11. Howard Hawks
Very few directors have ever crossed between genres with as much ease as Howard Hawks. A prominent figure in American film ever since his debut in the silent age, Hawks successfully transitioned to the "talkies" and ended up with a filmography with few equals in cinematic history. Hawks was a bit of enigma within the Hollywood studio system. He was able to retain a great deal of autonomy over his work, enabling his films to take more risks than the average production. His filmmaking was not flashy or particularly exciting but has been praised by many subsequent directors as one of the best and most convincing in movie history. Orson Welles once contrasted Howard Hawks with John Ford by saying "Hawks is great prose; Ford is poetry", and directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Scorsese, and Altman have praised his naturalistic style as extremely influential on their own work. Overseas, Hawks's films were heavily praised by the critics of Cahiers Du Cinema such Godard and Truffaut who often considered him one of the great American auteurs. Hawks made classics in almost every conceivable genre from gangster films, to sci-fi, to comedies, to noir, to westerns, and dramas. He separated himself from his peers by not giving way to traditional Hollywood tropes of the time as his films largely avoided blind patriotism, religiosity, or sentimentality.