Cowardly director.

Nah he's not a good director but he should grow a pair and make movies for the fun of it, not to cultivate a 'legacy'.

If he let loose he might actually improve as a director. He praises a lot of slasher movies, he should make one. I'd like to see it.

You can take your own advice and go do something else with your life, this is a movie discussion forum and if discussions pertaining to movies annoy you then why even bother with this site.

Overrated.

One could argue he's a poor director... in that as a director he took a very long time to make movies and his productions ran on forever with him doing a ridiculous amount of takes. A lot of other directors are more fine tuned and professional. Many can churn out quality movies like clockwork.

One tidbit that always stuck with me is Scatman Crothers talking about the direction he got from Kubrick on The Shining. It was the scene where he walks into the overlook hotel to try rescue Danny. Kubrick told him to do the walk over and over again, some 30 times I think, without ever giving him any pointers on what to do. Just told him to do it again. That doesn't sound like good direction to me.

He also was an asshole to Duvall. Directors being nasty to their actors is always a negative.


In saying all this I do like some of his movies, but as you say his filmography is sparse so he doesn't rank highly for me. All that squeezing wasn't worth the extra juice in my opinion. When you hear that he did 100+ takes on some scenes you're left wondering was take 101 really that much better than 64 and was that much better than take 17.

I've always counted From Dusk till Dawn in his cannon, he might not have pointed the camera but they came out of his mind. He even had Harvey Keitel and Earl Mcgraw in the cast. That was 50/50 co direction he can say what he wants