The Top 250 Director of All Time according to 'They Shoot Pictures Don't They'

[slumcat]

NOTE 1: THIS LIST IS FOR ALL TIME, NOT JUST RECENT MOVIES
NOTE 2: THIS IS NOT THEIR OPINION, JUST A LIST THEY CAME UP WITH BY COLLECTING THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF CRITICS LIST OVER YEARS AND YEARS AND AGGREGATING THEM. SO THIS IS NOT ONE PERSON'S OPINION. IT IS A GENERAL CRITICAL CONSENSUS

http://www.theyshootpictures.com/

The red ones are still working. The blue ones are sort of working or recently retired.

What do you think of this list? I think it'll go well with Harry's Poll.

List your own Top 10

1. Alfred Hitchcock
2. Orson Welles
3. Stanley Kubrick
4. Federico Fellini
5. Jean-Luc Godard
6. Jean Renoir
7. John Ford
8. Akira Kurosawa
9. Francis Ford Coppola
10. Ingmar Bergman
11. Yasujiro Ozu
12. Martin Scorsese
13. Carl Theodor Dreyer
14. Luis Buñuel
15. Charles Chaplin
16. Andrei Tarkovsky
17. Robert Bresson
18. Billy Wilder
19. F.W. Murnau
20. Howard Hawks
21. Michelangelo Antonioni
22. Fritz Lang
23. Sergei Eisenstein
24. François Truffaut
25. Kenji Mizoguchi
26. Roberto Rossellini
27. David Lean
28. David Lynch
29. Vittorio De Sica
30. Luchino Visconti
31. Steven Spielberg
32. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
33. Woody Allen
34. Jean Vigo
35. Satyajit Ray
36. John Cassavetes
37. Ernst Lubitsch
38. Roman Polanski
39. Sergio Leone
40. Alain Resnais
41. Max Ophüls
42. D.W. Griffith
43. Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly
44. Robert Altman
45. Wong Kar-wai
46. Abbas Kiarostami
47. Buster Keaton
48. Terrence Malick
49. John Huston
50. Ridley Scott
51. Rainer Werner Fassbinder
52. Werner Herzog
53. Dziga Vertov
54. Pier Paolo Pasolini
55. Chris Marker
56. Jacques Tati
57. Sam Peckinpah
58. Michael Curtiz
59. Bernardo Bertolucci
60. Carol Reed
61. Marcel Carné
62. Preston Sturges
63. Krzysztof Kieslowski
64. Frank Capra
65. Victor Fleming
66. Vincente Minnelli
67. Nicholas Ray
68. Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
69. Leo McCarey
70. Erich von Stroheim
71. Béla Tarr
72. Douglas Sirk
73. Hou Hsiao-hsien
74. Nicolas Roeg
75. Wim Wenders
76. Chantal Akerman
77. Gillo Pontecorvo
78. Quentin Tarantino
79. Elia Kazan
80. Jacques Rivette
81. Edward Yang
82. Josef von Sternberg
83. Jean-Pierre Melville
84. Claude Lanzmann
85. Lars von Trier
86. Joseph L. Mankiewicz
87. Eric Rohmer
88. Milos Forman
89. George Cukor
90. David Cronenberg
91. Jacques Tourneur
92. Jacques Demy
93. William Wyler
94. Jean Eustache
95. Hayao Miyazaki
96. Victor Erice
97. Clint Eastwood
98. Claire Denis
99. Theo Angelopoulos
100. Sidney Lumet
101. Spike Lee
102. King Vidor
103. Paul Thomas Anderson
104. Michael Haneke
105. Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet
106. Jean Cocteau
107. Brian De Palma
108. Abel Gance
109. George Lucas
