Favorite directors
by TauCetiAlpha | created - 7 months ago | updated - 3 months ago | Public
1. Walerian Borowczyk
Director | Docteur Jekyll et les femmes
Born in Kwilcz, Poland, Walerian Borowczyk trained as a painter and lithographer, winning Poland's National Prize in 1953. He began his film career as a film poster designer, then started making short animated films in the late 1950s. Moving to France in the early 1960s, he gained a reputation as a...
2. Luis Buñuel
Writer | Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie
The father of cinematic Surrealism and one of the most original directors in the history of the film medium, Luis Buñuel was given a strict Jesuit education (which sowed the seeds of his obsession with both religion and subversive behavior), and subsequently moved to Madrid to study at the ...
3. J. Lee Thompson
Director | The Guns of Navarone
J. Lee Thompson was born on August 1, 1914 in Bristol, England, UK. He was a director and writer, known for The Guns of Navarone (1961), Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957) and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972). He was married to Penny Thompson, Florence (Bill) Bailey, Lucille Kelly and Joan ...
4. Sam Firstenberg
Director | One More Chance
Since 1980 Sam Firstenberg has been in the independent filmmaking field. Directing 22 theatrical feature films since completing his graduate studies in film at Loyola Marymount University. One More Chance (1981), starring Kirstie Alley, won prizes in major film festivals and sparked the beginning ...
5. Bruce Beresford
Director | Driving Miss Daisy
Bruce Beresford was born in Australia and graduated from Sydney University in 1962. He served as Film Officer for the British Film Institute Production Board from 1966-1971 and as a Film Advisor to the Arts Council of Great Britain. Beresford has also directed several operas including Girl Of The ...
6. Stewart Raffill
Writer | Passenger 57
Stewart Raffill's career includes 57 film and TV credits and 11 industry awards. As a writer/director he has worked with Academy Award and Emmy Award-winning talent. His films have been distributed by MGM/UA, 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Disney ABC, New World Pictures, Orion, Netflix, ...
7. William Lustig
Actor | Army of Darkness
William Lustig was born on February 1, 1955 in Bronx, New York. During his teenage years, Lustig avidly watched a huge volume of lowdown trashy exploitation fare at numerous 42nd Street grind house theaters in Manhattan and also worked as a movie theater usher in Fort Lee, New Jersey. After ...
8. Eddie Romero
Director | Ganito kami noon... Paano kayo ngayon?
Eddie Romero, who initially used the screen name 'Enrique Moreno' early in his directing career, was born July 7 1924 in Dumaguete City. He is the son of Pilar Cinco, a school teacher, and José E. Romero, a former congressman, Secretary of Education, and Philippine Ambassador to London. He was ...
9. Cirio H. Santiago
Director | Water Lily
Producer/director Cirio H. Santiago is the son of Dr. Ciriaco Santiago, who founded Premiere Productions in Manila in 1946. He has two siblings. After starting out as a producer he started directing English-language movies in the early 70s. Santiago became one of the pioneers of the "Blaxploitation...
10. David Cronenberg
Actor | The Fly
David Cronenberg, also known as the King of Venereal Horror or the Baron of Blood, was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in 1943. His father, Milton Cronenberg, was a journalist and editor, and his mother, Esther (Sumberg), was a piano player. After showing an inclination for literature at an early...
11. Stuart Gordon
Writer | Re-Animator
Stuart Gordon started his film directing career in 1985. After graduating from Lane Technical High School, Gordon worked as a commercial artist apprentice prior to enrolling at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Unable to get into the film classes, he enrolled in an acting class and ended up ...
12. Terence Young
Director | Dr. No
Born in Shanghai and Cambridge-educated, Terence Young began in the industry as a scriptwriter. In the 1940s he worked on a variety of subjects, including the hugely popular wartime romance Suicide Squadron (1941), set to Richard Addinsell's rousing "Warsaw Concerto". His original story was devised...
13. Basil Dearden
Director | Sapphire
A former stage director, Basil Dearden entered films as an assistant to director Basil Dean (he changed his name from Dear to avoid being confused with Dean). Dearden worked his way up the ladder and directed (with Will Hay) his first film in 1941; two years later he directed his first film on his ...
