If you haven't already discovered this in the Directors movie group, (or maybe I even posted this in a previous blog entry) I wanted to reveal an indicator of a freakish and obsessive side of my personality.
I actually created my own algorithm to help me list who my favorite directors are. I rate every movie I see and save the records. I have collected further information that I have included along with my ratings to come up with three basic variables I use in my algorithm. I have used this data to come up with a rating of each director on a scale of 1 to 10. Here are the variables:
A = the average movie rating of all of the movies I have seen by that director
B = the number of movies I have seen by that director
C = the total number of movies that director has made
In calculating the number of movies a director has made I have imposed many personal restrictions. For one I am not counting "shorts" which IMDB classifies as any movie that is less than 45 minutes. I just never rate these films. I find it more difficult to rate a short as compared to a feature length which has more to absorb. By the same token I would not count vignettes or anthology films where different short segments are done by different directors. In cases where directors are listed as co-directors or uncredited, I have to make an often poorly informed decision about whether this should be counted. These are issues I will continually be reevaluating.
And now here is the formula for calculating the score I give to each director:
((((B*A)+((((A-5.5)*(B/C))+5.5)*(C-B)))/C)+(((B-1)*0.5)*A))/(1+((B-1)*0.5))
Basically what this means is that movies I have not seen are assumed to have a rating of 5.5 out of 10. But as I see more films by a director, that assumed rating for movies I haven't seen starts to get closer to the average score of the movies of theirs I have seen. And then I calculate a final average score based on the average rating of the movies I have seen along with the assumed score for movies I haven't seen. So basically the number of movies I have seen by a director and the percentage of movies I have seen of a director's work both affect how strong their average score will be. That may be why a director who has made fewer films will have an easier chance to initially get a higher score, since I can see all of their movies in a less amount of time.
Here is my list of top 30 directors of all time based on my algorithm. I am only including directors for whom I have seen more than one of their movies. (I have also removed a few directors that I just didn't consider relevant for whatever personal reasons):
1. Joel and Ethan Coen
2. Hal Hartley
3. Jim Jarmusch
4. Stanley Kubrick
5. Bruce Robinson
6. Terry Zwigoff
7. Quentin Tarantino
8. Whit Stillman
9. Buster Keaton
10. Paul Thomas Anderson
11. Sergio Leone
12. Tsai Ming-liang
13. Alejandro González Iñárritu
14. Terry Jones
15. Terry Gilliam
16. Mel Brooks
17. Todd Solondz
18. Werner Herzog
19. Terrence Malick
20. Robert Zemeckis
21. Wes Anderson
22. Ingmar Bergman
23. John R. Cherry III
24. George Lucas
25. Errol Morris
26. Akira Kurosawa
27. Clyde Bruckman
28. Milos Forman
29. Spike Jonze
30. Seijun Suzuki
Now I will start selecting movies to see based on the idea that if I like some of a director's movies I'll probably like more. And by seeing more movies from these directors I will be able to make my list more accurate. Hopefully in a year from now or so I can post a new more accurate list.