110. George A. Romero
111. James Cameron
112. Sergei Parajanov
113. Pedro Almodóvar
114. Michael Snow
115. Robert Flaherty
116. Glauber Rocha
117. Stan Brakhage
118. Otto Preminger
119. Ken Loach
120. Alexander Dovzhenko
121. Mikio Naruse
122. Peter Weir
123. Jane Campion
124. Alexander Mackendrick
125. Jim Jarmusch
126. Aleksandr Sokurov
127. Henri-Georges Clouzot
128. William Friedkin
129. Apichatpong Weerasethakul
130. Andrzej Wajda
131. John Carpenter
132. Raoul Walsh
133. Andy Warhol
134. Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack
135. Michael Powell
136. Elem Klimov
137. Hal Ashby
138. Michael Cimino
139. Ousmane Sembene
140. Terry Gilliam
141. Mike Leigh
142. Maurice Pialat
143. James Whale
144. Agnès Varda
145. Zhang Yimou
146. Louis Malle
147. Mike Nichols
148. Arthur Penn
149. Ritwik Ghatak
150. Samuel Fuller
151. Nagisa Oshima
152. Robert Wise
153. Djibril Diop Mambéty
154. G.W. Pabst
155. Mikhail Kalatozov
156. George Stevens
157. Michael Mann
158. Robert Aldrich
159. Rob Reiner
160. Terence Davies
161. Maya Deren
162. John Boorman
163. René Clair
164. Tod Browning
165. Tobe Hooper
166. Anthony Mann
167. Georges Méliès
168. Robert Hamer
169. Tsai Ming-liang
170. Manoel de Oliveira
171. Robert Zemeckis
172. Frank Borzage
173. Humphrey Jennings
174. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea
175. Joseph Losey
176. Bob Fosse
177. Robert Wiene
178. Shohei Imamura
179. Peter Bogdanovich
180. Don Siegel
181. Frederick Wiseman
182. Ben Sharpsteen
183. Emir Kusturica
184. Blake Edwards
185. Oliver Stone
186. Georges Franju
187. Victor Sjöström
188. Sydney Pollack
189. Todd Haynes
190. David Hand
191. Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne
192. Lindsay Anderson
193. David Fincher
194. Charles Burnett
195. Fei Mu
196. John Schlesinger
197. George Roy Hill
198. Tim Burton
199. Guru Dutt
200. Harold Ramis
201. Fred Zinnemann
202. Kenneth Anger
203. Ang Lee
204. Errol Morris
205. Gus Van Sant
206. Ken Russell
207. Jia Zhangke
208. Luis García Berlanga
209. Paul Verhoeven
210. Leni Riefenstahl
211. Monte Hellman
212. Ermanno Olmi
213. Louis Feuillade
214. John Woo
215. Richard Linklater
216. Francesco Rosi
217. Chen Kaige
218. Mel Brooks
219. Peter Kubelka
220. Jean Rouch
221. Jacques Becker
222. Peter Watkins
223. Jack Clayton
224. Boris Barnet
225. Robert Mulligan
226. Bob Rafelson
227. Edgar G. Ulmer
228. Jerry Lewis
229. Rouben Mamoulian
230. Peter Jackson
231. Dario Argento
232. King Hu
233. Alan J. Pakula
234. Sam Wood
235. Aki Kaurismäki
236. John Hughes
237. Marcel Ophüls
238. Peter Greenaway
239. Claude Chabrol
240. Mohsen Makhmalbaf
241. Frantisek Vlácil
242. Miklós Jancsó
243. Giuseppe Tornatore
244. Dennis Hopper
245. Seijun Suzuki
246. Dusan Makavejev
247. Masaki Kobayashi
248. Jonas Mekas
249. Mark Sandrich
250. Alejandro Jodorowsky

