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I love movies and when I think of important directors I think of Martin Scorsese, Akira Kurosawa, Orson Welles, John Waters, Sergio Leone, David Lynch, Terry Gilliam, D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, Quentin Tarantino, Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle,

Steven Spielberg, Satyajit Ray, Alfred Hitchcock, Georges Méliès, the Coen brothers, Francis Ford Coppola, Sergei Eisenstein, the Maysles bothers, etc but all theses directors are male and I was wondering if there's any female directors that are similar in terms of importance. I liked Mira

Nair's "Salaam Bombay!" but I don't know if her work is comparable to the work of the other director's I mentioned.

I don't know if her body of work is comparable to all of those others, but Sofia Coppola wrote and directed Lost in Translation, and that's a really good film.

It never occurred to me that most directors are male because you don't see the director in the work.

Frankly I couldn't care less what gender a director is, I doubt most others do either.

 Hordini wrote:
I don't know if her body of work is comparable to all of those others, but Sofia Coppola wrote and directed Lost in Translation, and that's a really good film.

Yeah, but then she did other movies afterward which sort of ruined that.

Katherine Bigelow, Mary Harron, and Jane Campion are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

I don't know of many directors to begin with, apart from the usual big names.
When thinking of female directors, the first ones to come to my mind are Sofia Coppola and Penny Marshall.

Leni Riefenstahl, very controversial but undoubtedly a visionary director and photographer from a purely artistic viewpoint.

Without Riefenstahl's work, Lucas' "medal ceremony" in Star Wars wouldn't look quite the same.

Purely from an artistic and visionary standpoint, +1.

 Ahtman wrote:
Yeah, but then she did other movies afterward which sort of ruined that.

Katherine Bigelow, Mary Harron, and Jane Campion are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

Honestly, I think I like Coppola's movies more than that lot. I didn't realise how few of my favourite movies were made women until just now.

Sarah Polley is carving out a name for herself, but her resume to date is promising, not great. Amy Heckerling directed one of the Vacation movies, Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Clueless, which are all really fun movies, but it's really a long way short of the sort of stuff that should be on this list.

So uh, yeah. Turns out women aren't very good at telling people to stand on the x and repeat their lines over and over again.

I'd put Katheryn Bigelow up there. Strange Days, The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty.

 Seaward wrote:
I'd put Katheryn Bigelow up there. Strange Days, The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty.

I'm sure people will throw things at me for saying this but I still maintain that her best film was Point Break.

It seems to be the types of film that the few women that are directors are interested in doing that also limits their public profile. Katherine Bigelow is one of the few that regularly does big Hollywood action/adventure films. Most of the women listed here do smaller, less broad films like The Piano or Lost in Translation. Of course it also could be that they are less trusted when it comes to big budget films so it could be a bit of a catch-22 as well.

I liked Point Break a lot.

There no doubt is sexism in the film industry as elsewhere.