Any website or magazine editor will tell you, when in doubt, just shove in a competition or a poll. People love lists! So, in 2006, as attention shifted to the upcoming World Cup, in desperation, I asked the writers of Close-Up Film to come up with their list of the ten best working directors. Most struggled to come up with ten! What follows is my intro to the results, the results themselves, then my own entries.
This year’s Cannes saw an unprecedented number of auteur pieces heading up the competition – films from Ken Loach, Pedro Almodovar, Richard Linklater, et al - while coming up over the next few months are a stack of releases designed to get the cinephile’s mouth watering – Michael Mann’s adaptation of his own TV series Miami Vice, Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep, Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Three Times and Terry Gilliam’s Tideland. And now that other great summer contest, the World Cup, is about to start, we here at Close-Up thought we’d counteract the football blues by kicking off our own debate on the best in film. So we asked our writers this simple question: who are the ten best directors working today? The filmmakers who are making the difference, the ones crafting the finest cinema, the work that will last and be remembered in the future?
It was clear who the winners would be early on, but what was extraordinary about the response was the sheer breadth of people offered as candidates. All in all, our writers polled an astonishing 97 names. And the diversity of filmmakers who excited their interest was refreshing, from the Coen Brothers to the Dardenne Brothers, from Julio Medem to Chris Cunningham. Proof enough against the prophets of doom who would have us believe that cinema is past its best. On the contrary, world cinema is alive and well, blossoming with new genres and movements, like the Korean revenge thriller or Luhrmann’s acid musical.
Over the next few weeks, Close-Up will be providing a series of specials on some of the directors mentioned here and in the individual responses below. Look out for issues devoted to Ken Loach, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Michael Mann, Richard Linklater, and, of course, the winner of our poll, Martin Scorsese. With all that, who needs football?
Martin Scorsese
Michael Haneke/Park Chan-wook/Steven Spielberg
Other directors who received multiple votes:
Paul Thomas Anderson
Wes Anderson
David Cronenberg
Ang Lee
Quentin Tarantino
Tim Burton
Clint Eastwood
Michel Gondry
David Lynch
Hiyao Miyazaki
Christopher Nolan
Bryan Singer
Wong Kar Wei
Abbas Kiarostami – Every generation needs their own movement of cinema. The ‘20s had the Soviet school, the ‘40s Neo-realism, the ‘60s the French New Wave. But what was the defining movement of my, er, thirtysomething generation? The new Iranian cinema. And its crown prince was Kiarostami. He is our Rossellini, our Godard, a filmmaker who rewrites all the rules, who fuses neorealism with docudrama with contemplative humanism. And he’s still going strong, pushing cinema so far into the abstract with Ten and Five that a new word will have to be coined for the genre they belong to.
Hou Hsiao-Hsien – Derek Malcolm once complained that if Hou was French or Italian, he’d be known as one of the “world’s foremost filmmakers”. Well, here he is on my list, Derek. Because no director at the moment makes films that are so lyrical, so downright beautiful, but which contrive at the same time to define the whole social, political and historical framework of one country – namely, Taiwan. He is an absolute master.
David Cronenberg – Although I haven’t much liked his two most recent efforts, I still regard Cronenberg as the most intelligent and original English-language director. Throughout his career, from his first shorts (Stereo, Crimes of the Future) and his early ‘grunge’ classics (The Brood, Videodrome) up to his ingenious adaptations of untranslatable books (Naked Lunch, Crash), he has displayed an uncompromising, intellectual edge. He needs to return to writing his own scripts, but his control of material is never less than assured.
David Lynch – The other great David of North American film is a whole other story, one played out in dreams and nightmares, that slides between Surrealist monsters and bobbysox pop. Lynch has pushed his way out of the cult envelope to emerge as a fully-fledged master of narrative experimentation, and the realms he has created are so tangible, they’re now a part of everyone’s cinematic mindscape.
Hiyao Miyazaki – The king of all animators, even surpassing Disney in the complexity of his story-telling and the richness of his themes. While the excellence of his films’ animation is in no doubt, what constantly surprises is the subtlety of the interaction between characters and the quiet but passionate way Miyazaki pursues his arguments about personal responsibility and ecological damage.
“Beat” Takeshi Kitano – The super cool hard man of modern cinema perhaps, but also a formidably intelligent essayist, comedian and director who has combined his talents to create a new, utterly unique brand of film. Deceptively light, his movies combine childlike playfulness, vehement nihilism and romantic sentiment with bravura visual stylisation.
Koreeda Hirokazu – The third Japanese director on my list is the least-known, and yet his four features to date demonstrate a humanism that had been all but lost from cinema since the 1950s. He may not be as formally daring as his East Asian counterparts, but Koreeda is more concerned with the vagaries of human relationships. His compassion for his characters, and the often non-professional actors that play them, coupled with the intensity of his enquiry and sureness of technique means he should be regarded as a minor master.
Jia Zhangke – Still a relatively new face on the World Cinema scene, and yet already this Chinese director has shown a tremendous talent for combining rigorous technique with intelligent insight. His breakthrough feature, Platform, could be considered the apotheosis of the long-take, sequence-shot ‘cinema of contemplation’.
Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne – Harbingers of a new European humanism, harking back to the social realism of the ‘50s and ‘60s and the work of Alan Clarke, and already influencing figures like Christi Puiu, maker of the astonishing Death of Mr Lazarescu. Their films are intimate and small-scale, but the impact of their work is universal, as their two Palme D’Ors bear witness.
Robert Altman – One of a growing league of veterans (including New Wavers Rivette, Rohmer and Chabrol, and keepers of the classic mise-en-scene faith, Eastwood and Polanksi) who not only refuse to go away but repeatedly show up their young rivals with movies that are innovative and challenging. Only recently, Altman gave us Gosford Park and the beautiful, criminally-underrated ballet movie, The Company, which deserves to be called one of the greatest dance films ever.
Honourable mentions to those two great “shadow-men” of the movies – Victor Erice and Chris Marker.