List of most popular film artists (all time)

Quentin Jerome Tarantino (born March 27, 1963) is an American film director, screenwriter, cinematographer, producer, and actor. His films are characterized by non-linear storylines, satirical subject matter, and an aestheticizati...

Heywood "Woody" Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg, December 1, 1935) is an American actor, writer, director, comedian and playwright, whose career spans more than 50 years.

Jeffrey Jacob "J. J." Abrams (born June 27, 1966) is an American director, producer, writer, actor, author and composer, best known for his work in the genres of action, drama, and science fiction. Abrams wrote and/or produced fea...

Sir Peter Robert Jackson ONZ KNZM (born 31 October 1961) is a New Zealand filmmaker. He is best known as the director and producer of The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003) and The Hobbit trilogy (2012–2014), both of which are...

Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, (13 August 1899 – 29 April 1980) was an English film director and producer, often nicknamed "The Master of Suspense".

Stanley Kubrick (July 26, 1928 – March 7, 1999) was an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and editor who did much of his work in the United Kingdom. Kubrick's films covered a variety of genres, includi...

Angelina Jolie Pitt (née Voight; June 4, 1975) is an American actress, filmmaker, and humanitarian. She has received an Academy Award, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and three Golden Globe Awards, and has been cited as Hollywood'...

George Walton Lucas, Jr. (born May 14, 1944) is an American filmmaker and entrepreneur. He is best known as the creator of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, as well as the founder of Lucasfilm and Industrial Light and Ma...

Mel Colm-Cille Gerard Gibson (born January 3, 1956) is an American actor and filmmaker.

Luc Besson (born 18 March 1959) is a French film director, screenwriter, and producer.

Morgan Freeman is an American actor, film director, and narrator. Freeman has received Academy Award nominations for his performances in Street Smart, Driving Miss Daisy, The Shawshank Redemption and Invictus, and won the Best Sup...

William Bradley "Brad" Pitt (born December 18, 1963) is an American actor and producer. He has received a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and three Academy Award nominations in acting categories, and received two...

Ridley Scott (born 30 November 1937) is an English film director and producer. Following his commercial breakthrough with the science-fiction horror film Alien (1979), his best-known works are the neo-noir dystopian science fictio...

Timothy Walter "Tim" Burton (born August 25, 1958) is an American film director, producer, artist, writer, and animator. He is known for his dark, gothic, macabre, and quirky horror and fantasy films such as the horror comedy fant...

David Keith Lynch (born January 20, 1946) is an American director, screenwriter, visual artist, musician, actor, and author. Known for his surrealist films, he has developed a unique cinematic style. The surreal and, in many cases...

Manoj Shyamalan (born 6 August 1970), known professionally as M. Night Shyamalan, is an Indian-American film director, screenwriter, producer and occasional actor.

Sion Sono (born December 18, 1961) is a Japanese filmmaker, author and poet.

Akira Kurosawa ( March 23, 1910 – September 6, 1998) was a Japanese filmmaker. Kurosawa directed 30 films in a career spanning 57 years.

James Francis Cameron (born August 16, 1954) is a Canadian filmmaker, inventor, engineer, philanthropist, and deep-sea explorer who has directed the two biggest box office films of all time (Avatar and Titanic). He first found maj...

John Christopher "Johnny" Depp II (born June 9, 1963) is an American actor, producer, and musician. He has won the Golden Globe Award and Screen Actors Guild award for Best Actor.

Steven Allan Spielberg (born December 18, 1946) is an American filmmaker. He is also one of the co-founders of DreamWorks Studios.

Christopher Jonathan James Nolan (born 30 July 1970) is an English-American film director, screenwriter, and producer. He has created several of the most commercially successful films of the early 21st century. His nine films have...

Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton (October 4, 1895 – February 1, 1966) was an American actor, vaudevillian, comedian, filmmaker, stunt performer, and writer. He was best known for his silent films, in which his trademark was physical c...

Andrew Stanton (born December 3, 1965) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, and voice actor based at Pixar. His film work includes writing and directing Pixar's A Bug's Life (1998) (as co-director), Finding Nemo (...

Lee Edward Unkrich (born August 8, 1967) is an American director, film editor and screenwriter. He is a longtime member of the creative team at Pixar, where he started in 1994 as a film editor. He later began directing, first as c...

