List of most popular film screenwriters (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...

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'...

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...

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

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Robert Anthony Rodríguez (born June 20, 1968) is an American filmmaker and musician. He shoots and produces many of his films in Mexico and his home state, Texas. Rodriguez directed the 1992 action film El Mariachi, which was a co...

Dennis Lee Hopper (May 17, 1936 – May 29, 2010) was an American actor, filmmaker, photographer, and artist. He attended the Actors Studio, making his first television appearance in 1954, and soon after appeared in two films with J...

Roman Polanski (born Rajmund Roman Thierry Polański, 18 August 1933) is a Paris-born Pole and, since 1976, naturalized French-Polish film director, producer, writer, and actor. Born in Paris to Polish parents, he moved with his fa...

Mark Anthony "Baz" Luhrmann (born 17 September 1962) is an Australian film director, screenwriter and producer best known for The Red Curtain Trilogy, comprising his romantic comedy film Strictly Ballroom (1992), the romantic dram...

Benjamin Geza Affleck-Boldt (born August 15, 1972), better known as Ben Affleck, is an American actor and filmmaker. He has won two Academy Awards and three Golden Globe Awards. Affleck began his career as a child actor, starring...

Joseph Leonard Gordon-Levitt (born February 17, 1981) is an American actor and filmmaker. As a child actor, he appeared in the films A River Runs Through It, Angels in the Outfield and 10 Things I Hate About You, and as Tommy Solo...

Seth Aaron Rogen (born April 15, 1982) is a Canadian American actor, filmmaker, and comedian. Rogen began his career performing stand-up comedy during his teenage years, winning the Vancouver Amateur Comedy Contest in 1998. While...

Charles Stuart "Charlie" Kaufman (born November 19, 1958) is an American screenwriter, producer, director, and lyricist. He wrote the films Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind...

Spike Jonze (born Adam Spiegel; October 22, 1969) is an American director, producer, screenwriter and actor, whose work includes music videos, commercials, film and television. He started his feature film directing career with Bei...

Wesley Wales "Wes" Anderson (born May 1, 1969) is an American film director, film producer, screenwriter, and actor. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for The Royal Tenenbaums in 2001, Moonrise Ki...

Robert Lee Zemeckis (born May 14, 1952) is an American filmmaker and screenwriter. He has directed some of the biggest blockbuster hits of the past few decades. He first came to public attention in the 1980s as the director of Rom...

Ralph Bakshi (born October 29, 1938) is an American director of animated and live-action films. In the 1970s, he established an alternative to mainstream animation through independent and adult-oriented productions. Between 1972 a...

Donald Virgil "Don" Bluth (born September 13, 1937) is an American animator, film director, producer, writer, production designer, video game designer and animation instructor who is known for directing animated films, including T...

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...

Terrence Frederick Malick (born November 30, 1943) is an American film director, screenwriter and producer. In a career spanning over four decades he has directed eight feature films. Malick made his directorial debut with the dra...

Jean-Jacques Annaud (born 1 October 1943) is a French film director, screenwriter and producer, best known for directing Quest for Fire (1981), The Name of the Rose (1986), The Lover (1991), and Seven Years in Tibet (1997). Annaud...

Benjamin Edward Meara "Ben" Stiller (born November 30, 1965) is an American actor, comedian, and filmmaker. He is the son of veteran comedians and actors Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara. After beginning his acting career with a play,...

Zhang Yimou (born 14 November 1951) is a Chinese film director, producer, screenwriter and actor, and former cinematographer. He is counted amongst the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers, having made his directorial debut in 1...

Stephen Chow (Chinese: 周星馳, Chow Sing-Chi; born 22 June 1962) is a Hong Kong actor, screenwriter, film director, producer and political adviser of Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference...

Xu Jinglei (born April 16, 1974) is a Chinese actress and film director. She graduated from Beijing Film Academy in 1997. She has also spanned an acting career with directing since 2003. Although not well known outside of China, X...

Ang Lee (Chinese: 李安; pinyin: Lǐ Ān; born October 23, 1954) is a Taiwanese-born American film director, screenwriter and producer. Lee has won the Academy Award for Best Director twice: for Brokeback Mountain (2005) and for Life o...

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...

Frank Arpad Darabont (born Darabont Ferenc; January 28, 1959) is a Hungarian-American film director, screenwriter and producer who has been nominated for three Academy Awards and a Golden Globe Award. In his early career he was pr...

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

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.