The idea that the director is the author is younger than the films
For the first half of cinema's life, a film belonged to the studio. Hollywood credited the producer, the studio owned the style, and directors were skilled employees who were assigned pictures and moved on.
The argument that changed it came from a French magazine. Critics at *Cahiers du Cinéma* in the 1950s — several of whom went on to direct — proposed that the best directors stamped a recognisable personality across everything they touched, even inside the studio system, and that you could read a film the way you read a novel. They made the case using American directors like HAWKS and FORD, who would have been baffled by the compliment. The word auteur, and most of the way we now talk about film, comes out of that argument.
Seven days for forty-five seconds
The shower sequence in *Psycho* runs about forty-five seconds, took seven days to shoot, and used roughly seventy-eight camera setups for around fifty cuts. HITCHCOCK built it that way for a specific reason: the knife is never once shown entering the body. The violence happens in the edit, assembled in the viewer's head from fragments.
The blood was chocolate syrup, which photographs better in black and white, and the sound was a knife going into a melon — the crew tested several and picked the one that sounded worst. He also bought up copies of the novel to stop people learning the ending, and refused to let latecomers into cinemas, which nobody had ever insisted on before.
Star Wars started as a Japanese film
LUCAS has been open that *The Hidden Fortress*, made by KUROSAWA in 1958, gave him the structure for Star Wars — in particular the decision to tell a story about a princess, a general and a hidden fortune from the point of view of the two lowest-status characters in it, a pair of bickering peasants. They became the droids.
The debt runs further than plot. The wipe transitions, the framing of duels, the mud-and-wear look of a used universe are all Kurosawa habits. He in turn had built several of his own films out of American westerns and Shakespeare, and *Seven Samurai* was remade as *The Magnificent Seven*. Almost nothing in this grid is a single mind working alone; it is mostly people watching each other carefully.
The take counts
KUBRICK's reputation rests partly on how many times he would do a thing. Around a hundred takes was not unusual, and *The Shining* holds records for it. He believed the performance he wanted only appeared once the actor had exhausted every idea they had brought with them.
The cost of that method fell on the people in front of the camera, and Shelley Duvall spoke for years afterwards about what the shoot did to her. It is a useful counterweight to the romance of the obsessive genius: the obsession is real, it does sometimes produce the thing, and somebody else usually pays part of the bill.
The rest of the credits
The grid spans a century. DEMILLE and the early spectacle; WILDER, who wrote as well as directed and was funnier than almost anyone; BERGMAN and FELLINI, who made films that looked like nothing Hollywood would finance; COPPOLA, SCORSESE and Ridley SCOTT.
Then the generation who grew up in film schools rather than studios — SPIELBERG, LUCAS, CAMERON, BURTON, FINCHER, NOLAN, TARANTINO, VILLENEUVE, ANDERSON and CUARON. It is the first list here where most of the names could tell you exactly which older films they were copying, because they learned the job by watching rather than by working their way up a studio ladder.