The greatest director in movie history, according to science
If you’re a cinema fan, you inevitably have extremely strong opinions. Do you think, unequivocally, that The Godfather is the greatest film of all time? Are you absolutely certain that the distinction actually belongs to Jeanne Dielman? What about 2001: A Space Odyssey? When it comes to absolutes, cinema, like any great art form, refuses to fit neatly into objective boxes. And yet, some enterprising scientists have found a way to distil all that intangible art into stone-cold data, and from it, they have apparently identified the greatest director of all time.
Before naming names and letting the shit-slinging commence, let’s examine the options. Historically, directors like Stanley Kubrick, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Alfred Hitchcock, and Francis Ford Coppola (before Megalopolis) would have been the top contenders. Arthouse academics might throw in Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, Chantal Akerman, and Yasujirō Ozu as well. Martin Scorsese, his heroes Powell and Pressburger, and the French New Wave crowd also deserve a mention. Come to think of it, many of us would be hard-pressed to come up with a top ten list, let alone a top one.
A 2018 study published in Applied Network Science analysed 47,000 movies and 20,000 directors to put the debate to rest once and for all. Based on data from IMDb, the researchers focused on four metrics – how often a film is referenced in other moves, how quickly that influence spreads, the breadth of the influence (which the researchers called “harmonic centrality”), and the film’s overall influence as determined by how often the film is referenced in other media, including in Google page rankings.
According to the analysis, The Wizard of Oz emerged as the most influential film ever made. It’s not the movie that most people would label as the greatest of all time, but sure, it had a pretty big influence on the medium. Star Wars was ranked second, and Psycho third. As for the greatest director of all time, the data was clear: Alfred Hitchcock.
This will come as no surprise for anyone familiar with Hitchcock’s films. While critics didn’t breathlessly laud the director during his career the way he is now, his fingerprints are all over the movies of subsequent filmmakers. From the French New Wave to Christopher Nolan, his influence is enormous, and for a study that focuses so intently on influence over any other metric, it’s hard to come up with a more accurate winner.
Whether it’s Hitchcock’s pioneering techniques for creating suspense, his invention of the dolly zoom, his detour into slasher horror, or his groundbreaking thematic innovations in the psychological thriller genre, he created a blueprint that countless filmmakers have followed ever since. Interestingly, the third most influential director of all time, according to the researchers, is Brian De Palma, a filmmaker known for referencing Hitchcock so faithfully that he practically copies him scene for scene. His ranking might indicate the flaws in methodology, as he seems to have attained his spot purely through mimicking the top-ranking director rather than by innovating his own techniques.
Second on the list, not surprisingly, was Steven Spielberg, whose contributions to blockbuster cinema are unparalleled. Howard Hawks and John Ford rounded out the top five, with Scorsese landing barely outside it with the sixth spot.
