakovsky (Belovy)
Jonas Mekas (Mob of Angels at St. Anne)
Ken Loach (Riff-Raff)
Hayao Miyazaki (Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind)
Ken Russell (Women in Love)
Rouben Mamoulian (Blood and Sand)
Victor Erice (El Sur)
Bill Viola (The Passions)
Jan Nemec (Diamonds of the Night)
Tian Zhaungzhuang (The Horse Thief)
Georges Franju (Eyes Without a Face)
Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line)


- Edited by Leone

yeah this will need some work. Chaplin at number one bugs hella

Fuck the recommendations. At least these ones.

yeah alot of these recs are weird and obscure. The Sugarland Express recommended for Speilberg? Really?

Were these like recommendations of obscure films worth watching (because even then, a few of them aren't. "Sugarland Express" is a dull movie) or what Leone personally believed were the director's best films?

yeah those are just what you call "tr00" picks. I could list tr00 picks for a lot of directors, but he's able to list tr00 picks for damn near every director. Nigga had time in life

They weren't true picks, though, they're just esoteric picks. Dryer at 3 bugs me.

Eisenstein and Griffith need to be higher. Dreyer is probably too high but should remain in the top 10 for sure. If Chaplin isn't number one, it should probably be either Eisenstein or Griffith. I'm thinking this is probably correct for a top 9:

1. Griffith
2. Eisenstein
3. Chaplin
4. Hitchcock
5. Renoir
6. Ford
7. Welles
8. Murnau
9. Dreyer

I dont want to continue the mantra of "Just because they were first, doesn't mean they should be first; and more specifically, the industry at its whole does not cite the earliest of Autuers as the greatest directors" but i think i should.

I don't think what the "industry" thinks (how can an industry think?) really matters. What do you think should be the top 10, and why?

yeah.... what about "the art medium"?

Industry as the directors that came after them, their collective opinions (as expressed through who they cite and call the greatest directors of all time)...neither have ever posted high acclaim from the directors of the next movement, so i think thats pretty important.

Top ten: Welles, Renoir, Hitchcock i think are the top tier directors. I could see arguments for any of them to be at the top, or in any other order.

Next: Ford, Kurosawa, Kubrick, Chaplin, Fellini; same as what i said before, but i would have it as i wrote it. Dont feel like going in depth, these are just my opinions and really you can sort of bend any set of criteria to have any of them ahead of the other.

Then a bunch of directors such as Dryer, Godard, Bergman, Bunuel and possibly a few others.

I don't really understand your method or what it's based on. Just the most popular directors among directors? Copypasta:
http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/top ... ctors.html

Nevermind then

personally i think we'd be better off making a pt kind of list but only with cool people