Neill Blomkamp (born 17 September 1979) is a South African-Canadian film director, film producer, screenwriter, and animator, Blomkamp employs a documentary-style, hand-held, cinéma vérité technique, blending naturalistic and phot...

George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985) was an American actor, director, writer, and producer who worked in theatre, radio, and film.

Atom Egoyan, (born July 19, 1960) is a Canadian stage director and film director.

David Paul Cronenberg, (born March 15, 1943) is a Canadian filmmaker, screenwriter, and actor.

Denis Villeneuve (born October 3, 1967) is a French-Canadian film director and writer.

Werner Herzog Stipetić (born 5 September 1942), known as Werner Herzog, is a German film director, producer, screenwriter, author, actor and opera director.

Tom Cruise (born July 3, 1962) is an American actor and filmmaker. Cruise has been nominated for three Academy Awards and has won three Golden Globe Awards. He started his career at age 19 in the 1981 film Endless Love. After port...

Richard Stuart Linklater (born July 30, 1960) is an American film director and screenwriter.

Steven John "Steve" Carell (born August 16, 1962) is an American actor, comedian, director, producer and writer. After a five-year stint on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Carell found greater fame for playing Michael Scott on th...

Bradley Charles Cooper (born January 5, 1975) is an American actor and producer. He has been nominated for four Academy Awards, three for acting and one for producing, and one Tony Award.

Clinton "Clint" Eastwood, Jr. (born May 31, 1930) is an American actor, film director, producer, musician, and politician. He rose to international fame with his role as the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy of sp...

Frank Miller (born January 27, 1957) is an American writer, artist, and film director best known for his dark comic book stories and graphic novels such as Ronin, Daredevil: Born Again, The Dark Knight Returns, Sin City and 300. H...

Robert Bernard Altman (February 20, 1925 – November 20, 2006) was an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. He was nominated five times for the Academy Award for Best Director. He preferred large ensemble casts for hi...

Leonard "Lenny" Abrahamson (born 30 November 1966) is an Irish film and television director. Abrahamson is known for his films Adam & Paul, Garage, What Richard Did and Room.

Aaron Benjamin Sorkin (born June 9, 1961) is an American screenwriter, producer, and playwright. His works include the Broadway plays A Few Good Men and The Farnsworth Invention; the television series Sports Night, The West Wing,...

Thomas Joseph "Tom" McCarthy (born June 7, 1966) is an American film director, screenwriter, and actor who has appeared in several movies, including Meet the Parents and Good Night, and Good Luck, and television shows such as The...

Todd Haynes (born January 2, 1961) is an American independent film director and screenwriter. He is known for having directed the acclaimed films Safe (1995), Far from Heaven (2002), I'm Not There (2007), and Carol (2015). Haynes...

Judd Apatow (born December 6, 1967) is an American producer, writer, director, actor, and comedian. He is best known for his work in comedy films, and is the founder of Apatow Productions and also developed the television series F...

Adam McKay (born April 17, 1968) is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, comedian, and actor. McKay served as head writer for the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live for two seasons. He has a comedy partners...

John William "Will" Ferrell (born July 16, 1967) is an American actor, comedian, producer, and writer. He first established himself in the mid-1990s as a cast member on the NBC sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live, and has subse...

Alejandro González Iñárritu; credited since 2014 as Alejandro G. Iñárritu; born August 15, 1963) is a Mexican film director, producer, screenwriter, and former composer. He is the first Mexican director to be nominated for the Aca...

Christopher Ashton Kutcher (born February 7, 1978) is an American actor, producer, investor and former model. Kutcher began his career as a model. He began his acting career portraying Michael Kelso in the Fox sitcom That '70s Sho...

John Ford (February 1, 1894 – August 31, 1973) was an American film director. He made Westerns such as Stagecoach (1939), The Searchers (1956), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), as well as adaptations of classic 20th-ce...

Jaco Van Dormael (born 9 February 1957) is a Belgian film director, screenwriter and playwright. Van Dormael spent his childhood travelling around Europe, before going on to study filmmaking at the INSAS in Brussels, where he wrot...

Eli Raphael Roth (born April 18, 1972) is an American film director, producer, writer and actor. He is known for directing the horror film Hostel and its sequel, Hostel: Part II. He is also known for his role as Donny "The Bear Je...