>> Speaker 1: If good artists borrow and
great artists steal, who exactly are the directors of today stealing from?
We're tracing the cinematic roots of film's family tree with our picks for
the top ten most influential directors of all time.
>> [MUSIC]
>> Speaker 1: Kicking us off at #10, we wanna honor the filmmakers
who've influenced the future of cinema by literally inventing it.
And the first filmmaker that comes to mind is James Cameron.
A man who's often more engineer than filmmaker.
Whose reckless pursuit of technological innovation has brought us advances in 3D,
CGI, underwater filmmaking, and accidentally scuba diving.
There's also George Millay, father of special effects.
But if we're going to kick off our list with some of the grandfathers of cinema,
it's got to be The Lumiere Brothers.
>> Speaker 2: Just the thought of it, that one is doing for
Lumiere brothers, with 100 years ago, we are still enjoying it and doing it,
that means they are immortal.
>> Speaker 1: Auguste and Louis Lumiere are credited as the first ever filmmakers,
which sort of makes them influential by default.
But they deserve credit for more than just being the first to the party.
They also invented the camera, the projector, and popularized their new
tech all over Europe, effectively infecting the world with the cinema bug.
And while they couldn't quite crack narrative film in the way we
know it today,
they managed to stumble on rudimentary forms of the documentary and comedy.
>> [MUSIC]
>> Speaker 1: There's no denying that Hollywood and
the mainstream movie industry has a color problem.
Namely, there's not enough of it.
So for our number nine pick, we wanna give credit to some of the filmmakers who have
helped diversify the director's chair.
And we can't not mention directors like Van Peebles and
Gordon Parks who picked up the camera amidst extreme prejudice and friction.
Tyler Perry, who proved that movies made for
black people could be just as commercially viable as those for suburban tweens.
Or true inspirations, like Oscar Micheaux,
who clocks in as the first black filmmaker ever, getting his start in the 19-teens.
But for our pick, we don't think anyone's done as
much to bring the minority into the spotlight as the one and only Spike Lee.
>> Spike Lee: I never said that I had any answers.
And I don't think that it's fair to criticize me for that.
Say, well, I didn't like Do the Right Thing cuz Spike doesn't have an answer for
the racial situation in this country.
I mean, it's not my job though.
>> Speaker 1: Lee has pointed his lens directly into the crossfire of hatred and
intolerance ever since Do the Right Thing.
When working at his best, he's manage to find both the humanity and
the hypocrisy in every side of racial conflict.
He's revolutionary for
showing America that you can cast black people as more than pimps,
drug dealers, and prostitutes, which is a terribly sad thing to call revolutionary.
But it's done a hell of a lot from an already representation of film so
we'll take it.
Moving forward for our next pick, who do we think for the big summer blockbusters
and massive franchise bonanzas that litter our marquees with sequel numbers and
our toy stores with official action figures today?
Well, it's probably our number eight, Steven Spielberg.
>> Steven Spielberg: My name is Steve Spielberg and
I just directed a movie called Jaws.
>> Speaker 1: Sure, you can make a pretty compelling case for
his contemporaries like George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, but
Spielberg's Jaws created the modern event film.
Prior to Jaws, summer was a veritable dumping ground of whatever slop movie
studios wanted to phone in from home.
But with a little bit of TV advertising and
a pinch of luck, Jaws showed the world that summer releases could be
rainmakers worth structuring an entire year's slate around.
Since then, his deft balance of thrill, pathos, humor, humanity, and
Tom Hanks has proved him to be one of the most consistently profitable,
critically acclaimed, and recognizable filmmakers of the modern era.
[NOISE] Now, of course, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and
company didn't do it on their own.
They drew from a massive well of international influence.
And if we're talking about inspirational directors from abroad,
we've got to mention the likes of Fellini, Bergman, Lang, and Renoir.
But for our number seven pick,
we think that Akira Kurosawa has done a hell of a lot for cinema these days.
>> Martin Scorsese: Let me say it simply.
Kurosawa was my master and so many others.
>> George Lucas: After the first one, I mean,
the first one I saw The Seventh Samurai, and after that I was completely hooked.
>> Speaker 1: Check out our film school pilot on Star Wars and samurai,
if you want a full Webby Award winning breakdown.
That's right, we're bragging.
But the basics of it are this, Akira Kurosawa took traditional Japanese
film-making routes, combined them with a childhood fondness for American Westerns,
and created something that was both universally accessible and
cinematically groundbreaking.
Catapulting Japan into the international film spotlight in the process.
[SOUND] At number six,
we've got an early European director who theorized his way into novel territory.
And it's not Mernow, although FW was an absolute legend.
Instead, we've got to hand this spot to one of the Soviet montage theorists who
practically turned editing on its head.
And it could've been or or.
But we all know that not one of them quite lives up to the big cheese,
Sergei Eisenstein.
>> Peter Greenway: Eisenstein is known,
of course, not just as a practical filmmaker but a great theoretician.
So I believe he is the ultimate father figure of world cinema.
>> Speaker 1: Eisenstein looked at his predecessors,
looked at all the innovations in cinema thus far,
and realized they came from the creative juxtaposition of
two shots to create a meaning that was greater than the sum of its parts.
He then went on to come up with half a dozen more brilliant ways to do this, and
then showed them all off in Stripe, October, and
especially Battleship Potemkin.
His work unchained cinema from the restrictions of continuity and reality,
and allowed all future directors to fracture time,
space, and narrative in ways that were previously unheard of.
Next up, at number five, we wanna think a little more independent.
While most influential by its very nature, tends to favor those directors who have
contributed mostly to mainstream cinema, we think there are some
other filmmakers worth honoring, who have broken the mold for the Indie world.
