50 Fun Facts About Film Directors

Which director of Titanic made the first solo dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench?

James Cameron reached the deepest point of any ocean alone in 2012, and footage from the expedition showed a sea cucumber that scientists believe is a new species.

Which director worked for five years at a California video rental store before making Reservoir Dogs?

Quentin Tarantino manned the counter at Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, where he became known locally for his film knowledge and his recommendations.

Which British director of Psycho and Vertigo made brief cameo appearances in most of his own films?

Alfred Hitchcock first slipped into shot in The Lodger, sitting in a newsroom, and the walk-ons became a publicity trademark that audiences learned to watch for.

Which director kept the shark in Jaws mostly unseen because the mechanical models kept breaking down?

Steven Spielberg let an ominous, minimalist musical theme announce the shark instead, while trouble with the props helped push the budget from $4 million to $9 million.

Which former Disney animator went on to direct Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and the 1989 Batman?

Tim Burton won his apprenticeship at the studio with a student short called Stalk of the Celery Monster, then worked on The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron.

Which American Graffiti director founded Industrial Light & Magic to make his next film?

George Lucas set the company up in Van Nuys, California, in 1975 as he began work on Star Wars, and it has since made the effects for more than three hundred films.

Which director filmed all three Lord of the Rings movies at once in his native New Zealand?

Peter Jackson shot the trilogy in one stretch from 1999 to 2000, and its final part, The Return of the King, won every one of the 11 Oscars it was nominated for.

Which director told the thriller Memento in reverse order, long before winning Oscars for Oppenheimer?

Christopher Nolan built Memento on a story his brother Jonathan pitched to him during a road trip from Chicago to Los Angeles.

Which director of The Hurt Locker became the first woman to win the Best Director Oscar?

Kathryn Bigelow began as a painting student in San Francisco and lived as a struggling artist in New York before she turned to making films.

Which Apollo 13 director grew up on screen playing Opie in The Andy Griffith Show?

Ron Howard became a household name a second time as Richie Cunningham in Happy Days, then moved behind the camera and won a Best Director Oscar for A Beautiful Mind.

Which director cast Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas?

Martin Scorsese began the partnership with Mean Streets in 1973, but his first Best Director Oscar came for The Departed, more than thirty years later.

Which American director settled in England and went on to make 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining?

Stanley Kubrick rarely filmed abroad after the move, even dressing a derelict London gasworks as a ruined Vietnamese city for Full Metal Jacket.

Which Francis Ford Coppola war epic ran months over in the Philippines after storms destroyed its sets?

Apocalypse Now was planned as a five-month shoot and took more than a year, during which lead actor Martin Sheen suffered a near-fatal heart attack on location.

Which actor-director of Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby once served as mayor of Carmel, California?

Clint Eastwood won Best Director and Best Picture Oscars for both films, and held the mayor's office in Carmel-by-the-Sea for two years after his election in 1986.

Which director followed Lady Bird and Little Women with Barbie, a comedy about the Mattel doll?

Greta Gerwig became the first woman with sole director credit on a film that took more than $1 billion at the global box office.

Which director released the comedies Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein within a single year?

Mel Brooks is one of the few people to have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony, the full set known as an EGOT.

Which English director of Alien, Blade Runner and Gladiator started out making television commercials?

Ridley Scott made many adverts in the 1970s, including a Hovis bread commercial filmed on Gold Hill in Dorset, before his film debut with The Duellists.

Which Back to the Future director later won the Best Director Oscar for Forrest Gump?

Robert Zemeckis also mixed live actors with cartoons in Who Framed Roger Rabbit and built The Polar Express on motion capture of its cast.

Which Studio Ghibli co-founder directed My Neighbor Totoro and the Oscar-winning Spirited Away?

Hayao Miyazaki wrote and directed Spirited Away, which became the highest-grossing film in Japanese history on its release and won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.

Which former sketch comedian won a screenplay Oscar for his directing debut, the horror film Get Out?

Jordan Peele spent five seasons on Mad TV and co-created the series Key & Peele before his horror debut also earned Best Picture and Best Director nominations.

Which Sundance co-founder directed Quiz Show, the drama about the rigged 1950s game show Twenty-One?

Robert Redford had already won the Best Director Oscar with his first film behind the camera, the family drama Ordinary People.

Which Brooklyn-raised director of Do the Right Thing named his production company 40 Acres and a Mule?

Spike Lee has also directed commercials for Converse and Taco Bell through the company, and won a screenplay Oscar for BlacKkKlansman.

Which director of The Grand Budapest Hotel is known for symmetrical shots and a limited color palette?

Wes Anderson met Owen Wilson as a roommate at the University of Texas at Austin, and they turned a short they made together into his first film, Bottle Rocket.

Which Mexican director of Pan's Labyrinth won the Best Director Oscar for The Shape of Water?

Guillermo del Toro has had a lifelong fascination with monsters, and he put his own collection of paintings, models and film art on show in a museum exhibition called At Home with Monsters.

Which South Korean director made Parasite, the first non-English-language film to win Best Picture?

