Director: David Lean

David Lean began as an editor and cut his way through British cinema in the 1930s before directing, which explains the discipline in even his largest films. The early work is intimate: Brief Encounter runs on suppressed feeling in a railway tea room, and Great Expectations remains the standard Dickens adaptation.

The second half of the career is the one people mean when they say his name. The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and A Passage to India are enormous pictures shot on location in punishing conditions, and in all of them the landscape functions as a character with an opinion about the people crossing it.

He won Best Director twice and was nominated seven times. A famously hostile review of Ryan’s Daughter kept him from directing for fourteen years, which is one of the more consequential cases of criticism actually silencing a filmmaker.