Directors Project: 10 Things I Noticed From the Prep Sessions

Tim Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption

As of this past Sunday, the Directors Project's first phase has officially closed. With that said, it is in the stages of tallying votes and figuring out where everything stands. I assure you that the list is far more curious than initially believed. There's some trends that were unexpected. Since the voting went up to 1000 entries, it did allow for some oddities to sneak in and essentially make the list a lot harder to compile as a legitimate look. The following is a few strange early things that I have noticed and unfortunately need to incorporate into my list as we prepare for the next stages.

For starters, I want to apologize for the lack of posts as of late. I am aware that with Cannes being recently, I do have a lot of material that I could use. I am also aware that I need to be more active in publishing reviews. The truth is that I have been busy with real world situations and have been dedicating my time to other fields. I will keep doing this, though it will be hard to increase my output. For the time being, I am proud to say that I am officially a writer over at The Focus Pull, which publishes every Tuesday. Check out my work here. With summer coming up, I do hope to have more features posted on top of The Directors Project, which has been a major consumption of time.

With this said, let me run through a few strange notes that I feel one must look out for when reading my list. 

1. The goal of expanding my base to include more classic films was sort of a bust. Along with my unforeseen business, I didn't have time to catch all that many movies. As it stands, I still haven't seen any Tartakovsky or Ozu. It made me watch Kieslowski's The Three Colors trilogy however, and that is phenomenal. However, as a result, majority of my selections will be more American oriented than I initially hoped.

2. I haven't seen nearly as many Alfred Hitchcock films as I initially believed. I have only seen five total.

3. While there are several filmmakers who have multiple films in the Top 100, none have more than two in the Top 50. Also, only two directors (Banksy and Casey Affleck) have their entire filmography in the Top 50. Joshua Oppenheimer barely misses the cut at #51.

4. The most prolific directors on the list (not based on points ranking) are: Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, Sam Raimi, Kevin Smith, Steven Spielberg, Joel and Ethan Coen, Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, Christopher Nolan, Clint Eastwood, Paul Thomas Anderson, David Fincher, Hayao Miyazaki, Peter Jackson, Tim Burton and Richard Linklater to name a few.

5. Did I mention that Tim Burton shows up a lot on here? With exception to Sweeney Todd, the entries are all older films that are actually good.

6. There's a whole bunch of directors who made the list simply because they made a lot of the iconic Disney films.

7.  The last qualifying film on the list is Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers.

8. With the list being predominantly male, the highest ranked film by a female director is Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation (#25). 

9. The highest ranked animated film is Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox (#11)

10. It is way harder to mix quality films with personal favorites, so there's a lot of strange decisions that will be hard to refute, specifically Bring It On being #33. 

Those are a few things to tide you over as I get the final production underway. As promised, they will be released in 12 hour increments from the time that the releases start. I hope to have a more consistent output as summer approached and I again apologizing for leaving this blog at times dormant for over a week. Hopefully this will bring some attention back to covering news for The Oscar Buzz, which is starting to heat up. I do hope to have a piece on Foxcatcher sometime within the week. Otherwise, thanks for whatever contributions you have given and I look forward to seeing what the final results look like. From the sound of it, things are going to look both impressive with revelations of embarrassment of weak spots. Then again, that's why I'm doing this challenge.