What makes a great director?

Wait a great thread! While I'm not going to pretend to know what makes a great director because I simply have no way to judge other than by what I see at home or at the movies. I've never met any of these people or know what it's like to work with or for them and so on.

I can say this about this subject and I qualify this by saying that I watch A LOT of movies, good, bad, and really really bad. As I get older and look for movies to watch that I think will be good I tend to stick to certain Directors , Producers and so on.

Now I know this can't possibly mean that of the thousands of films that I watch and the hundreds of Directors that I like all of them are "Excellent or Good" But I guess I'm saying that in general the ones that I follow closely tend to be better than average and many times great. I could name a hundred examples but that will take up to much space.

This is why you guys will probably not see me post in to many of these debates about which director is better because in the Nolan/Fincher debate it's win win for me I like them both and choosing one over the other is pointless to me. Sadly this is not always the case there are plenty of directors out there that should go back to music videos or wherever they came from.

The cool thing for me today is that there is a lot more info available and there's a very good chance that because of forums like this I don't have to watch to many bad films because you folks are already talking about them before hand, so thanks in advance for that! Except of course when I'm on one of my frequent forays into really really bad film making and I try to collect every zombie movie made or all the films from Full Moon Studio's or something like that. LOL

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