ShaunHuston:I'm also curious about these questions, particularly the issue of how your "subjective" list matches up with the one generated by the algorithim. The question about female directors also raises the issue of not only how many films you've seen, but how many a director has made (the fact that there are fewer female directors made me think of this connection). Terence Malick, who appears on your list, would seem to be necessarily disadvantaged by having made only four films in his career. So, maybe his rating is impacted by this even if you've seen all of his films. Where the issue becomes more interesting is if, say, Days of Heaven is your favorite film. In that case, it would seem that Malick should rate higher somehow. Maybe an additional factor for the intensity of how much you love a particular directors film or films. As a qualitative-minded person, I can't be too much help, but these are interesting questions.
Actually a director who has made less films is in some way at more of an advantage because it is easier for me to see a higher percentage of the number of films they have made. And if the few I have seen are all extremely good, then their score shoots up high. That's why people like Malick, Todd Solondz, Wes Anderson, PT Anderson are on this list. Then again if even one of their movies was a total stinker it would take down the average quicker.
In the case of Malick specifically, I have seen Badlands which I gave a score of 10, Days of Heaven which was a 9, and The Thin Red Line which was an 8. I have yet to see The New World. So the average score works out to be 9. But it's a higher percentage of movies.
I have also seen three movies by Vittorio De Sica, but his average comes out to 9.667. But because he has made so many more movies I haven't seen he is inadvertently at a disadvantage.
The way I originally rated it was that each movie I haven't seen would be automatically given a score of 5.5 which would be exactly in the middle of the possible scores of 1-10. Although usually the average movie is better than the average score.
But then I modified the algorithm so actually the more movies I see by a director the more the score given to the movies I haven't seen is raised closer to the score of the average of the movies I have seen. In this way eventually if I see like five or six more movies by De Sica his score will be about as strong as it would be if I had seen all of his movies, even though the percentage would still be considerably low. But there will still be a slight disadvantage until I see all of his movies. But the ammount get exponentially smaller as I see more of his movies.
Hopefully it's not too complicated. There may be better ways. Of course I'd love it if you have any more suggestions or are confused still.
If you were actually curious for a list of which directors I have seen the most movies from I can give you a list. Of course this is a list only of directors for whom I have seen at least one movie that I have rated 9 or 10. So there may be some directors I have seen a lot of movies but never given any of their movies a top rating.
13 Steven Spielberg
11 Joel and Ethan Coen
Stanley Kubrick
10 Werner Herzog
9 Jim Jarmusch
8 Terry Gilliam
Martin Scorsese
David Zucker
Tim Burton
7 Hal Hartley
Robert Zemeckis
John R. Cherry III
Sam Raimi
6 Quentin Tarantino
Mel Brooks
Jim Abrahams
Alfred Hitchcock
5 Sergio Leone
George Lucas
Akira Kurosawa
Ingmar Bergman
Francis Ford Coppola
Wolfgang Reitherman
Blake Edwards
Hamilton Luske
Clyde Geronimi
M. Night Shyamalan
Steven Soderbergh
Barry Sonnenfeld