My favourite film directors
- Krzysztof Kieślowski (Red)
- Billy Wilder (The apartment)
- Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne (The son)
- Éric Rohmer (Rendezvous in Paris)
- Stanley Kubrick (Dr. Strangelove)
- Luis Buñuel (The discreet charm of the bourgeoisie)
- Woody Allen (The purple rose of Cairo)
- Jacques Tati (Playtime)
- Mike Leigh (Vera Drake)
- Fritz Lang (M)
- Emir Kusturica (Life is a miracle)
- Edgar Reitz (Heimat 2)
- Pedro Almodóvar (Volver)
- Otar Iosseliani (Chasing butterflies)
- Ingmar Bergman (The magician)
others, in alphabetical order:
Robert Altman (The players), Marco Bellocchio (L'ora di religione), Claude Chabrol (The unfaithful wife), Blake Edwards (A shot in the dark), Federico Fellini (Amarcord), Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North), Alfred Hitchcock (Rear window), Aki Kaurismäki (I hired a contract killer), Kim Ki-Duk (3-Iron), Takeshi Kitano (Dolls), Cédric Klapisch (L'auberge espagnole), Enrst Lubitsch (Ninotchka), Mario Monicelli (Cops and robbers), Elio Petri (The working class goes to heaven), Jean Renoir (The rules of the game), Walter Salles (Central do Brasil), Andrei Tarkovsky (Solaris), Bertrand Tavernier (The clockmaker), Lars von Trier (Dogville), François Truffaut (The man who loved women), Carlo Verdone (L'amore è eterno finché dura), Henri Verneuil (The Sicilian clan), Paolo Virzì (Tutta la vita davanti)
These lists only include directors of at least two films that I have seen. In brackets is my favourite film for each director.
From these results, I can conclude I most often like directors depicting contemporary Western life in a realistic way (Dardenne, Rohmer, Leigh), looking for positive human values but with an antirhetorical or even cynical eye (Wilder, Buñuel, Altman), especially when embarking in ambitious, radically original artistic projects (Playtime, Heimat, Dogville).