🎬The Greats

At her own Solax Studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, which she ran from 1910, Guy-Blaché is said to have hung a large sign reading 'BE NATURAL' above the stage, instructing actors trained in exaggerated stage technique to drop theatrical gestures for the more intimate scale the camera required, a directing philosophy so central to her method that a 2018 documentary about her rediscovery took the phrase as its title.

For Battleship Potemkin's Odessa Steps sequence, Eisenstein built the massacre almost entirely in the cutting room: he shot the scene with local Odessa residents as extras over several days in 1925, then intercut close-ups, mid-shots and a runaway baby carriage in a rhythm designed to accelerate the viewer's pulse rather than record events in real time, a fictional massacre assembled so persuasively through editing that many viewers have mistaken it for a historical record ever since.

The three assistant directors on Rashomon reportedly went to Kurosawa's home together to ask him to explain the confusing, contradictory script, since even they couldn't follow it. According to Kurosawa's own memoir, he reread it and told them human beings are unable to be honest about themselves, and that the script simply depicted people embellishing the truth about their own lives; the explanation convinced them, and shooting proceeded as written.

Varda made her first feature, La Pointe Courte, in 1954, five years before Truffaut's The 400 Blows is usually credited with starting the French New Wave, filming professional actor Philippe Noiret alongside non-professional local fishermen in the town of Sète, financed with money from her own family. She later said she had seen barely a handful of films before directing it, coming from still photography rather than a cinephile background, and cut the film with editor Alain Resnais, not yet a director himself.

When Marlon Brando arrived in the Philippines to play Colonel Kurtz on Apocalypse Now, he had not read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the novel the role was loosely based on, and had gained significant weight, forcing Coppola to shoot him mostly in shadow and improvise Kurtz's dialogue with him night after night as the production, delayed by a typhoon and Martin Sheen's on-set heart attack, stretched from a planned six weeks to well over a year.

At the 2010 Academy Awards, Bigelow's low-budget Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker won Best Picture and Best Director over Avatar, the highest-grossing film ever made at the time, directed by her former husband James Cameron, a rare instance of two ex-spouses facing off for the same top prizes, decided in her favor, and the first time in the Academy's 82-year history a woman had won the directing award.

Accepting the Best Director Oscar for Parasite in 2020, becoming only the second Asian filmmaker ever to win the award, Bong said through his interpreter that he had learned as a film student to live by a quote from fellow nominee Martin Scorsese, 'the most personal is the most creative,' prompting the ceremony's audience to rise and applaud Scorsese, sitting in the room having lost the award to the director who had just credited him.