FC Presents 100 FURIOUS FILMMAKERS – The ultimate list of directors who have shaped us as movie watchers and devoted fans of this form of popular art. We’ve also included some essential titles we’d recommend to new viewers.
VOLUME TWO
Francois Truffaut
“Film lovers are sick people.” – Essentials: The 400 Blows, Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim, Fahrenheit 451, The Bride Wore Black, Day For Night, The Last Metro
Andre De Toth
“It is always more exciting to be an unsuccessful pioneer, than a successful teller of old tales.” – Essentials: House of Wax, Crime Wave, The Bounty Hunter, Day of the Outlaw, Play Dirty
Brian Trenchard Smith
“As anyone who knows my work knows, there are about three I think that do, I make wacky films, and I enjoy exploring important themes in a wacky way sometimes, and sometimes I explore UN-important themes in a wacky way.” – Essentials: The Man From Hong Kong, Stunt Rock, Turkey Shoot, BMX Bandits, Dead End Drive-In, The Siege of Firebase Gloria
Jean Pierre Melville
“I’m incapable of doing anything but rough drafts. Each time I see one of my films again, then and only then can I see what I should have done. But I only see things this clearly once the finished print is being shown on the screen everywhere and it’s too late to do anything about it.” – Essentials: Bob Le Flambeur, Le Doulos, Le Samourai, Le Cercle Rouge, Un Flic
Yuen Woo Ping
“An action movie is cross-cultural, cross borders. So my goal is always to tell a story non-verbally. If I can, I would prefer not to have much dialog to tell the story.” – Essentials: Snake in The Eagle’s Shadow, Drunken Master, Magnificent Butcher, The Buddhist Fist, Iron Monkey
“They say I’m unsubtle. But we need above all, a theatre that wakes us up: nerves and heart.” – Essentials: Salvador, Platoon, Born on The 4th of July, JFK, Natural Born Killers, Nixon, W
Joe Dante
“Repetitiveness is one of the things that’s most difficult to get away from in genre pictures, because people come specifically to see certain kinds of things but get disappointed if they’re presented in the same way. So to try to find a new way to show old stuff is always the challenge” – Essentials: Hollywood Boulevard, Piranha, The Howling, Gremlins, Matinee
John Landis
“For some reason, people think of me as someone who can do anything I want. And I’m not. You know, I need someone to put up the money.” – Essentials: The Kentucky Fried Movie, Animal House, Blues Brothers, An American Werewolf in London, Trading Places, Coming To America
Abel Ferrara
“I come from a world where you get the film done, that’s a success.” – Essentials: Driller Killer, Ms 45, China Girl, King of New York, Bad Lieutenant, The Funeral
Jean Luc Godard
“Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.” – Essentials: About de souffle, Le Petit Soldat, Les Carabiniers, Bande A part, Alphaville,, Pierrot Le Fou, Masculine Feminine
Douglas Sirk
“If I can say one thing for my pictures, it is a certain craftsmanship. A thought which has gone into every angle. There is nothing there without an optical reason.” Essentials: Imitation of Life, Written on the Wind, Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows
“I still think like a critic, and I still analyze films like a critic. However, it’s not possible to write criticism if you’re making films.” – Essentials: Blue Collar, Hardcore, Patricia Hearst, American Gigolo, Light Sleeper, Auto Focus
Robert Aldrich
“I don’t think violence on film breeds violence in life. Violence in life breeds violence in films.” – Essentials: Kiss Me Deadly, Attack, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Flight of the Phoenix, The Dirty Dozen, Emperor of The North, The Longest Yard, The Frisco Kid
Peter Yates
– Essentials: Bullitt, The Hot Rock, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Mother Jugs and Speed, Breaking Away, The Deep, Krull
Mel Brooks
“Humor is just another defense against the universe.” – Essentials: The Producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, High Anxiety, History of the World Pt 1, Life Stinks, Spaceballs, Robin Hood: Men in Tights
Gordon Parks Sr
“At first I wasn’t sure that I had the talent, but I did know I had a fear of failure, and that fear compelled me to fight off anything that might abet it.” – Essentials: The Learning Tree, Shaft, Shaft’s Big Score, The Super Cops, Leadbelly
Franklin J. Schaffner
– Essentials: Planet of The Apes, Patton, Papillon, The Boys From Brazil
Kathryn Bigelow
“There should be more women directing; I think there’s just not the awareness that it’s really possible.” – Essentials: The Loveless, Blue Steel, Near Dark, Point Break, Strange Days, The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty
Ida Lupino
“Often I pretended to a cameraman to know less than I did. That way I got more cooperation.” – Essentials: Outrage, The Bigamist, The Hitchhiker
Ridley Scott
“Art’s like a shark. You’ve got to keep swimming, or else you drown” – Essentials: Alien, Blade Runner, Black Rain, Thelma and Louise, Gladiator, GI Jane.
