Alright so the likes of Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott and Peter Jackson are just a handful of directors that have taken Hollywood by storm with the big budget blockbusters that have left us all going 'wow'.
But lets not talk about them today lets talk about the more maverick filmmakers who have made a name for themselves by, lets face it, being a little bit weird and producing movies that are slightly off the wall.
So Femalefirst takes a look at some of Hollywood's maverick directors and the movies that made them
such a success.
Werner Herzog
Along with the likes of Reiner Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg German filmmaker Herzog is often linked with the German New Wave movement and is a popular director on the art house circuit.
Dismissive of film schools Herzog considered himself ready to forge a film career after completing his third short in 1966, and it turns out he had the right idea all along.
Like his final shot The Unprecedented Defence of Fortress Deutschkreuz war was the subject of his first feature film. Recuperating from war injuries on a remote, enchanted Greek island, a lonely soldier starts
to hallucinate, eventually goes totally insane, and tries to blow up the entire island.
Herzog gained a reputation for being unafraid to show filth, disease and controversial subjects as he moved between feature films and documentaries.
But the festival circuit loved his style of film as he won the best director award at Cannes for Fitzcarraldo, The Special Jury Prize for The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, as well as being nominated for the Golden Palm for Woyzeck and Where the green ants dream and the Golden Bear for Nosferatu the Vampyre.
More recently the director has been fascinated with the plight of German-American Navy pilot and Vietnam veteran, Dieter Dengler. He was shot down and held in Pathet Lao prison camp in Laos, he was just one of two survivors after he escaped into the jungle and was on the run for twenty three days.
After making a documentary about his experience Herzog went on to make a feature film with Christian Bale in the lead role.
And he was back in the director’s chair earlier this year as he teamed up with Nicolas Cage for Bad Lieutenant, another slightly off the wall movie.
Tim Burton
What's so good about Tim Burton is he makes movies he wants to make telling stories from his perspective and now bowing to studio pressure.
He is famous for his dark and gothic atmosphere and using misfit or outsiders as the main characters in his movies. He shot to fame with his feature debut Pee Wee's Big Adventure he went on to direct gothic horror Beetlejuice.
The film was a sleeper hit and Burton was an intriguing choice to helm the big screen version of Batman in 1989. But in the hands of Burton Gotham was very grim as the long shadows and distorted perspective that he loves dominated the picture.
Between the two Batman pictures he made one of his most popular film Edward Scissorhands as he contrasted the gothic style home of Edward with the plasticity of suburbia, oh not to mention this film
kicked off the Burton/ Depp partnership.
The pair have enjoyed major success working on Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Corpse Bride and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and yet despite this success Hollywood still seems uncomfortable Burton and he is yet to be nominated for Best Director at the Oscars.
Burton has enjoyed his biggest box office success this year as he brought his version of Alice In Wonderland to the big screen.
The movie once again teamed him up with Depp, obviously taking on the role of the Mad Hatter, and it broke the $1 billion barrier to be the second biggest grossing movie of 2010.
Stanley Kubrick
Kubrick was one of those filmmakers who's worked was equally praised and criticised as his visual style brought him acclaim but his narrative style brought him criticism.
After leaving his career as a photographer behind him it was 1957's Paths of Glory that really established Kubrick as director, he followed this up with further success as he made Spartacus, still regarded as one of the best sword and sandal movies of all time.
However he faced some moral backlash with his next couple of movies Lolita, an adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel, and Dr Strangelove.
Despite this his career soared as he spent the next five years developing 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film deals with the idea of human evolution opening with the pre-historic ape-man struggling to survive.
One morning a mysterious object - a monolith appears near their habitation.
Over the last forty years the film has been recognised as one of the greatest movies ever made and in 1991 this film was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in their National Film Registry.
But it was A Clockwork Orange that caused the most controversy, and was banned from the UK as the violence and the sexual violence was heavily criticised which led to a series of copycat crimes.
In part two we will look at the careers of William Friedkin and Francis Ford Coppola.
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw
Tagged in Tim Burton