 

[slumcat]

If I were to list 10 right now I would list

(alphabetically)

Michaelangelo Antonioni
Federico Fellini
Michael Haneke
F.W. Murnau
Max Ophüls
Satyajit Ray
Alain Resnais
Béla Tarr
Luchino Visconti
Orson Welles

 

[DarkSovereignty]

I don't care for Kubrick so I'm glad to see him ranked below Hitchcock and Welles and, totally agree with hitchcock being number 1

 

[slumcat]

I don't care for Kubrick so I'm glad to see him ranked below Hitchcock and Welles and, totally agree with hitchcock being number 1

This is the first year that Hitchcock has been no. 1. Welles had been no. 1 for like 10 years before that.

This is mainly in large part due to the fact that last year, famously, for the first time in 50 years, Vertigo finally displaced Citizen Kane as the critics choice for the greatest film ever made.

It was kinda a huge deal. Citizen Kane has been considered the greatest film ever made since the 1950's or round about.

 

[Rocketman]

Nolan isn't even on the list.

Not a legitimate list, in my opinion. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

Where's Frank Darabont? Sam Raimi? Darren Aronofsky?

John Woo ranks higher than Dario Argento and Peter Jackson??

John Hughes??
Dennis Hopper?
Jerry Lewis??

^ These guys are on the list, and Aronofsky, Darabont, Raimi, and Nolan aren't!?

No... just no.

 

[DarkSovereignty]

I'll give you Frank Darabont, but as for the others yeah no lol

 

[DarthSkywalker]

George Lucas is on the list. He is above Fincher. Peter Jackson is on the list. Look how low Scorsese and the Coen Bros are. In other words, it is joke. There is a clear and inherent bias to the 40-60s, and there would be considering how they gathered the info.

Scorsese would top the list for me without any doubt. He has more quality diversity then anyone, while arguably having the highest highs. Coppola in the top 10 is ridiculous imo. Coppola fell off a cliff after Now. So how is Coppola so high?
Off the top of my head,

Scorsese
Coen Bros
Kurosawa
Lean
Kubrick
Spielberg
Welles
Ozu
Hitchcock
Leone

 

[CapedCrusader14]

Pretty pathetic list.

 

[childeroland]

Interesting. Some oddities (Lucas, Nicholas Ray, De Palma and Ridley Scott way too high, Yang, Vigo, Kaige, Satajit Ray, Ophuls and Hou way too low, etc) some omissions (no Kim Ki-young or Park chan-wook, for example), but provocative. Not too bad.

 

[moviedoors]

If you really want to dig into film seriously, you could do much worse than to start with this list. That group of people offers up an embarrassment of riches.

 

[MrMaooz]

John Woo?

Please, the guy turned Mission: Impossible 2 into a weird ass kung fu movie.

 

[Blitzkrieg Bop]

That website is weird. The say Full Metal Jacket is a must watch, but A Clockwork Orange? Eh, if you've got the time.

 

[Evil Twin]

I think there's a good case to be made that John Woo's Hong Kong action films are the most influential action films of the last 30 years. Seriously, The Killer already cemented his legacy long ago.

I'm surprised that Chaplin and Keaton aren't right next to each other on the list.

 

[DirtyHarry]

The list is pretty eh. Sergio Leone is too low t:

Also, ↓↓↓↓

 

[slumcat]

George Lucas is on the list. He is above Fincher. Peter Jackson is on the list. Look how low Scorsese and the Coen Bros are. In other words, it is joke. There is a clear and inherent bias to the 40-60s, and there would be considering how they gathered the info.

Scorsese would top the list for me without any doubt. He has more quality diversity then anyone, while arguably having the highest highs. Coppola in the top 10 is ridiculous imo. Coppola fell off a cliff after Now. So how is Coppola so high?
Off the top of my head,

Scorsese
Coen Bros
Kurosawa
Lean
Kubrick
Spielberg
Welles
Ozu
Hitchcock
Leone

The list is aggregated by the great films made by a director.

Lucas has atleast two great films to his name Star Wars and American Garafitti, the former ranked very very highly.

And how is Scorsese low?????????? Look at the names above him! Infact I would rank him much lower, probably in the 40's or 50's.

There is no bias. These lists are collected from all of the world (not just for English movies) and over many years. This is how the consensus shook out.

And Coppola again has made stone cold great films all 4 of which rank very high, so it gives him a spot in the Top 10.

 

[chaseter]

Who takes the time to list out 250 directors?

 

[slumcat]

Interesting. Some oddities (Lucas, Nicholas Ray, De Palma and Ridley Scott way too high, Yang, Vigo, Kaige, Satajit Ray, Ophuls and Hou way too low, etc) some omissions (no Kim Ki-young or Park chan-wook, for example), but provocative. Not too bad.

Like I said Lucas gets his place because of Star Wars and Americna Grafitti.

And the French critics absolutely worshiped Ray. Ridley Scott gets his high spot by virtue of two of his films being ranked very high - Blade Runner and Alien.