James Cameron
“I’m a storyteller; that’s what exploration really is all about. Going to places where others haven’t been and returning to tell a story they haven’t heard before.” – Essentials: The Terminator, Aliens, Terminator 2, True Lies, Titanic
“Don’t give me any money, don’t give me any people, but give freedom, and I’ll give you a movie that looks gigantic.” Essentials: El Mariachi, Desperado, From Dusk Til Dawn, Sin City, Planet Terror, Machete
Billy Wilder
“A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.” – Essentials: Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, Stalag 17, The Apartment, Ace in the Hole, Some Like It Hot
Norman Jewison
When I make a film, I never want the film to become a vehicle of social propaganda. If I wanted to do that, I’d make documentaries.” – Essentials: The Cincinatti Kid, The Russians Are Coming!…The Russians Are Coming!, In The Heat of the Night, Thomas Crown Affair, Rollerball, And Justice For All, A Soldier’s Story, Moonstruck
George A. Romero
If I fail, the film industry writes me off as another statistic. If I succeed, they pay me a million bucks to fly out to Hollywood and fart. – Essentials: Night of The Living Dead, Martin, Dawn of the Dead, Knightriders, Creepshow
Budd Boetticher
“The characters are more important to me than the ideas, because it’s through the mind and the sayings and the actions of the characters that the ideas are born. I’m not concerned with what people stand for, I’m concerned with what they do about it.” – Essentials: The Bullfighter and the Lady, Seven Men From Now, The Tall T, Ride Lonesome, The Killer is Loose, The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond
Jack Cardiff
“Most directors who have been around for a while, acquire a gaunt, soul-scarred look associated with fighter pilots who have survived a war.” – Essentials: The Long Ships, Dark of the Sun, Girl On a Motorcycle, The Freakmaker
Sam Raimi
“I’ve always been interested in the camera and the effects of it – that’s what drew me to film in the first place.” – Essentials: The Evil Dead Trilogy, Darkman, The Quick and the Dead, A Simple Plan, Spider Man Trilogy
Roman Polanski
“Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater.” – Essentials: Fearless Vampire Killers, Knife in The Water, Cul De Sac, Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, The Tenant, The Ninth Gate
Christopher Nolan
“I’ve always been a movie guy, movies have been my thing. I love movies, all kinds of movies.” – Essentials: Following, Memento, The Dark Knight Trilogy, The Prestige, Inception
David Fincher
“In film, we sculpt time, we sculpt behaviour and we sculpt light.” – Essentials: Seven, Fight Club, The Game, Zodiac, The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo
Mike Nichols
“In a weird way, when I was looking back, I didn’t know I was going to be a director until I was.” – Essentials: Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Graduate, Catch 22, The Fortune, Silkwood, Biloxi Blues, Wolf
Ralph Nelson
– Essentials: Requiem for a Heavyweight, Duel At Diablo, Charly, Tick…Tick…Tick…, Soldier Blue, The Wilby Conspiracy, Embryo, A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But A Sandwich
John Milius
“Films are always pretentious. There’s nothing more pretentious than a filmmaker.” – Essentials: Dillinger, The Wind and The Lion, Big Wednesday, Conan The Barbarian, Red Dawn
George Miller
“In the same way that newspapers are evaporating or adjusting or adapting into the web, so the same thing will happen with the moving image. It’s going to require a lot of rigour and agility to anticipate and surf those changes rather than be swamped.” – Essentials: Mad Max, The Road Warrior, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
Michael Mann
“A 65-ft.-wide screen and 500 people reacting to the movie, there is nothing like that experience.” – Essentials: Thief, The Keep, Manhunter, Heat, The Insider, Collateral, The Last of the Mohicans
