Your favourite directors

Evening all,

A pretty self-explanatory thread to go alongside the favourite actors/films equivalents, this one to list your favourite directors in film. As for me, I've bumped up my usual top 7 to a upper echolon of 16 directors...

Richard Brooks - 6 films seen (top pick: ELMER GANTRY)
Michael Curtiz - 17 (MILDRED PIERCE)
John Frankenheimer - 8 (THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE)
Howard Hawks - 11 (RIO BRAVO)
Alfred Hitchcock - 32 (VERTIGO)
Elia Kazan - 12 (EAST OF EDEN)
Sergio Leone - 4 (ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST)
Otto Preminger - 10 (ANATOMY OF A MURDER)
Nicholas Ray - 7 (REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE)
Mark Robson - 8 (PEYTON PLACE)
Don Siegel - 9 (THE KILLERS)
Douglas Sirk - 7 (A TIME TO LOVE AND A TME TO DIE)
John Sturges - 14 (THE GREAT ESCAPE)
Billy Wilder - 14 (DOUBLE INDEMNITY)
Robert Wise - 11 (THE SOUND OF MUSIC)
William Wyler - 9 (THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES)

Alternatively, you might like to go for it FourDot style and do some Director-o-meters, or stimulate some discussion the conventional way. :)

EDIT - forgot Howard Hawks.

Alphabetical order seems easiest.

Robert Aldrich, Dario Argento, Roy Ward Baker Street, Luis Bunuel, John Carpenter, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Gerard Damiano, Brian De Palma, Cy Endfield, David Fincher, Terence Fisher, Georges Franju, John Frankenheimer, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Hamer, Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Hodges, Seth Holt, Simon Lindsay Honey, Elias Kazan, John Krisch, Sergio Leone, David Lynch, Alexander Mackendrick, Michael Mann, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, Roman Polanski, Michael Powell, Michael Reeves, Leni Riefenstahl, Ridley Scott, Don Siegel, Alan Smithee, Andrei Tarkovsky, Lars von Trier, Paul Verhoeven, and Terry Zwigoff.

Michelangelo Antonioni
Jean-Luc Godard
Elia Kazan
Jerry Lewis
Alain Resnais
Josef von Sternberg

After that, there's probably quite a few I'd like to mention. But I wouldn't put them in the same bracket as those five.

Ingmar Bergman, Frank Borzage, Robert Bresson, Frank Capra, Federico Fellini, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, John Huston, Buster Keaton, Fritz Lang*, Vincente Minnelli, F.W. Murnau, Brian de Palma, Roman Polanski, Michael Powell, Jean Renoir*, Martin Scorsese, Frank Tashlin, Luchino Visconti, Raoul Walsh, Orson Welles, Wim Wenders, Wong Kar-wai.

*I really dig Lang and Renoir, but I still have so much left to watch. They may well end up cracking that top tier after all, but it depends on how many more films I see that are the same quality as Scarlet Street or Toni.

My favourite directors are the Soviet-era trio of Georgiy Daneliya, Mark Zakharov and Eldar Ryazanov, all of whom not only directed lyrical comedies that touched the hearts of most Russian people, but who also were great people. From Western directors, it's hard not to admire the filmographies of Coppola, Lean, Kubrick, Leone, Hitchcock, Polanski, Gilliam, Nolan, Scott, Spielberg, Scorsese, Fellini, and many others. However, I don't always feel I can connect with whatever visions they have. Coppola is probably my favourite director from that group.

At the moment, my personal ten would be as follows:

INGMAR BERGMAN
CARL THEODOR DREYER
JEAN-LUC GODARD
STANLEY KUBRICK
FRITZ LANG
GEORG WILHELM PABST
ALAIN RESNAIS
ANDRE TARKOVSKY
ORSON WELLES
KAR-WAI WONG

As of now, Welles in first place

So many brilliant directors. If I had to pick my top 5 favorite directors, it'd look like this:

1. Hitchcock
2. Truffaut
3. De Palma
4. Kubrick
5. Lynch

And the rest:

Welles, Polanski, Argento, Chabrol, Clouzot, Bunuel, Scorsese, Ridley Scott, Powell, Godard, Carpenter, Tarkovsky, Leone, Don Siegel, Bunuel, Wilder, Malle, John Frankenheimer, David Lean, Verhoeven, Gilliam, Mann, Cronenberg, Roeg, Kazan, Fritz Lang

And Michael Bay.

I have favorite films more than I have favorite directors. I can say that Elia Kazan and Howard Hawks appeal to me. Kazan for his sense of life, and Hawks for his economy and for the attitude of films like ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS, RED RIVER, and RIO BRAVO.

I like John Huston for his... I don't know what to call it. And Polanski for his sensibilities.

Hitchcock is a no brainer.

Billy Wilder is a big one, and I like him as much for his writing talent as for him as a filmmaker. I like his sense of humor.

David Lynch. Dennis Hopper called him an American surrealist.

The White Tuxedo wrote:

I have favorite films more than I have favorite directors.

I find I'm increasingly the opposite. Within a director's oeuvre I have my favourites (I'm incredibly keen on Lang's SCARLET STREET, for example) but I'm mostly interested in the body of work created by interesting individuals. The basic unit is always the film, but the way an artist develops and the system of cinematic expression they create fascinates me.

Over the last year Josef von Sternberg has pretty much cemented himself as my favourite filmmaker. I love everything about his style, which is expressed in its most perfect form in BLONDE VENUS, THE SCARLET EMPRESS, and THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN - pure unashamed melodrama (Sirk is another favourite) with often absurd plots and moments of camp, photographed by a man with unparalleled compositional ability. Need to grab the Criterion boxset and MACAO, but after that I'm afraid most of his extant work is unavailable.