Hollywood's Best Film Directors

As others have noted the first few episodes suffer from some bad graphics / style decisions. On the plus side each episode is 25 minutes and features a director answering pretty much the same list of questions each time. Those questions are kept off camera and so the full run time is of the director answering questions.

Ivan Reitman, Francis Ford Coppola, Barry Levinson, Rob Reiner, George Lucas, Brett Ratner, John McTiernan, Michael Mann, Bryan Singer, Milos Forman, John Singleton, Ron Howard, James L Brooks, Paul Greengrass, Martin Campbell, Ridley Scott, Mel Gibson, Jon Favreau, Luc Besson and the Farelly Brothers round out the first 2o episodes of the first season which is all that I've seen.

Firstly the graphics and presentation gets better as the series continues. The quality of the content more than makes up for the presentation.

The episodes I enjoyed the most were the ones from directors I haven't heard much from directly. These were James L Brooks, John Singleton, Luc Besson. Always good to hear from Ridley Scott and George Lucas too. I will look up the rest of the series as a chance to hear directly from the director is always worth the time to watch.

I recently discovered this series on one of the PBS networks and found it very enlightening. I have always found it interesting to hear the thought process that a film director has when they work on a film. But as I watched more episodes I saw a pattern: the complete lack of diversity! I counted only three directors who are POC (John Singleton, John Woo, and M. Night Shyamalan); a few gay openly directors; and not one single female director! Where was Kathryn Bigalow or Mira Nair? Talk about an "old boy club.! Granted some directors prefer (or more importantly are shut out by Hollywood when it comes to funding a film) to work outside of the Hollywood system (Spike Lee, Tyler Perry, Kasi Lemmons, etc.) but that shouldn't exclude them from being interviewed! It's 2021 Hollywood: WAKE UP!

I don't know if this series has ended production for now, but if it should come back, hopefully they will open the door for a more diverse selection of filmmakers. Representation matters! Had I seen an interview with Lee Daniels when I was growing up maybe I would've pursued filmmaking earlier than I did. For the record I should say that I am Black, gay man and got my degree in filmmaking in my 40's.

Nice series. Long list of great director, relevant chapters and good editing. The interviews are well done and the directors seem comfortable and happy to talk about their work. It's nice to see passionate people like this. The episode are 26 minutes long but I think they could be longer. When I watched the episode with Wes Craven, I really wanted more.

This series presents some interesting information, but in the most disjointed and confusing way possible. There were some very strange decisions made on the part of the editor and producer of these pieces.

To begin, all of the interviews are presented as a 4:3 box within a blurred vignette. I have no idea why they felt this was necessary, maybe the footage was not up to spec? In addition to the strange framing, there is a musical backtracking accompanying every interview. The music is very odd, for the Rob Reiner interview the backtracking was some type of Bollywood soundtrack, I have no idea why they went that direction. There are so many confusing choices as far as editing and design goes, this piece looks like a poorly made student project. Even the interstitial slides were poorly produced motion graphics pieces. Overall the interviews were good, but the presentation makes this very difficult to watch.

The fact that this show was on for 5 consecutive seasons is very surprising. For a show about the greatest directors, this was very poorly presented.

I love programs about celebrities and cinema. They are usually quite short so it's nice to be able to finally watch a long and full interview, well-structured and illustrated with behind the scene and red carpet shots.

I also appreciate the fact that the director talk about his movies and also films from others that inspire him. I was surprised to hear that Farrely Bro's favorite movie is One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, it is my favorite movie too !