Film Directors
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Film Directors trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
A director's name on a poster can sell a film before anyone has seen a frame of it. Behind the best-known names are stories as good as the movies themselves: day jobs abandoned, shoots that nearly collapsed, and gambles that changed how films are made. This quiz covers famous movie directors from the silent era to today's blockbusters. Expect questions on who made which classic, how well-known filmmakers got their start, Oscar firsts, trademark styles, festival prizes and the working language of the director's chair. It is written for film fans, pub quiz teams and movie-night hosts. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you can play straight through or print the questions for a group.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which director of Titanic made the first solo dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench?
James Cameron
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.
Q 02Which director worked for five years at a California video rental store before making Reservoir Dogs?
Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino manned the counter at Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, where he became known locally for his film knowledge and his recommendations.
Q 03Which British director of Psycho and Vertigo made brief cameo appearances in most of his own films?
Alfred Hitchcock
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.
Q 04Which director kept the shark in Jaws mostly unseen because the mechanical models kept breaking down?
Steven Spielberg
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.
Q 05Which former Disney animator went on to direct Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and the 1989 Batman?
Tim Burton
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.
Q 06Which American Graffiti director founded Industrial Light & Magic to make his next film?
George Lucas
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.
Q 07Which director filmed all three Lord of the Rings movies at once in his native New Zealand?
Peter Jackson
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.
Q 08Which director told the thriller Memento in reverse order, long before winning Oscars for Oppenheimer?
Christopher Nolan
Christopher Nolan built Memento on a story his brother Jonathan pitched to him during a road trip from Chicago to Los Angeles.
Q 09Which director of The Hurt Locker became the first woman to win the Best Director Oscar?
Kathryn Bigelow
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.
Q 10Which Apollo 13 director grew up on screen playing Opie in The Andy Griffith Show?
Ron Howard
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.
Q 11Which director cast Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas?
Martin Scorsese
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.
Q 12Which American director settled in England and went on to make 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining?
Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick rarely filmed abroad after the move, even dressing a derelict London gasworks as a ruined Vietnamese city for Full Metal Jacket.
Q 13Which Francis Ford Coppola war epic ran months over in the Philippines after storms destroyed its sets?
Apocalypse Now
Q 21Which Sundance co-founder directed Quiz Show, the drama about the rigged 1950s game show Twenty-One?
Robert Redford
Robert Redford had already won the Best Director Oscar with his first film behind the camera, the family drama Ordinary People.
Q 22Which Brooklyn-raised director of Do the Right Thing named his production company 40 Acres and a Mule?
Spike Lee
Spike Lee has also directed commercials for Converse and Taco Bell through the company, and won a screenplay Oscar for BlacKkKlansman.
Q 23Which director of The Grand Budapest Hotel is known for symmetrical shots and a limited color palette?
Wes Anderson
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.
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.
Q 14Which actor-director of Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby once served as mayor of Carmel, California?
Clint Eastwood
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.
Q 15Which director followed Lady Bird and Little Women with Barbie, a comedy about the Mattel doll?
Greta Gerwig
Greta Gerwig became the first woman with sole director credit on a film that took more than $1 billion at the global box office.
Q 16Which director released the comedies Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein within a single year?
Mel Brooks
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.
Q 17Which English director of Alien, Blade Runner and Gladiator started out making television commercials?
Ridley Scott
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.
Q 18Which Back to the Future director later won the Best Director Oscar for Forrest Gump?
Robert Zemeckis
Robert Zemeckis also mixed live actors with cartoons in Who Framed Roger Rabbit and built The Polar Express on motion capture of its cast.
Q 19Which Studio Ghibli co-founder directed My Neighbor Totoro and the Oscar-winning Spirited Away?
Hayao Miyazaki
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.
Q 20Which former sketch comedian won a screenplay Oscar for his directing debut, the horror film Get Out?
Jordan Peele
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.
Q 24Which Mexican director of Pan's Labyrinth won the Best Director Oscar for The Shape of Water?
Guillermo del Toro
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.
Q 25Which South Korean director made Parasite, the first non-English-language film to win Best Picture?
Bong Joon-ho
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.
Q 26Which director co-wrote, produced and starred in Citizen Kane, his very first feature film?
Orson Welles
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.
Q 27Which Japanese director made Seven Samurai, later remade in Hollywood as The Magnificent Seven?
Akira Kurosawa
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.
Q 28Which silent-era star directed himself as the Tramp in The Kid, City Lights and Modern Times?
Charlie Chaplin
Charlie Chaplin co-founded the distribution company United Artists in 1919, which gave him complete control over his own films.
Q 29Which William Friedkin film was the first horror movie to be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar?
The Exorcist
The Exorcist earned ten Oscar nominations in all, two years after the same filmmaker's thriller The French Connection had won Best Picture.
Q 30Which Jonathan Demme thriller swept the five major Oscars, from Best Picture to both lead acting prizes?
The Silence of the Lambs
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.