A Look at Ten of My Favorite Directors, Why I Revere Them and A Film that Sums them Up

Bergman with the great cinema photographer Sven Nykvist

In this post, I’m highlighting ten directors whose work I deeply admire. For each, I’ve chosen a single film that I believe best captures their unique voice, style, and impact on cinema. 

Ingmar Bergman. My favorite. An incredible body of work. The thinking man’s director. Cerebral stories that challenge us to contemplate but are beautiful to look at. Masterpieces like The Seventh Seal, Persona and the kaleidoscopic Fanny and Alexander. Bergman told extremely human stories about how people think, celebrate, suffer and make sense of the world. Bergman explored not just minds but souls. There were eccentrics, there were the mad but there were also the classic everyman/woman looking for love, looking for meaning looking for solace. He’s oeuvre is best summed up by Winter Light which, like other of his films, explores the frustration of God’s silence.

Woody Allen. Fifty films that range from classic comedies like Bananas, to serious meditations such as Match Point with many films like Manhattan straddling both worlds. Allen is a master of comedy but he can also tell Bergman-like stories of personal angst and self exploration. Also like Bergman, many of his movies center around relationships. Allen the director’s best friend is Allen the writer. He has given himself fantastic scripts to work with. He gets great performances from his casts -- especially women --ranging from Diane Keaton to Cate Blanchett to Penelope Cruz. His work is best summed up by Midnight in Paris. Beautifully shot, rich with great performance, an original premise, much humor and much to think about.

John Ford. I could be perfectly happy watching Ford films with no sound or subtitles. They are exquisitely shot whether you’re seeing the colorful Vista Vision of The Searchers or the glorious black and white of Young Mr. Lincoln. No one was better at framing a shot. He made the wide open spaces of Monument Valley even bigger by making the interiors so claustrophobic. His pacing was always perfect. You’d be hard-pressed to find a yawn in one his films. The wordless opening shot of The Long Voyage Home is one of the best in cinema as his poignant closing shot in The Searchers. Though not a Western, his work can be summed up by the brilliance of The Grapes of Wrath, a visual masterpiece that makes the oh-so human stories being told all the more memorable.

Preston Sturges. They all came out in one great rush in the first half of the 1940s. Several of the greatest screwball comedies ever made. From The Great McGinty to Hail the Conquering Hero Sturges made pictures that mixed highbrow wit with slapstick that never quite went over the top. He was another director who benefitted from his own screenplays. He was a master of telling unique stories: a comedy director who wants to make socially relevant films, a faux war hero being promoted by real heroes, a pregnant teen who doesn’t know who the father is, a nobody who goes from being political muscle to corrupt governor. They’re all fast-paced, fun and memorable. Sturges work is epitomized by The Lady Eve where a smart and sexy con artist (Barbara Stanwyck) seduces an ale scion (Henry Fonda). Hilarious complications ensue.

Aki Kaurismäki. He tells stories of resilience, people overcoming misfortunes (accidents, beatings, amnesia, poverty). His characters are not especially beautiful, far from glamorous. They are often stoic, outwardly placid, but always relatable. The great Finn’s films are a visual treat with beautiful color palettes and spot on framing. The stories are rich with irony but there’s nothing broad, no gratuitous violence no slapstick. The stories are simple yet compelling. Kaurismäki the director’s greatest asset is Kaurismäki the writer. His work is summed up in his most recent film, Fallen Leaves. Awkward love, hurdles for both main characters to clear, a Chaplinesque ending.

Martin Scorsese. You think of the gangster films or the gritty urban dramas like Taxi Driver. But the man also made Age of Innocence a sumptuous period piece with delicate and devastating performances from the likes of Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer. At his best in his early days Scorsese was a grand master of using the camera to better tell his stories. The freeze frames, the slow motion, the odd angles, were all used in service of enhancing the story-telling. Raging Bull is a great example. His films was always raw and honest. The best of the lot was Goodfellas which is for me the best directed film of all time. Scorsese brought all his talents to creating this indelible story so rich with memorable scenes and characters.

The Coen Brothers. The Big Lebowski, No Country For Old Men and A Serious Man. Three completely different films from the same creative minds. It’s as if they refuse to in anyway repeat themselves so they go out of their way to make something different every time. (Imagine the range of going from Blood Simple to Barton Fink.) The commonality in their pictures is that they’re all damn good and many are masterclasses in cinema. They avoid cliches like the plague. The originality in dialogue and the avoidance of standard cinematic tropes sets them apart. They’ve never been “Hollywood” directors which means they’ve always had the truth of their stories guide their story telling. Inside Llewyn Davis sums up their brilliance. It’s an unconventional story. A rising star who doesn’t rise, who indeed is hard to root for. They perfectly capture a moment in time which is revealed to us through a cadre of highly original characters.

Andrei Tarkovsky. In some respects the ultimate European art house director but one who never looked amateurish nor tried our patience. Films like Mirror and The Sacrifice invited us to think, challenged us to wonder but never left us confused. He could tell big stories like the epic Andrei Rublev or starker, simpler ones like Ivan’s Childhood. He had the brains of Bergman and the vision of Kurosawa. Tarkovsky mastered the simple shot that told so much. He let some scenes linger so we could catch our breath and he picked his spots well. I think Stalker is the ultimate Tarkovsky film. Smart, mysterious, asking us questions while giving us so much to soak in.

Federico Fellini. Where to start? Where to finish? What to include? Fellini’s film are so rich, so full of life, energy, people. Oh goodness the people.The glitterati, the intellectual, the talented, the precocious the interesting the grotesque, the bizarre. Sitting down to a Fellini movie is the cinematic equivalent of a royal banquet. See 8 1/2, La Dolce Vita, Amarcod. Even the simpler stripped down stories like La Strada contain so much. Laughter, pathos and the intellectually inspiring. To me his work is best summed up by Nights of Cabiria. A by turns heart-warming and tragic story told with both verve and empathy. The smile at the end says it all.

Sean Baker. Here’s another director who shows great respect for the human race. He does this in part by having characters who seem real, believable and are interesting. They are not all “good” people but for all their deficiencies there is humanity. Baker is a humanist director telling stories of people who have had a few breaks go against them but struggle on. Tangerine is about a transgender sex worker, Take Out follows a Chinese immigrant in New York making food deliveries, Starlet is about the friendship between two women, one is 21 and the other 85. He has films set in New York, Texas, Florida and Los Angeles.  He goes where the stories are. Earlier this year he won a well-deserved Best Picture Oscar for Anora a film that captures all that is great about Baker’s work. It is the story of an exotic dancer who finds love with a Russian oligarch’s son. Until that love becomes inconvenient for his family. It is a rich blend of comedy, drama, romance and maintaining one’s dignity.

I learned from this exercise that the best directors emphasize people. Making them seem real, relatable and interesting. They show respect for their characters and for their audience. Their stories are not dumbed down and are often challenging but never pretentious. They often elicit great performances from actors. They tell original stories that they often write themselves. They have a visual style, are masters of pacing and editing and are particularly good at picking just the right music or particular song for their soundtracks. Undoubtedly they excel at selecting their crews be they cinema photographers, editors, set designers or make up artists.

What’s next. Probably a part two. Look who I left out: Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa, Michelangelo Antonioni, Luis Buñuel, Howard Hawks, Charlie Chaplin, Wong Kar Wai, Billy Wilder, Paul Thomas Anderson, Satyajit Ray, William Wellman, Louis Malle, Jim Jarmusch and Roberto Rossellini.