Bong Joon-ho had made his English-language debut six years earlier with Snowpiercer, a science fiction action film starring Chris Evans and Tilda Swinton.

Which director co-wrote, produced and starred in Citizen Kane, his very first feature film?

Orson Welles was already famous for a 1938 radio version of The War of the Worlds that led some listeners to believe a Martian invasion was under way.

Which Japanese director made Seven Samurai, later remade in Hollywood as The Magnificent Seven?

Akira Kurosawa saw another of his samurai films, Yojimbo, copied in Italy as A Fistful of Dollars, which led the Japanese studio Toho to sue.

Which silent-era star directed himself as the Tramp in The Kid, City Lights and Modern Times?

Charlie Chaplin co-founded the distribution company United Artists in 1919, which gave him complete control over his own films.

Which William Friedkin film was the first horror movie to be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar?

The Exorcist earned ten Oscar nominations in all, two years after the same filmmaker's thriller The French Connection had won Best Picture.

Which Jonathan Demme thriller swept the five major Oscars, from Best Picture to both lead acting prizes?

The Silence of the Lambs was only the third film to manage the sweep, after It Happened One Night and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Which top prize of the Cannes Film Festival goes to the director of the best film in competition?

The Palme d'Or was created in 1955 to replace the festival's Grand Prix, then was itself dropped for a decade before returning for good in 1975.

Which fake name did the Directors Guild of America credit when a filmmaker disowned the finished film?

Alan Smithee was coined in 1968 for the western Death of a Gunfighter, and a director had to prove to a guild panel that creative control had been taken away.

Which French term did Cahiers du Cinéma critics use for a director with a strong personal style?

Auteur theory grew from a 1955 phrase of François Truffaut's, arguing that directors who put their personality into their work make better films.

Which Italian director ended his Dollars trilogy with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly?

Sergio Leone became known for cutting between extreme close-ups and very long shots, a style he carried into Once Upon a Time in the West.

Which Swedish director had a knight play chess against Death in The Seventh Seal?

Ingmar Bergman set most of his films in Sweden and shot many of them, from 1961 onward, on the island of Fårö.

Which director shot Boyhood in short bursts over twelve years while its young lead actor grew up?

Richard Linklater filmed from 2002 to 2014, so the lead actor Ellar Coltrane ages from six to eighteen on screen within a single film.

Which director raised almost half the $7,000 budget of El Mariachi by volunteering for drug trials?

Robert Rodriguez was living in Austin, Texas, when he signed up for the clinical tests, and later explained his money-saving tricks on the film's DVD.

Which Australian director worked as a hospital physician before making the first Mad Max film?

George Miller later won an Oscar for the animated film Happy Feet, then returned to the wasteland decades on with Mad Max: Fury Road.

Which Slumdog Millionaire director staged the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games?

Danny Boyle won the Best Director Oscar for the Mumbai-set drama, having made his name in the 1990s with Shallow Grave and Trainspotting.

Which director of the 1978 slasher Halloween also composed and performed its piano score himself?

John Carpenter took just three days to write and record the music, building it around a simple piano melody in an unusual time signature.

Which director is credited with both The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, released in the same year?

Victor Fleming won the Best Director Oscar for the Civil War epic, and directed its leading man Clark Gable in five films in all.

Which French stage magician turned filmmaker made the 1902 fantasy A Trip to the Moon?

Georges Méliès fell for stage magic at London's Egyptian Hall, and loosely based his best-known film on Jules Verne's novel From the Earth to the Moon.

Which director of Boyz n the Hood was the first Black filmmaker nominated for the Best Director Oscar?

John Singleton was only 24 and it was his first feature, which also made him the youngest person nominated for the award up to that point.

Which Italian director's La Dolce Vita gave the world the word paparazzi, from a character's name?

Federico Fellini named the news photographer in his 1960 satire Paparazzo, and the surname passed into many languages as a label for intrusive photographers.

Which director of Some Like It Hot left Germany for Paris, then Hollywood, as the Nazis rose to power?

Billy Wilder made his first film as a director in Paris in 1934, and in Hollywood went on to direct Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch as well.

Which German director had a real 320-ton steamship hauled up a hill in the Amazon for Fitzcarraldo?

Werner Herzog had his crew haul the real vessel up the muddy slope despite faulty machinery, echoing the obsession of the would-be rubber baron in his story.

Which Italian director of Seven Beauties became the first woman nominated for the Best Director Oscar?

Lina Wertmüller was already known in America for Swept Away, which the National Board of Review had named its top foreign film.

Which director won Best Director Oscars for two musicals, West Side Story and The Sound of Music?

Robert Wise started out as a film editor at RKO, where his work cutting Citizen Kane earned him an Oscar nomination.

Which Hollywood director made The Ten Commandments twice, as a 1923 silent and a 1956 epic?

Cecil B. DeMille saw his first version hold the Paramount revenue record for 25 years, and the remake turned out to be his final film.

Which Soviet director staged the massacre on the Odessa Steps in the silent film Battleship Potemkin?

Sergei Eisenstein cut the sequence as a showcase of Soviet montage editing, and it has been recreated by other filmmakers ever since.