I was pondering and discussing who the greatest Director was. I choose ‘greatest’ deliberately. Coppola. Hitchcock, Kubrick, Truffat, Welles, Lean all these sorts of names invariably come up in discussion of who’s the best director, but who’s the greatest?
“Greatness is a concept of a state of superiority affecting a person, object or place. The concept carries the implication that the particular person or object, when compared to others of a similar type, has clear and perceivable advantage. As a descriptive term it is most often applied to a person or their work, and may be qualified or unqualified. Application of the terms "great" and "greatness" is dependent on the perspective and subjective judgments of those who apply them-wikipedia.”
Given that assessment I think it very well may be Steven Spielberg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqhE7ieH2R8
Minority Report, Artificial Intelligence: AI, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Jurassic Park, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and War of the Worlds
But he’s dabbled in fantasy; Hook and Always
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nrvMNf-HEg
However, what is often surprising is the quality of his so called ‘Serious’ Movies: The Color Purple, Munich, Amistad The Terminal, Catch Me If You Can, Saving Private Ryan, Empire of the sun, Jaws, The Sugarland Express, Duel and of course Schindler’s List.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-wNe68de7Y
He has also Produced for directors such as Eastwood, Scorsese, Kurosawa, Zemeckis, Sonnenfeld, Dante and Craven; Letters from Iwo Jima, Flags of Our Fathers, Memoirs of a Geisha, The Lovely Bones, Shrek, Men in Black, Cape Fear, A Brief History of Time, Band of Brothers, Arachnophobia, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, Joe Versus the Volcano, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Back to the Future trilogy, The Goonies, Gremlins, Twilight Zone: The Movie and Poltergeist.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFA4m5B81QA
He’s currently working on future projects as diverse as Tintin, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, Jackie Kennedy, George Gershwin and 9/11.
As a director his name can sell a film to the masses; a concept that only really applies to the independent film goer these days, but years ago the masses would go to the cinema on the basis that it was a Hitchcock or a Capra.
Spielberg. The Greatest?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8MApxKsCyU