The modern motion-picture director is the person most responsible for the ultimate style, structure, and quality of a film. Cinema is an art of collaboration, and in some instances someone other than the director may come to dominate (for example, a producer with authority over the final cut or an actor whose box-office popularity gives him the power to direct the director), but in general it is assumed that the person assigned to direct the picture must take the credit or blame for its form and content.

(Read Cecil B. DeMille’s 1929 Britannica essay on film directing.)

While the function the director serves has always been filled by someone, the priority of that function has not always been recognized. Georges Méliès, for example, thought of himself as a “producer” of films, and indeed from 1896 to 1912 he took care of all aspects of the making of the films bearing his name, including set design, acting, and camera work. Charles Pathé, in turn-of-the-century France, was one of the first producers to assign an assistant (Ferdinand Zecca) specifically to direct the pictures of his rapidly expanding film empire. At France’s Gaumont Pictures, Louis Feuillade and Alice Guy, the first woman to take on a key position in cinema, shared the task of directing, each specializing in separate genres. In the United States as in Europe, many of the first film directors were cameramen (Edwin S. Porter) or actors (D.W. Griffith) until circumstance compelled them to take on various directorial duties. The movie industry was growing rapidly, however, and by 1910 the number of films required to fill the many newly constructed movie theatres was such that production had to be delegated. The director’s role was to work with the actors, designers, technicians, and others involved in the moviemaking process, coordinating and overseeing their efforts in order to rapidly turn out interesting and comprehensible movies within given financial and material strictures.

As early as the 1920s those who wrote seriously about motion pictures had no qualms about attributing successes and failures to the director. Some directors, notably F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang in Germany and Victor Sjöström in Sweden, were virtually as famous as the stars who acted in their films. In 1926 William Fox paid Murnau $1 million to relocate in Hollywood in the hopes that he would make the greatest movies the world had yet seen. The primary issue of this marriage of art and money, Sunrise (1927), remains an anomaly in the history of the film industry, for Murnau was given unusual control and virtually unlimited resources. The film still astounds critics, but it was not a commercial success, and it stunted for a time the growing stature of the director. Erich von Stroheim’s more dramatic encounters with producers such as Irving Thalberg further encouraged this businesslike attitude, which led to the practice of quickly typing directors as either workmanlike or difficult.

In the great age of the studio system (1927–48), strong directors vied with the factory conditions in which films were made. Those directors with powerful personalities (such as Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Ernst Lubitsch) were given great freedom, but they still had to work with actors and actresses contracted to the studio, with union personnel following time-honoured routines, with scripts and scriptwriters selected by the studio, and with deadlines that discouraged experimentation.

The “auteur theory,” which was propagated by French film theorists in the 1950s, offered a powerful method for studying and evaluating the films of the studio era. The word auteur (literally “author” in French) had been employed in France in the 1930s in legal battles over the rights to artistic property. This legal struggle to determine whether a film “belonged” to its scriptwriter, director, or producer strengthened the belief held by many critics and theorists that it was the director alone who deserved credit for a film, just as an architect could be credited for a building even though it was built and used by other people. While this view made eminent sense when strong directors were concerned, it tended to ignore average filmmakers.

Auteurs are defined as directors with solid technique, a well-defined vision of the world, and a degree of control over their productions. Some directorial situations are easy to evaluate. Griffith and Chaplin had complete financial control over their major efforts. European art directors, such as Ingmar Bergman, enjoyed similar freedom. Indeed, their films were often marketed as the expressions of important artistic personalities. However, the auteur theory was developed to encourage the reevaluation of countless films by directors operating in the middle of suffocating studio situations. Directors such as Leo McCarey, Gregory La Cava, and Anthony Mann stylistically and thematically imbued their films, whatever the genre, with a consistent, personal aesthetic. Their output, even when unsuccessful, is deemed immeasurably more valuable than the undistinguished films of weaker directors who merely translated the words and actions indicated in a script into routine screen images. Scriptwriters in the studio years worked mainly in teams; a single script often passed through the hands of several different writers, so most films are more recognizable as the product of a particular studio than of an individual writer. The tension between director and genre or studio is thought to produce films that appeal to the public while expressing the vision of an individual. Thus, through the auteur, the popular art of cinema is able to achieve the traditional goals of poetry and the fine arts, goals of authentic expression and of genius.

