Whether by accident or on purpose, have you devoured a significant percentage of any one director's filmography? If you're not sure, tally them up - the totals might impress you! Sometimes you catch on to a director early in their career and can follow their releases theatrically; other times they are long gone and you have a lot of catching up to do. I never really made it a point to see every work by a certain director (except perhaps Pedro Almodovar), since there are usually a few duds holding me back. But through some vague combination of effort and coincidence, here are the directors whose films I've seen the most of, either by quantity or percentage - and I suppose they do paint a pretty accurate picture of my tastes. For my purposes, I am only counting feature-length narrative films that they directed all of (i.e. not just a segment), and requiring that the person in question directed at least five qualifying films (I mean, I've seen all of Jason Reitman's movies, but that wasn't very hard, now was it?).
The Whole Enchilada
PT Anderson - all 5 (including his debut film Sydney aka Hard Eight from 1996)
Wes Anderson - all 6
Christopher Nolan - all 7 (including his debut film Following from 1998)
Almost the Whole Enchilada
Quentin Tarantino - 6 out of 6.5 or 7 (I haven't seen Death Proof/Grindhouse, so however you'd count that)
Charlie Chaplin - 8 out of 11
Stanley Kubrick - 8.5 out of 13 (the half is for The Shining, which I watched with some friends in high school but was so terrified that I was looking away for a considerable amount of the running time. I heard the whole movie though...)
Orson Welles - 9 out of 11 (I'm counting F for Fake, his 1973 documentary/fiction hybrid)
The Double Digit Club
The brothers Coen - 12.5 out of 14 (the missing one is The Ladykillers, which is supposed to be terrible but I might watch someday to be a completist, and the half refers to the fact that I watched Intolerable Cruelty on a plane with varying degrees of attention)
Pedro Almodovar - 14 out of 17 (a number that will unfortunately remain the same until the final three get Region 1 releases or play at a rep house)
Woody Allen - 15 out of 39 (this excludes You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, which comes out in September)
Billy Wilder - 17 out of 26
Alfred Hitchcock - 23 out of 58ish (the ish is because there's some unfinished, uncredited or co-directed business)
Special thanks to the various rep houses that helped me fill in some gaps!
How about you? Who are your most-watched directors?
3 comments:
Here's a copy/paste of some of my most watched directors:
Kubrick, Lynch, Nolan, Spielberg, Nicole Holofcener, Alexander Payne, Tim Burton, Isabel Coixet,Darren Aronofsky, Stephen Daldry, James Cameron, Jason Reitman, Lars von Trier, Richard Linklater,Hal Hartley, Peter Weir,Tarkovsky, Sean Penn, etc.
Mostly recent stuff from 70s and onwards,I know. Not sure if they all meet your criteria of directing 5 quality films.
Some directors I feel only have 1 or 2 great movies in them.
I don't watch the same director all at once, as I feel some of the themes repeat themselves.
I noticed Richard Linklater is not on your post here, I love him and hate him, to me a very up and down career. I have recommended what I regard his best films on my blog.
The Ladykillers isn't so very bad, just bad for the Coen Brothers.
Nobody really counts Death Proof unless they're in the mood to, which I am, because then it counts even more that I've yet to see Jackie Brown.
About the Almodovar films. I recently discovered that not only does VLC ignore region coding, but that most DVD players can be made all region using your remote control.
Post a Comment