 

[psylockolussus]

Where's Bryan Singer and Matthew Vaughn?

 

[slumcat]

Nolan isn't even on the list.

Not a legitimate list, in my opinion. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

Where's Frank Darabont? Sam Raimi? Darren Aronofsky?

John Woo ranks higher than Dario Argento and Peter Jackson??

John Hughes??
Dennis Hopper?
Jerry Lewis??

^ These guys are on the list, and Aronofsky, Darabont, Raimi, and Nolan aren't!?

No... just no.

Christopher Nolan, Aronofsky, Darabont, Raimi some of the greatest directors of all time.

The only way they could get on to the list is if they made films which can be considered some of the greatest of all time. And none of these guys have done that.

 

[slumcat]

John Woo?

Please, the guy turned Mission: Impossible 2 into a weird ass kung fu movie.

Lol that's not the John Woo film listed. The John Woo film listed is The Killer from 1989. And again Woo is highly regarded by French critics.

 

[slumcat]

I think there's a good case to be made that John Woo's Hong Kong action films are the most influential action films of the last 30 years. Seriously, The Killer already cemented his legacy long ago.

I'm surprised that Chaplin and Keaton aren't right next to each other on the list.

Chaplin is considered a much much greater DIRECTOR than Keaton. And remember this film is ranking film-making.

These are the films they list for Chaplin

CHARLES CHAPLIN - City Lights (1931 / USA / 86m / BW) ▪29
CHARLES CHAPLIN - Modern Times (1936 / USA / 89m / BW) ▪43
CHARLES CHAPLIN - Gold Rush, The (1925 / USA / 82m / BW) ▪63
CHARLES CHAPLIN - Great Dictator, The (1940 / USA / 128m / BW) ▪159
CHARLES CHAPLIN - Monsieur Verdoux (1947 / USA / 123m / BW) ▪265
CHARLES CHAPLIN - Kid, The (1921 / USA / 60m / BW) ▪324
CHARLES CHAPLIN - Limelight (1952 / USA / 145m / BW) ▪485
CHARLES CHAPLIN - Woman of Paris, A (1923 / USA / 81m / BW) ▪555
CHARLES CHAPLIN - Circus, The (1928 / USA / 72m / BW) ▪613

These are the films they list for Keaton

BUSTER KEATON & CLYDE BRUCKMAN - General, The (1926 / USA / 74m / BW) ▪36
BUSTER KEATON - Sherlock Jr. (1924 / USA / 44m / BW) ▪103
BUSTER KEATON & EDWARD SEDGWICK - Cameraman, The (1928 / USA / 69m / BW) ▪400
BUSTER KEATON & CHARLES F. REISNER - Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928 / USA / 71m / BW) ▪411
BUSTER KEATON & JOHN BLYSTONE - Our Hospitality (1923 / USA / 74m / BW) ▪545
BUSTER KEATON & DONALD CRISP - Navigator, The (1924 / USA / 59m / BW) ▪587
BUSTER KEATON - Seven Chances (1925 / USA / 56m / BW) ▪757

Keaton's films were co-directed often times. And Chaplin simply has more more masterpieces to his name.

 

[slumcat]

Pretty pathetic list.

Let's see your own then?

 

[childeroland]

Like I said Lucas gets his place because of Star Wars and Americna Grafitti.

And the French critics absolutely worshiped Ray. Ridley Scott gets his high spot by virtue of two of his films being very high - Blade Runner and Alien.

I love Star Wars, but ranking Lucas over some of the folks they did because of that film and Graffiti (over Pabst with pandoras box, diary of a lost girl, Loach with Kes, the King Kong directors, Whale with Frankenstein) and ranking Nicholas Ray that high (for what, possibly, Rebels Without a Cause -- another film I love, but still -- In a Lonely Place, or Johnny Guitar?) over von Stroheim, the director of Greed and Yang, director of Yi Yi and Brighter Summer Day? Odd, but not horrible or anything. I don't begrudge Lucas too much anyway, though it seems more like a personal favorites list I might have put together myself than a survey of film experts.

 

[dude stannis]

No John McTiernan? Pish posh I say!

 

[Lord]

Where's Ed Wood?