The auteur theory was especially influential in the 1960s and arguably was instrumental in creating not only the French New Wave but also similar movements in Britain and the United States. Directors such as Lindsay Anderson, Joseph Losey, Stanley Kubrick, John Cassavetes, Francis Ford Coppola, and Arthur Penn thought of themselves as budding auteurs and earned critical and popular acclaim for their distinctive styles and themes. With the fall of the studio system in the 1950s, there was indeed room for a single personality to take control of a film and to market it on the basis of personal vision.

After 1960 first-rank American motion-picture directors began to make films under conditions that had been in practice in Europe throughout the century. The insignificant studio system of France, for example, had enabled and encouraged individual entrepreneurs to put together film projects on a onetime basis. Such projects generally revolved around an équipe, or team of creative personnel, with the director at its head. The director could then truly shape the work of the designer, composer, and (most important) the scenarist so that the film had a consistent and relatively personal style from beginning to end. In this artisanal format, a producer depends on the director to develop a distinctive way of handling scenes. The director may even be required to rewrite the scenario in order to achieve a particular effect. As a result of this personal commitment, the well-publicized arguments that occur during the production of many important films almost always involve the director.

Alfred Hitchcock was one director who disdained arguments. He kept the blueprint of his films in his head and provided detailed instructions for each shot, without any discussion. His producers were not given the opportunity to offer alternative suggestions or to recut the film. The scenes fit together in one way only, Hitchcock’s way. While some critics have complained that the acting in a Hitchcock film is often stilted, that the sets are artificial, and that the rear-projection shots are obvious, the Hitchcock style is immediately recognizable. Most people admire the effectiveness of Hitchcock’s direction, some even claiming that in his films can be found profound moral and metaphysical insight.

Major directors throughout the world have often enjoyed such respect. Among others, Mizoguchi Kenji and Kurosawa Akira of Japan, Satyajit Ray of India, Federico Fellini of Italy, Luis Buñuel of Spain, and Carl Dreyer of Denmark were given rare opportunities to make individual artistic statements. Some have been treated as virtual national treasures whose films bring cultural glory to the countries within which they work.

Despite these exceptions, most directors labour under great restrictions, particularly in the age of the television industry. A conventional television series rotates directors episode after episode so that the producers, actors, and production crew, who work continuously on the show, have much greater control over the product. Each scene of a television program is typically filmed from three different camera setups. The director strives to get the best performances possible from the actors, confident that the crew is delivering appropriate images, and an editor later chooses the best shots to use to tell the story. In comparison, powerful film directors have often involved themselves deeply in editing and postproduction. The television industry has accentuated the assembly-line features of the studio system, while independent film production today often distinguishes itself by according the director dictatorial power.

Whether granted complete or restricted control, every director must approve the screenplay and then concentrate on the scene being filmed in its relation to the overall design of the film. The management unit (an assistant director and continuity clerk) concerns itself with the details of organization so that the director can interact with the creative personnel on the set (cinematographers, lighting and sound crews, set decorators, and, of course, actors). As for postproduction, all directors look with the editor at daily rushes from the lab, but only some follow through and become involved with the editing, music, and mixing phases. In all cases, the director is the one person to maintain a complete view of the project, drawing the best from all the personnel, from writer through sound mixer, and shaping their efforts so that the film attains a consistent look and meaning.

