Top 10 Directors

From sci-fi, to adventure, drama and everything inbetween, Steven Spielberg is one of the most popular and influential film makers in film history. He won Best Director Oscars for Schindler’s List and Private Ryan and three of his films, Jaws, ET & Jurassic Park broke box office records. “I’ve tried to make every movie as if it were made by a different director,” says Spielberg.

There are probably never enough hours in the day for our next director, the titanic James Cameron… and judging by his output it‘s very possible he has actually learned the secret of cloning himself. If anyone could, it would be him. "Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality,” says the director of Titanic, Alien and Avatar.

“I’m too restless not to do anything that’s not really zany,” says Robert Zemeckis. Despite the double negative, with Back To The Future 1, 2 & 3, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Forrest Gump under his academy-award winning belt, it’s kind of hard to argue.

“Live like you’ll die tomorrow, work like you don’t need the money and dance like nobody’s watching,” said Bob Fosse, the ace dancer, choreographer and director of Cabaret, All That Jazz and Sweet Charity. Fosse was recovering from a heart attack when he came up with idea of the autobiographical, warts-and-all-singing and dancing movie extravaganza that became All That Jazz. It won four Oscars and a clutch of other awards.

Robert Zemeckis wrote most of the best lines for Dan Ayckroyd. Who would go on to completely smash all box office records co-starring with his old Saturday Night Live mates Bill Murray and Harold Ramis in Ghostbusters, which was directed by Ivan Reitman, a giant among men-who-shout-action! Now how many degrees of separation is that?

Ivan Reitman continued collaborating with Harold Ramis for some years but both men were successful independently in front of and behind the camera. Multiplicity, starring Michael Keaton and Andie McDowell was a Ramis special as was the box office smash comedy, Groundhog Day.

No stranger to Hollywood, writer, director and former Python Terry Gilliam has been responsible for many a celluloid flight of fancy. Letting his imagination run wild certainly paid off with The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen, Brazil and The Fisher King.

“I want everything I do to have humor in it, because it seems to me that all of life has that,” says Lawrence Kasdan who directed the seminal comedy/drama The Big Chill, Body Heat and Wyatt Earp. Kasdan is also a hugely respected screenwriter with credits for Star Wars and Raiders Of The Lost Ark to his name.

“There’s no point in making films unless you intend to show us something special,” says director Bryan Singer and his work seems to bear this out. After receiving critical acclaim for the thriller The Usual Suspects, Singer would go on to breathe life into the X Men franchise and the Superman legend.

“I look on myself as an entertainer, more than anything else,” says Sam Raimi. Well that’s one way to describe the gore-fest director’s work. After all, this is the man who cut his teeth, and more or less every other body part, on the hugely controversial horror The Evil Dead. Since then Raimi has cut his teeth on more mainstream blockbusters including the Spiderman trilogy.