Favourite Filmmakers per Decade

[CarsonWid]

So, I was thinking about who my favourite directors are right now and was trying to put it in the context of who is delivering recently and not just about people who were good 5-10 years ago. 2 good examples are the Coen brothers and Darren Aronofsky, both of whom I would include in my Top 20 but haven't exactly delivered recently (in my opinion).

So I took out the old Excel spreadsheet and put in scores for my top 50 directors and divided them into decades to see some results. Note that some of these results are skewed by 1 or 2 good or bad movies or sometimes just having 1 movie in a specific decade that I have seen:

2010s
1. Wes Anderson (86.5)
2. Fincher (84.7)
3. Inarritu (84)
4. Nolan (83.7)
5. McQueen (83.5)

2000s
1. Scorsese (91.3)
2. Aronofsky (89.3)
3. Wes Anderson (89)
4. Nolan (89)
5. PT Anderson (86.5)

1990s
1. Gilliam (87)
2. Wes Anderson (87)
3. Jarmusch (84)
4. Coens (84)
5. Tarantino (83.7)

1980s
1. Kubrick (91.5)
2. Kurosawa (90.5)
3. Tarkovsky (83.5)
4. Woody Allen (83.3)
5. Jarmusch (80.3)

1970s
1. Coppola (92.3)
2. Kubrick (91)
3. Tarkovsky (87)
4. Scorsese (83)
5. Woody Allen (82.5)
*It should be noted here that I realized while doing this that I have seen no 70s Bergman films, which is a sin and I will fix soon.

1960s
1. Leone (88.3)
2. Kubrick (88)
3. Kobayashi (88)
4. Kurosawa (87.3)
5. Bergman (85)

Probably other directors could have been in my top 5 that I didn't include because I haven't seen more than 1 film of theirs in a decade or because they weren't in my top 50 overall due to some bad movies bringing them down....but thought it was fun to do.

I wish in the Filmmaker List section we could place list restrictions (restrict the search just to certain time frame, genre, etc.)

[snallygaster]

Interesting. I used a slightly different method, grouping by decade and eliminating any unique director names from each group (thus a 2-film minimum):

2010s: Too few rankings to be meaningful

2000s:
Coens (2) 90
Ang Lee (2) 84
Bela Tarr (2) 82
Adam Curtis (3) 78
Katsuhito Ishii (3) 76

1990s:
Coens (4) 83
Tarantino (2) 74
Fincher (2) 69
Nick Park (2) 69
Jarmusch (2) 65

1980s:
Kubrick (2) 86
Abrahams / Zucker (2) 77
Hayao Miyazaki (3) 74
Sam Raimi (2) 69
Jonathan Demme (2) 65

1970s:
Kubrick (2) 82
Coppola (4) 80
Tarkovsky (3) 79
Peter Watkins (2) 79
Bergman (2) 79

1960s:
Kaneto Shindo (2) 90
Masaki Kobayashi (5) 85 (83 if Human Condition is counted as one movie)
Fellini (2) 85
Ozu (3) 84
Bergman (2) 81

1950s:
Kubrick (2) 91
Ozu (4) 90
Satyajit Ray (3) 78
Kurosawa (5) 75
Mizoguchi (5) 75

1940s:
John Ford (2) 77
Orson Welles (2) 76
John Huston (2) 75
Ozu (2) 75
Howard Hawks (2) 74

1930s:
Chaplin (2) 77
Jean Renoir (3) 67
Leo McCarey (2) 66
Ernst Lubitsch (2) 59
Jean Vigo (3) 53

1920s & earlier: too few rankings

The Coens and Bergman are top-5 in two decades; Ozu and Kubrick are top-5 in three decades. American directors nearly drop out during the 50s and 60s.