Thinking about directors

Recently I've been involved in a project to rank the Top 50 directors of all time. I'm not claiming the list has any authority but it was fun to do and made me think about what it is I like in a director and really if my favourite directors aren't just the same as the directors who made the most films I enjoyed. I'm going to do a series of posts about the directors I picked, why I picked them and talk about the films of theirs I love. Today though, I'm just going to tell you who I voted for and where they ranked overall on the list and go into a little bit about why I picked the list I did. I won't go into the complete list, although I will post the final group list.

My top 10 was (In brackets is the final place in the group ranking):

1) Akira Kurosawa (6th)
2) Alfred Hitchcock (3rd)
3) Stanley Kubrick (1st)
4) Werner Herzog (33rd)
5) Sergio Leone (26th)
6) Ken Loach (NR)
7) Quentin Tarantino (5th)
8) The Archers (NR)
9) Mike Leigh (NR)
10) John Ford (NR)

Other directors that came close to making the list:

Ingmar Bergman
Martin Scorsese
David Lean
Stephen Frears
John Carpenter
Robert Bresson

Unfortunately I messed up while I was trimming my list of possible into the actual Top 10 and somehow forgot Martin Scorsese. Really he should be 4 instead of Werner Herzog. So that would make my actual list:

1) Akira Kurosawa
2) Alfred Hitchcock
3) Stanley Kubrick
4) Martin Scorsese
5) Sergio Leone
6) Ken Loach
7) Quentin Tarantino
8) The Archers
9) Mike Leigh
10) John Ford

It's silly to be bothered about this, especially as this list certainly isn't set in concrete and could, and doubtless will, change in the future. However, it is a type of silliness I'm prone to indulge in, I wouldn't be writing blogs about my favourite directors if I didn't.

One final quick note before I call it a night. I've only seen one movie from both Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal) and Robert Bresson (Diary Of A Country Priest). I loved both of these movies but one great movie wasn't enough to put them on my top 10 list and won't be enough to get them a blog in this series. I do plan on eventually watching more of their films and I'll probably blog more about them then.