The Lists: Directors

A friend let me know there was a thing on the facebook where people were supposed to list their favorite 15 directors in 15 minutes. This being the facebook, I guess, the rule was:

"Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen Directors who've influenced you and that will ALWAYS STICK WITH YOU. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes."

Not being on the facebook, and still relying on older modes of communication like morse code and the pony express and stuff, I typed up a list via email. Figured it fit in with the whole Lists thing I did a while back, so here's an additional list.

Note that I'm kind of an anti-auteurist these days. By which I mean that for me, it's more the individual films that are important. And when I like a director, I try not to take it as a given that everything good in the film is exclusively his or her doing. I'm not sure I'd list Christopher Nolan, but I'd list his cinematographer, Wally Pfister. And I'd definitely list the Coens' main cinematographer these days, Roger Deakins. Toss in Tim Orr and Adam Stone, who have worked with David Gordon Green. So I'll list some cinematographers as well, separately.

So, more or less in the order they came to me (which I guess is part of the point of the whole exercise):

1. Akira Kurosawa
2. Coen Brothers
3. Noah Baumbach
4. David Gordon Green (he and his dp, Tim Orr, are a big influence on my photography. As is Adam Stone, who shot the second unit stuff for All the Real Girls, which from what I gather, covers most of the nature shots, as well as that amazing shot of the dog. He also lensed Jeff Nichols' Shotgun Stories.)
5. John Carpenter
6. Terrance Malick (for Days of Heaven)
7. Robert Wise (for The Haunting)
8. Wong Kar-Wai
9. maybe Johnnie To
10. George Miller
11. Andrei Tarkovsky (for Stalker)
12. Kelly Reichardt (for damn sure)
13. Guillermo Del Toro (ran out of 15 minutes here)
14. Victor Nunez (for Ruby in Paradise)
15. George A. Romero

And cinematographers (again in the order they came to me):
1. Wally Pfister
2. Roger Deakins
3. Tim Orr
4. Nestor Almendros (for Days of Heaven)
5. Kazuo Miyagawa
6. Adam Stone
7. could maybe add Haskell Wexler (for Days of Heaven)

And since people were doing honorable mentions, here's those:
Spielberg, Tsui Hark, Fassbinder (for Veronika Voss and In a Year with 13 Moons), Ralph Nelson (for Requiem for a Heavyweight), Sven Nykvist (cinematographer), Monte Hellman (for Two Lane Blacktop), and maybe Guillermo Navarro (Del Toro's cinematographer).

Okay, that's it.