Top 10 Most Successful Hollywood Directors

A film director is an innovative genius and creator, a complex artist and a hard working man. The director is involved in every single step of the creation of a movie. He directs everyone including screenwriters, designers, hires and directs actors, decides what scenes to film and how many times to repeat them, helps the editors in their post production work and so on and so forth. The success of a movie depends on the work of director. Most successful Hollywood directors are creative as well as hard working.

A successful director creates the most amazing movies. He is the most appreciated man when movie is a hit and if unfortunately the movie is flop he is the only person to be blamed. That is why there are only very few really great directors and they are paid millions of dollars for the movies that they direct. Here are top 10 most successful directors in Hollywood. I am sure that you are already familiar with their names and their best movies.

10. John Ford

John Ford was an Irish-American man who directed more than 140 movies during his career which lasted for more than 50 years. He is still considered to be one of the most influential directors and filmmakers in Hollywood. He holds the record for winning the Best Directors Oscar and the Academy Awards for Best Directors four times. His most famous movies are westerns like The Man Who Shot Liberty Wallace, The Searchers and Stagecoach and adaptations after great American novels like The Grapes of Wrath. These movies made him famous and he will always be praised for giving audience such films in Hollywood.

9. Joel Coen

Joel Coen is an American film director of Jewish descent who works along with his brother Ethan. They write, direct and produce their films together. Joel Coen directed movies like No Country for Old Men (2007), The Big Lebowski (1998) and True Grit (2010). Joel and Ethan were nominated for thirteen Academy Awards and they won four. They also won Oscars and a lot of other awards for the sophisticated, complex, post-modern kind of movies. Both brothers will be remembered whenever the history of Hollywood is written because they have given best movies through out their career as director.

8. Charlie Chaplin

Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin was the most famous movie star before World War I. He worked in both the silent and the talking movie era being a creative comedian, a movie director, writer and exceptional artist. The role in The Tramp played in 1914 made him famous. By 1916 he was writing, directing and producing his own films, and from 1918 he was composing the film music also. Not just his acting was wonderful, movies directed by him are worth watching.

7. Orson Welles

Orson Welles was an American director, writer and producer. He co-wrote, produced directed and starred in the best film of all time, Citizen Kane (1941). He also produced The War of Worlds (1938), the most famous broadcast in radio history that started a mass hysteria about an alien invasion and made Welles famous. In 2002, two British Film Institutes voted him as the greatest film director of all time.

6. Francis Ford Coppola

Francis Ford Coppola is an American film director famous for his depiction of Vietnam War in his movie Apocalypse Now and his innovative ways of reinventing the gangster movie in The Godfather I and II. He won Academy Awards and Oscars for his movies becoming a prominent figure among famous Hollywood directors during 1970-80. He is the fourth most successful Hollywood director of all time.

5. Quentin Tarantino

This successful director in Hollywood began his directing career in 1980. Quentin Tarantino’s particular style of movie called the aestheticization of violence made him famous and brought him numerous awards. His hit movies are Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), Kill Bill (2003, 2004), Inglorious Basterds (2009) and Django Unchained (2012). On the basis of his experience in directing, he has been listed in the most successful movie directors. He is the one of the successful Hollywood directors of all times for giving most watched movies.

4. Steven Spielberg

Steven Spielberg is one of the most successful, influential and popular movie makers in the history of cinema. His movies covered a variety of themes from science-fiction and adventure to Holocaust, slavery, war and terrorism. His most famous movies are Schinlder’s List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). His most recent directed movie was Lincoln (2012). They brought him a lot of fame and money, Forbes estimating his wealth at $3.7 billion.

3. Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese is an American director that grew up in New York City. He won Academy Award, Palm d’Or, Emmy, Golden Globe, BAFTA and many other awards for his movies. He is one of the most influential figures of all time. His best movies are Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980) and Goodfellas (1990).

2. Stanley Kubrick

He is one of America’s greatest filmmakers. He adapted a lot of novels and short stories in a unique and “dazzling” way. His movies covered a large variety of themes like war, black comedy, horror and science fiction. One of his greatest movies is A Clockwork Orange (1971). Some of his films worth mentioning are Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Lolita (1962) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

1. Alfred Hitchcock

The most successful director in Hollywood was Hitchcock. This legend was an English director and producer that moved to Hollywood in 1939. In his 60 years career he directed more than 50 films and pioneered a lot of things in the movie making techniques like camera movement that maximize the anxiety and fear effect. The Movie Maker magazine regarded him as the most influential film maker of all times. Psycho (1960) is Hitchcock’s best-known film which is still watched by movie lovers.