Lately, we're pretty proud of Tarantino and
Soderbergh for bringing an Indie sensibility to a wide release of screens.
We had the utmost respect for Bunuel, Fellini, and Atonioni for
pushing their respective envelopes.
And we absolutely adore the reckless abandon with which Cassavetes
shunned convention.
But we think the real hero of the avant-garde
is none other than Jean-Luc Godard.
>> Jean-Luc Godard: [FOREIGN] >> Speaker 1: Busting under the feature
scene with Breathless, one of the boldest and most enduring statements on cinematic
rule-breaking you'll ever find in every single film school classic ever.
He gave us jumpcuts, long takes, direct address and
carte blanche to break any rule, no matter how sacrosanct.
>> [MUSIC]
>> Speaker 1: Over the entire course of film history there have been a rare
few directors who manage to achieve something so unparalleled,
so close to perfection that they stand relatively alone as cinematic virtuosos.
One of those names, the name you're going to be very angry
isn't quite our number four pick, is Stanley Kubrick.
But another one of the names and our pick for
number four, just barely edging out Stanley is Alfred Hitchcock.
>> Alfred Hitchcock: Life is a big mystery, as it always has been.
I think people are intrigued by mystery.
>> Speaker 1: There is perhaps no other director who so
deeply understood his audience and so adeptly manipulated them.
There has been no other filmmaker who has so completely gripped his viewers by
both their intellects and their emotion all at once.
Often imitated but never replicated, Hitchcock has taught everyone from film
neophytes to François Truffaut the intricacies of psychological storytelling
and stands as perhaps the pinnacle of film excellence.
[NOISE] But perfection isn't everything.
Hitchcock built his masterpieces on a deep foundation of film history.
>> Steven Spielberg: So we're all handing influences down and
inspiring from generation to generation.
>> Speaker 1: Almost every director today owes a debt to at least one of
the forefathers like Howard Hawkes, Cecil B Demil, Billy Wilder, John Huston, and
Ernst Lubitsch.
However, if there's one thing that every working filmmaker has in common,
it's that in one way or
another they stand on the back of our number three pick, Orson Welles.
>> Orson Welles: Where did you get the confidence
from to make-
>> Speaker 2: [CROSSTALK] >> Speaker 1: With such-
>> Speaker 11: Ignorance,
sheer ignorance, you know?
There's no confidence to [INAUDIBLE].
>> Speaker 1: There is perhaps no other single film that advanced cinemas more
than Citizen Kane.
One need only look at the dramatic shift in films produced before and
after the 1941 released to see how important Welles truly was.
>> Mel Brooks: It was kind of, in a wonderful way, responsible for
American filmmaking emerging as an important world product.
>> Speaker 1: Deep focused cinematography, varied camera heights, dramatic lighting,
and non-linear navigation through time may be the big reasons we hailed the film.
But he actually didn't really invent any of it.
Think of Orson Wells as a magnificent thief, a brilliant synthesizer, a man
who delved into the annals of filmmaking, brought forth his favorite bits and
with them built a more meaningful hold than had ever previously been assembled.
[NOISE] So who does Welles have to thank?
Well, there's no one whose influence was stronger than John Ford.
>> John Ford: Back in the 60s, Orson Wells was interviewed and
one of the questions he was asked was who his favorite American directors were.
He said, well, I prefer the old masters,
by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.
>> Speaker 1: Welles studied Ford's stagecoach every night over
dinner in preparation for directing Citizen Kane.
And if Ford influenced Welles and Welles influenced everyone else,
well, then by the transitive property of influence, Ford gets a spot on our list.
>> Peter Bogdanovich: Mr. Ford, you made a picture called Three Bad Men,
which is a large scale western.
You had a quite elaborate land rush in it.
How did you shoot that?
>> John Ford: With a camera.
>> Speaker 1: Now to suggest that John Ford's only achievement was Orson Welles'
abject fandom is severely estimating his importance.
And although his vision of the American frontier is perhaps the definitive
cinematic version of our national identity,
his success extended far beyond the western.
In one year, he directed Young Mr.
Lincoln, The Grapes of Wrath, and Stagecoach.
His work was simple but still nuanced, massive but still intimate, and
political but still personal.
Which makes him truly one of the greatest cinematic inspirations of all time.
[NOISE] And finally closing in at #1, where would any of these directors be if
it weren't for the earliest innovations of film's pioneers?
It's easy to forget that cinema isn't even a 150 years old.
However, dedicated filmmakers pushed the genre from
unchanging static long shots to today in an astonishing short amount of time.
So when considering some of the earliest innovators, we have to thank Robert W Paul
for inventing the first ever cut on continuity.
George Albert Smith for the first closeup and POV shot.
And James Williamson for the first ever reverse angle.
Edwin S Porter gets a massive shout-out for the first filmmaker to intercut.
But for our number one pick, we have to give it to DW Griffith.
The Director who put all these fresh ideas together and
figured out how they could work in concert to tell a feature length story.
>> Stanley Kubrick: His career was both an inspiration and a cautionary tale.
His best films will always rank among the most important films ever made.
>> Speaker 1: If all earlier directors were cavemen coming up with words like
me and rock, throw, and
even putting them together in elementary ways like me rock throw.
Griffith basically came along and invented grammar.
He showed us to arrange shots into coherent scenes, link scenes to make
coherent sequences, and combine sequences to build complex meaning.
His work is the pivot point from cinema as a technological curiosity and
peep show attraction, to a legitimate way to tell complicated stories.
And that may sound all fine and well today, where cinema and
storytelling is as natural as speech, but coming up with that in a vacuum?
Incredible.
So, what do you think?
Do you disagree with some of our picks?
Did we leave out your favorite director?
Let us know in the comments below and be sure to subscribe for
more CineFix movie lists.