Credit: Far Out / Kyle Loftus
Science is quite important, obviously, and over the years it has been responsible for the discovery of penicillin, the theory of relativity, mapping the structure of DNA and loads of other things I don’t really understand. But what it should really, most constructively be used for is deciding who the most boring movie director in Hollywood is.
Now we are far too busy arguing over whether or not Tyler Ballgame is just a very good Roy Orbison impersonator or a brilliant artist in his own right to bother to do this kind of in-depth scientific research ourselves, but fortunately there are individuals like Stephen Follows who love in-depth data enough to sit and patiently feed endless numbers into whirring, clanking machines so that we can feast on the results.
And what he found, after inputting the data of some 190 different film directors, each of whom had made at least four movies, and a whopping 2,970 live-action films, was that a pattern had emerged, and their individual works started to look very similar indeed. While many directors have an instantly recognisable style, Christopher Nolan, for example, the investigation showed which filmmakers stuck closest to their comfort zones when it came to directing.
Follows used image embedding in order to examine the shot composition of each director across their careers and assigned a ‘consistency score’, with a score of zero meaning the films are no more alike than a randomly picked batch, and a high score meaning they cluster tightly together visually. And once he’d done that, one name jumped out above the others.
That name was Taylor Hackford; not a household name, for sure, but the man behind movies as disparate as Jamie Foxx’s Ray, Parker with Jason Statham, the Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves horror The Devil’s Advocate and housewives’ favourite from 1982, An Officer and a Gentleman.
Despite those movies all being from completely different genres, Hackford’s consistency score of 0.38 meant that no matter the film he was in the number one chair for, you should be able to tell that it’s him holding the reins. Second on the list was Seth Gordon, director of early 2010’s comedies like Horrible Bosses and Identity Thief, while surprisingly third place went to Michel Gondry, the fiercely creative mind behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (amazing) and The Green Hornet (not amazing).
At the other end of the scale, the directors with the lowest consistency scores, and therefore the hardest to pick out from movie to movie, included Mel Gibson, who it seems tries to do something completely different with each film he makes, including Braveheart, The Passion of the Christ and war drama Hacksaw Ridge, plus David O Russell, of Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle fame.
Follows wanted to be fair to the directors in question, however, and so he also compared the data once he included those who had worked with at least three different directors of photography, too, to see if that made a difference. But no, Hackford came out on top regardless.
One thing to note is that Follows stressed that making a different-looking movie each time is no definite sign of quality; after all, Alfred Hitchcock was one legendary name that came out with a very high consistency score, and as the man himself said, “Self-plagiarism is style”.
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