Greatest directors (all time)

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Sydney Irwin Pollack (July 1, 1934 – May 26, 2008) was an American film director, producer and actor. Pollack directed more than 21 films and 10 television shows, acted in over 30 films or shows, and produced over 44 films. His 19...

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...

Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones (born 30 May 1971) is an English film director, film producer, and screenwriter. He is best known for directing the award-winning science fiction films Moon (2009) and Source Code (2011). He is also the...

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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

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...

Martin Charles Scorsese (born November 17, 1942) is an American director, producer, screenwriter, actor, and film historian, whose career spans more than 45 years.

Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang (December 5, 1890 – August 2, 1976) was a German-Austrian filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor.

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...

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...

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...

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...

Dr. George Miller (born 3 March 1945) is an Australian film director, screenwriter, producer, and former medical doctor. He is best known for his Mad Max franchise. Aside from the Mad Max films, Miller has been involved in a wide...

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...

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

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

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

Ron Fricke is an American film director and cinematographer, specializing in time-lapse photography and large format cinematography. He was the director of photography for Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and directed the purely cinematic non...

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...

Terrence Vance "Terry" Gilliam (born 22 November 1940) is an American-born British screenwriter, film director, animator, actor, comedian and member of the Monty Python comedy troupe. Gilliam has directed 12 feature films, includi...

Lau Kar-leung (28 July 1934 – 25 June 2013), also known as Liu Chia-liang, was a Hong Kong-based Chinese actor, filmmaker, choreographer and martial artist. Lau is best known for the films he made in the 1970s and 1980s for the Sh...

Rob Marshall (born October 17, 1960) is an American theater director, film director and choreographer. His most noted work is the 2002 Academy Award for Best Picture winner Chicago, for which he won a Directors Guild of America Aw...

Irvin Kershner (born Isadore Kershner; April 29, 1923 – November 27, 2010) was an American film director and occasional actor, best known for directing independent films early in his career, and then The Empire Strikes Back, the J...

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...

John Howard Carpenter (born January 16, 1948) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, editor and composer. Although Carpenter has worked in numerous film genres, he is most commonly associated with horror and science...

George Andrew Romero (born February 4, 1940) is an American-Canadian film director, film producer, screenwriter and editor, best known for his series of gruesome and satirical horror films about a hypothetical zombie apocalypse, b...

Xavier Dolan (born 20 March 1989), sometimes credited as Xavier Dolan-Tadros, is a Canadian actor and filmmaker.

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,...

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...

Philip Seymour Hoffman (July 23, 1967 – February 2, 2014) was an American actor, director, and producer of film and theater. Best known for his distinctive supporting and character roles – typically lowlifes, bullies, and misfits...

Ronald William "Ron" Howard (born March 1, 1954) is an American film director, producer, and actor, best known for playing two high-profile roles in television sitcoms in his childhood and early adulthood, and for directing a numb...

Lars von Trier (born Lars Trier; 30 April 1956) is a Danish film director and screenwriter. He is closely associated with the Dogme 95 collective – an avant-garde filmmaking movement – although his own films have taken a variety o...

Ava Marie DuVernay (born August 24, 1972) is an American director, screenwriter, film marketer, and film distributor. At the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, DuVernay won the Best Director Prize for her second feature film Middle of N...

Bruce Lee (Chinese: 李小龍; born Lee Jun-fan, Chinese: 李振藩; November 27, 1940 – July 20, 1973) was a Hong Kong American martial artist, Hong Kong action film actor, martial arts instructor, philosopher, filmmaker, and the founder of...