With so many incredible directors out there, it’s hard to pick a favourite. There are your living legends Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, directors with a specific style or genre like Tim Burton and Wes Anderson and then blockbuster directors like Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino.
Female directors are accounting for some of the most successful and creative films in the industry. Greta Gerwig who turned from acting to directing, is making waves with her features including Barbie, Ladybird and Little Women. Sofia Coppola is also an iconic director who started out in acting, with works including Lost in Translation, Priscilla and The Virgin Suicides. Forbes has listed its greatest directors of all time – has your favourite made the list? Here are the top 10 directors of all time as selected by Forbes.
10. Chantal Akerman
Best known for her films Jeanne Dielman, News from Home (1976) and Je Tu Il Elle (1974), Belgian Feminist avant-garde filmmaker Chantal Akerman has been helmed as a “directors’ director” due to her influence on cinema. She is responsible not only for films but also art exhibitions, various documentaries and also short films. She topped the BFIs Sight and Sound list in 2022 for her film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.
9. Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini was nominated for 17 Oscars and won a record four in the Best Foreign Language Film category. He is best known for works including La Dolce Vita (1960), 8½ (1963) and Roma (1972). Prior to his 50-year career Fellini dropped out of law school and began working in radio. He later became involved with the neorealist Italian film movement, but is best known for his art films that followed this era.
8. Satyajit Ray
Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray is widely known for The Apu Trilogy (1955–1959), The Music Room (1958) and the Goopy–Bagha trilogy. Hiswork had also been inspired bythe Italian neorealist movement but he crafted a style of his own through his use of traditional Indian music, meticulous editing and using actors from a diverse range of backgrounds. Francis Ford Coppola and Christopher Nolan have cited Ray as an influence to their work.
7. Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick is a renowned filmmaker with a huge legacy including A Clockwork Orange (1971), Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). He was notorious forbeing difficult to work with as a director. Kubrick won very few awards for his work but was nominated for 13 Oscars. However, despite this, he has inspired many directors to follow suit in his directing style, especially when it comes to camerawork and framing.
6. Wong Kar-wai
Hong Kong-based filmmaker Wong Kar-wai is best known for films is best known for his films Chungking Express (1994), Happy Together (1997) and In the Mood for Love (2000), but he got his start in TV. He has influenced many other directors including Quentin Tarantino, and this was due to his tendancy to create often feature broken narrative structures, use of bold saturation, pop music and step-printing, a process which alters film rates.
5. Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock has been labelled as the “Master of Suspense” and directed mroe than 50 films in his decades-long career. His legacy is however largely tainted due to his treatment of female leads. He is best known for Rebecca (1940), which earned him his first of five Academy Award nominations for Best Director, alongside Suspicion (1941) and Dial M for Murder (1954).
4. Jean-Luc Godard
The Swiss-born director Jean-Luc Godard was a pillar of French New Wave cinema. His filmography includes Breathless (1960), Contempt (1963) and Masculin Féminin (1966). He was famous for giving his actors free reign to explore their performances and was known to begin filming with unfinished scripts. Godard liked to play with narrative, continuity, sound and camerawork in many of his works especially jump cuts.
3. Frank Capra
Frank Capra’s films largely captured the idealism of what America could be in the 1930s and 1940s. He began working in silent comedies but his best known works include You Can’t Take It with You (1938), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). He emigrating to America from Sicily at five years old and went on to win five Oscars and earn lifetime achievement awards from the American Film Institute and the Directors Guild of America in his career.
2. Billy Wilder
Billy Wilder started his career writing scripts in Germany. Austrian born, many of Wilder’s family members were killed by the Nazis. After he left Germany in the 1930s, Wilder has cemeted himself as one of Hollywood’s greats by the 1940s. Someof his most well-known works include Sunset Boulevard (1950), Sabrina (1954) and Some Like It Hot (1959). He was nominated for 21 Oscars, and won six, including two for Best Director.
1. Akira Kurosawa
Most famous for Seven Samurai, across a 60-year career Kurosawa worked across genres on books, TV and theatre as well. As well as classic samurai fare, he gainged recognition for noirish dramas like Drunken Angel (1948), period pieces like Rashomon (1950) and riveting crime flicks like High and Low (1963). He helped to popularise Japanese films in the West and many other notable directors described him favourably. Kurosawa started working for Photo Chemical Laboratories (which later became Japan’s Toho Studios) in 1936 at the age of 25.