What influential directors of the past do I need to know about?
There are so many directors whose movies need to be seen. In early cinema it's DW Griffith, it's Sergei Eisenstein, it's the films of Charlie Chaplin and the films of Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. Other directors that should be seen: Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Preston Sturges, and Frank Capra, who polarises some people; some people find his movies as somewhat sentimental and other people find they're incredible, populous movies. I mean 'Capraesque' is a term that everyone talks about when you're talking about a movie that has a lot of sentiment and a lot of feel for the common man. I'm back tracking again, but the westerns certainly of John Ford. Orson Wells, who really was ahead of his time, really made movies that he wanted to see, and made movies with a touring company of actors that he used on the stage as well and didn't see a gap between doing something artistic and doing something commercial. Citizen Kane is arguably the greatest film ever made. World cinema wise, there are the Indian movies of Satyajit Ray, there are the Italian films of Fellini, there's the French new wave; the movies of Jean-Luc Godard, the movies of Louis Malle and Francois Truffaut. There are German expressionist filmmakers like Fritz Lang, who did studio movies and also did movies that reflected the turmoil that Germany was going through. There are just so many, and then of course what's currently in vogue (and I think always will be actually) are the film makers of the 70's who have a lot of influence on contemporary film makers, and they would be Scorcese and Coppola. I love the movies of Hal Ashby who did these kind of leisurely, weird serial comic movies like "Being There" that are wonderful. The films of Paul Mazursky that were about relationships and about people getting divorced and having second chapters of their lives in their 40's and their 50's, and we hadn't seen that before. Robert Benton's movies, and Robert Altman's movies certainly, with the overlapping dialogue and the mosaic of characters and unresolved story lines; he took so many different genres and subverted them in his movies. Then there are Lucas and Spielberg coming up in the 70's and the 80's who made big blockbusters but also made movies that had a real sensibility, and they're arguably the most famous filmmakers of our time.