Takashi Miike
“I can only work realistically while wanting to depict something unrealistic.” – Essentials: Shinjuku Triad Society, Fudoh: The New Generation, Rainy Dog, Visitor Q, Ichi The Killer, Audition
Terence Malick
“I film quite a bit of footage, then edit. Changes before your eyes, things you can do and things you can’t. My attitude is always ‘let it keep rolling.” – Essentials: Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World, The Tree of Life
Sidney Lumet
“For any director with a little lucidity, masterpieces are films that come to you by accident.” – Essentials: 12 Angry Men, The Pawnbroker, Fail Safe, The Hill, The Anderson Tapes, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, Running on Empty, Q&A, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
John Hughes
“I so desperately hate to end these movies that the first thing I do when I’m done is write another one. Then I don’t feel sad about having to leave and everybody going away.” – Essentials: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Buellers Day Off, Uncle Buck, Planes Trains and Automobiles
Ron Howard
“If I had to choose between a great acting job and a good directing job, I’d choose the directing job.” – Essentials: Grand Theft Auto, Night Shift, Splash, Cocoon, Willow, Far and Away, Backdraft, Apollo 13, Ransom, A Beautiful Mind, Cinderella Man, Frost/Nixon
“Well, we’re in show business, and I have been making a living in this business a long time and inevitably it means taking what it is that you’ve done and hopefully you’re showing it to a lot of people who like it.” – Essentials: Hard Times, The Driver, The Warriors, The Long Riders, Southern Comfort, 48 Hrs, Last Man Standing
Milos Forman
“I tell you, in my opinion, the cornerstone of democracy is free press – that’s the cornerstone.” – Essentials: One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest, Hair, Ragtime, Amadeus, The People Vs Larry Flynt, Man on The Moon
John Frankenheimer
“I really, really love directing films.” – Essentials: The Train, Seven Days in May, Birdman of Alcatraz, The Manchurian Candidate, Seconds, Grand Prix, French Connection II, Black Sunday, 52 Pick Up, Ronin, Reindeer Games
Terence Fisher
“The written word is the basic of everything. Most important, the idea, and after that, the dialogue.” – Essentials: The Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy, The Brides of Dracula, The Gorgon, Dracula: Prince of Darkness, Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell
Larry Cohen
“Most of my films have a lot of character development and exploration, whereas in most horror movies the characters are just cardboard.” – Essentials: Black Caesar, Its Alive, God Told Me To, Q, The Stuff, Special Effects
Paul Thomas Anderson
“I don’t think it’s a director’s job to peek behind the curtain too much.” – Essentials: Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood
Robert Altman
“Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes.” – Essentials: The Delinquents, MASH, Brewster McCloud, McCabe & Mrs Miller, Thieves Like Us, California Split, The Long Goodbye, Nashville, Popeye, Streamers, The Player, Pret A Porter
John Boorman
“It’s so easy to manipulate an audience, but it’s nearly always clear that you are being manipulated. I think even people that are not critically attuned are aware of cynical manipulation in film.” – Essentials: Point Blank, Hell in The Pacific, Deliverance, Excalibur
Rob Reiner
“I like writing because you can make things happen and turn out the way they never do in real life.” – Essentials: This Is Spinal Tap, Stand By Me, Misery, When Harry Met Sally, A Few Good Men, Ghosts of Mississippi
One thought on “100 FURIOUS FILMMAKERS VOL. 2”
Nice list Peter, But no Werner Herzog? He is about as furious as they come. Love the site.