Successful directing has much to do with intangible social relations, such as keeping harmony (or productive competition) alive on the set, drawing the best performances possible from actors, shaping a script into a form that takes advantage of the talents of the director of photography or of the main actor, or beseeching the producer for the money needed for a special shot. Beyond such routine expectations, the great director is identified for a unique or ingenious approach to the medium. Directors have earned praise for their audacious handling of stories. Refusing to be hemmed in by the standard requirements of a two-hour drama dealing with a few central characters, Francis Ford Coppola, for example, pieced together a truly epic fresco in his two-part masterpiece The Godfather, as did Robert Altman in such collage narratives as Nashville (1975) and Short Cuts (1993) and Paul Thomas Anderson in Magnolia (1999). Italian directors have experimented with the epic form, as in Ermanno Olmi’s L’albero degli zoccoli (1979; The Tree of Wooden Clogs) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Novecento (1976; 1900) and The Last Emperor (1987), and with narrative structure, as in Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà (1946; Paisan) and Ettore Scola’s Le Bal (1983; The Ball), which abandon traditional plot construction and a single story line in favour of separate short episodes that are thematically or historically linked.

Some directors gain more fame for their visual style than for their narrative acuity. Bertolucci’s films, for example, are not always well received, but his fluid, saturated images and their “psychoanalytic” effect have made their mark in films such as Il conformista (1970; The Conformist) and Luna (1979). The same might be said for Fellini, Andrey Tarkovsky, and Werner Herzog. Some critics feel that Coppola’s One from the Heart (1982) projects an intense, personal vision, which is much more interesting from the directorial point of view than his more commercially successful efforts, including The Godfather. Although many directors credit their cinematographers for achieving such notable visions, most cinematographers claim merely to solve technical problems at the behest of the director.

The same can be said of effects achieved in postproduction. The incredibly dense aural ambience surrounding Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), for example, resulted from the concatenation of scores of individual sound tracks mixed by a team of talented experts, but Coppola himself had already evinced a powerful understanding of the possibilities of sound in his much smaller film The Conversation (1974). Similarly, a good share of Altman’s fame must go to the engineers who coordinated the radio miking of as many as a dozen characters in a single scene in Nashville. It was, however, Altman who recognized the total effect that two hours of overlapping conversations would have on the spectator. Martin Scorsese’s rugged editing in Taxi Driver and Raging Bull was a function not only of an editor’s ingenuity but also of a total conception of script, acting style, camera work (including harsh black-and-white tones for the latter film), and music.

A director might best be thought of as a problem solver. Seldom concerned with technology, the director takes the resources at hand (the technological capabilities and the conventions of filmmaking operating at the moment) and searches for effective solutions to dramatic or visual problems. A style emerges when these solutions, or “techniques,” are applied consistently across a series of films. For example, Bresson’s penchant for employing off-camera sound to signal important events (a car wreck in Au Hasard Balthasar [1966]; a bank robbery in L’Argent) defies standard filmmaking conventions and reaches toward a peculiarly valuable way of understanding an interior or spiritual drama. Bresson’s sound techniques became part of his austere and evocative style.

Directors may be characterized by the solutions they regularly arrive at when a story or scene is presented to them. Murnau and Mizoguchi preferred the languorous tracking shot to editing a dramatic situation so that the drama could be seen to arise in the midst of the shot. Antonioni let the camera continue to shoot well after the characters were out of range so that the spectator could observe the way a dramatic scene disappeared or sense its smallness in the landscape that remained. After 1970 most American directors employed hard-hitting, swift techniques to give power to the gritty stories that came to dominate world cinema. These techniques—close-up sound, pounding music, and abrupt editing—were used to keep the spectator interested and excited. Within this general American style, however, individual directors found different methods to achieve similar effects, and they discovered that using similar techniques did not guarantee similar results.

It is generally acknowledged that the best directors are those who consistently contribute not only ingenious techniques but also an effective, coherent, personal style or theme to their films. Brian De Palma’s use of point-of-view strategies, for example, gives a particular horror to such films as Carrie (1976) and Body Double (1984), and his technique has been compared to that of Hitchcock. Most critics agree, however, that Hitchcock is the more significant director, because the rigorous point-of-view strategy that Hitchcock employed in such films as Rear Window (1954) was far more than a tour de force of moviemaking technique; it was an expression of the director’s thoughts on vision and knowledge.