For those who truly want to become a director my suggestion is watch everything you can get your grubby little hands on. Do not ignore the present because film is always evolving, but the past holds some of the greatest treasures. Howard Hawk's His Girl Friday makes me laugh more than any comedy made in the past ten years. Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai and Le Cercle Rouge embody the word "cool" and create something new out of old cliches. Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin and Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless taught me the true power of editing. Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly will forever be the first film that I noticed what a director could stylistically do with a film. These are only a handful of movies I've watched the past 2 1/2 years that have led me to understand all the powers cinema holds and let me discover what I wanted to do as a director.
If there was one thing I have learned is film cannot be taught. Not to say you shouldn't take classes, but these classes should spring board into your everyday life and lead to hundreds of hours of watching film and hundreds of hours in agony with a pen and paper, writing ideas and scripts. If you haven't bought a note pad yet, get one. This will be the best tool a director can have. You can write all the thoughts you ever had and always be able to go back to them. Never abandon a good idea because you don't know where it is going. It will lead you somewhere even if it is later in your life.
With all that said I am going to attempt to make movie suggests since too often I complain and not praise. I started my conquest into cinema with AFI's Top 100 movies list. I have not finished said list because I get side track by all the other films I have not yet watched, but it is a great starting place for anyone. Next I would suggest using Roger Ebert's Great Movie list because the list is composed of a large amount of foreign films which obviously will not appear on the American Film Institute's list. For me personally the works of Sidney Lumet, Martin Scorsese, John Huston, Jean-Pierre Melville (a director I feel is my little treasure since no one around me has seem to seen his films), Sergio Leone, Woody Allen, and Buster Keaton are the most influential around. I could go on for hours about individual movies but I'll restrain myself. What I'm trying to say is watch movies, watch a lot of them, and never lose the passion.
-On a side note I am open to talk on Fridays any time through out this semester and am more then willing to sit in front of a class and babble on about movies. My favorite subject is the movies of the 60's and 70's but I really am willing to talk about anything. -
