8. Billy Wilder
Billy Wilder is considered by many to be the best director of "pure" movies in Hollywood history. That is, his films were not made to be "art" with the intention to be art, although they could easily be called that, rather they were made for the sole purpose of producing the finest film possible. They were meticulously crafted, acted, written, and directed and might just be the pinnacle of Hollywood studio filmmaking. Many of Wilder's films rank among the very best Hollywood ever turned out. His first classic would probably be 1944's Double Indemnity which is a staple on lists of best film noirs. 1950's Sunset Boulevard routinely ranks in the top 15 or so on lists of greatest American films, and the following year's Ace In the Hole is also considered one of the great films of that generation. In 1955 he helped create the legend of Marilyn Monroe with his The Seven Year Itch, and then three years later cast her in Some Like It Hot which remains one of the most acclaimed of all comedic films. His last great film, 1960's The Apartment, is one of the greatest films ever to win Best Picture at the Oscars and capped an incredible fifteen year run of incredible moviemaking. Like other directors of the time such as Hawks, Capra, and Kazan, Wilder avoided unnecessarily showy cinematography in order to not distract the audience from the from the core of the narrative. What he did instead was develop very tightly constructed, extraordinarily well-written scripts that often touched on subjects that had traditionally been avoided in American cinema. He had a gift for working with actors and believed that a script should work around the actor instead of vice versa, enabling him to coax great performances from actors as different as Jimmy Cagney and Marilyn Monroe. Wilder pushed the boundaries of cinema, both in what was acceptable to be shown on-screen in terms of narrative elements and in how to make films that reached perfection in nearly every regard. His films remain some of the most acclaimed of all-time and he would rank highly in any list of great directors, regardless of nationality.