14. Leslie Howard
Actor | Pygmalion
Leslie Howard Steiner was born in London to Lilian (Blumberg) and Ferdinand "Frank" Steiner. His father was a Hungarian Jewish immigrant, and his English mother was of German Jewish and mostly English descent. Leslie went to Dulwich College, then worked as a bank clerk until the outbreak of World ...
15. Ken Annakin
Director | The Longest Day
A former salesman and journalist, Ken Annakin got into the film industry making documentary shorts. His feature debut, Holiday Camp (1947), was a comedy about a Cockney family on vacation. It was made for the Rank Organization and was a modest success, spawning three sequels, all of which he ...
16. Abbas Kiarostami
Writer | Copie conforme
Abbas Kiarostami was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1940. He graduated from university with a degree in fine arts before starting work as a graphic designer. He then joined the Center for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, where he started a film section, and this started his career ...
17. Ken Russell
Director | The Devils
Ken Russell tried several professions before choosing to become a film director; he was a still photographer and a dancer and he even served in the Army, but film was his destiny. He began by making several short films which paved the way for his brilliant television films of the 1960s that are ...
18. Robert Wise
Director | West Side Story
Robert Earl Wise was born on September 10, 1914 in Winchester, Indiana, the youngest of three sons of Olive R. (Longenecker) and Earl Waldo Wise, a meat packer. His parents were both of Pennsylvania Dutch (German) descent. At age nineteen, the avid moviegoer came into the film business through an ...
19. W.S. Van Dyke
Director | The Thin Man
For the better part of his career, Woodbridge Strong Van Dyke lived up to his sobriquet "One-Take Woody" by steadfastly adhering to his credo of shooting each scene as quickly and efficiently as possible. Over his 25-year career, he economically directed over 90 diverse entertainments, which not ...
20. William A. Wellman
Director | A Star Is Born
William Wellman, the Oscar-winning screenwriter-director of the original A Star Is Born (1937), was called "Wild Bill" during his World War I service as an aviator, a nickname that persisted in Hollywood due to his larger-than-life personality and lifestyle.
A leap-year baby born in 1896 on the 29th...
21. Roger Corman
Actor | The Silence of the Lambs
Roger William Corman was born April 5, 1926, in Detroit, Michigan. Initially following in his father's footsteps, Corman studied engineering at Stanford University but while in school, he began to lose interest in the profession and developed a growing passion for film. Upon graduation, he worked a...
22. Nicholas Ray
Director | Rebel Without a Cause
Nicholas Ray was born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle in 1911, in small-town Galesville, Wisconsin, to Lena (Toppen) and Raymond Joseph Kienzle, a contractor and builder. He was of German and Norwegian descent. Ray's early experience with film came with some radio broadcasting in high school. He left the ...
23. Philippe Mora
Director | Mad Dog Morgan
Philippe Mora is a highly talented artist and film-maker with an impressive resume to boast of. He was born in Paris in 1949 to Georges and Mirka Mora, who moved to Melbourne, Australia in 1951. There the elder Moras became very important local artistic and cultural figures. Georges was an art ...
24. Richard Pepin
Producer | Mindstorm
Born in Canada, Richard Pepin is known for directing and producing together with director Joseph Merhi with the PM Entertainment Group which he co-owned many action, fantasy and martial arts films between the 80s and 90s distributed for the direct circuit -to-video; Pepin unlike his colleague has ...
25. Brian Trenchard-Smith
Director | The Man from Hong Kong
Brian Trenchard-Smith is an Anglo Australian film and television director, producer, and writer, with a reputation for large scale movies on small scale budgets, many of which display a quirky sense of humor that has earned him a cult following. Quentin Tarantino referred to him in Entertainment ...
26. Michael Powell
Director | Peeping Tom
The son of Thomas William Powell and Mabel (nee Corbett). Michael Powell was always a self-confessed movie addict. He was brought up partly in Canterbury ("The Garden of England") and partly in the south of France (where his parents ran a hotel). Educated at Kings School, Canterbury and Dulwich ...
27. Tom Gries
Director | Will Penny
Georgetown University-educated Thomas Stephen Gries was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Ruth Marie (Gluck), an advertising copywriter and actress, and Joseph Charles Gries. He returned from service with the US Marines in WW II and worked as a reporter for a Chicago newspaper. Traveling to Hollywood ...
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