50 Surprising Films From Great Directors

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From crazy choices to career changes

Pirates (1986)

Is It Really So Strange? Exiled from Hollywood and on the run for unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, it's fair to say that Polanski probably needed cheering up by 1986. His next film, Frantic , was also relatively light-hearted compared to much of his back catalogue.

Amelie (2001)

The Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet

The Surprise: Jeunet's trajectory as weirdo visionary seemed to be inevitable after Delicatessen and The City Of Lost Children . Yet after the debacle of Alien: Resurrection , he abandoned the sci-fi genre for the romantic gambolling of Audrey Tautou's benign troublemaker.

Is It Really So Strange? Increasingly, it feels as if Jeunet's one-time creative partner Marc Caro was the Ainspiration for the darker side of their films. Alone, Jeunet seems to prefer a gentler whimsy judging from his films since Amelie , A Very Long Engagement and Micmacs .

Big Trouble (1986)

The Director: John Cassavetes

The Surprise: You always knew where you stood with a Cassavetes film - bleak, deeply textured and brilliantly acted. At least, that was true until his final film, a mainstream comedy whose only connection to his C.V. was that it starred Cassavetes regular Peter Falk.

Is It Really So Strange? Cassavetes only took the gig after original director Andrew Bergman departed, and hated himself for doing so, later disowning a film that, sadly, turned out to be his last.

Mr And Mrs Smith (1941)

The Director: Alfred Hitchcock

The Surprise: Only a year after being brought to Hollywood for his reputation with thrillers, and securing a Best Picture win for Rebecca , the 'Master of Suspense' fooled everyone by making a screwball comedy with Robert Montgomery and Carole Lombard as the titular couple - not to be confused with Brangelina in the unrelated 2005 action movie.

Is It Really So Strange? The younger Hitchcock happily worked across all genres before finding his style; if this is 'off-brand' it's largely because the director made the film as a favour to close friend Lombard, and quickly returned to thrillers with Suspicion and Saboteur .

The Color Purple (1985)

The Director: Steven Spielberg

The Surprise: The big talking point of Oscar season was to ask what right geeky blockbuster specialist Spielberg had in adapting Alice Walker's African-American classic. Was he serious, or just trying to win Oscars?

Is It Really So Strange? While the film famously didn't convert any of its 11 nominations into a win, it marked a substantial change in Spielberg's career and proved that, yes, he was serious. He even completed a loose trilogy about major landmarks in the black American experience with Amistad and Lincoln .

Annie (1982)

The Director: John Huston

The Surprise: So you've bought the rights to a smash Broadway musical. Now you need a director. Do you: a) find a genre specialist with an affinity for child actors and songs, or b) hire John Huston, the grizzled veteran with 40 years of classics involving hard-bitten, cynical detectives, criminals and adventurers?

Is It Really So Strange? In retrospect, Hollywood went mad for a few years hiring heavyweight directors to helm lightweight projects. This isn't the last such film on this list.

The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957)

The Director: David Lean

The Surprise: Having cut his teeth on adaptations of Dickens and Coward, nothing in Lean's career served warning of the quantum leap in scale and ambition of his widescreen PoW epic.

Is It Really So Strange? Don't forget that Lean's first film was the wartime drama In Which We Serve , albeit on a much smaller scale, so perhaps it was always in his blood to go big. One thing's for sure, he never downsized again; Kwai 's Oscar success led to Lean's new career as the maker of epics, most notably Lawrence Of Arabia .

Good Will Hunting (1997)

The Director: Gus Van Sant

The Surprise: Hitherto, Van Sant's films echoed his public image: arty, iconoclastic and slightly pretentious. Everything that the Affleck/Damon-scripted blue collar crowd-pleaser wasn't, in other words.

Is It Really So Strange? Good Will Hunting gave Van Sant a taste for surprising us, and he's never stopped since. You never know whether he's going to make a plotless, point-the-camera-at-the-back-of-someone's-head art film, an Oscar-winning mainstream biopic or a heretical shot-for-shot remake of Psycho .

The Glenn Miller Story (1954)

The Director: Anthony Mann

The Surprise: Mann had brought impressive psychological depth to the Western in a string of collaborations with James Stewart when the two united on this altogether more wholesome biopic of the renowned band leader.

Is It Really So Strange? The Mann Westerns changed opinions of James Stewart's versatility, so you might argue that this was a case of the actor (an obvious choice as Miller) returning the favour by getting Mann to extend his range.

A Good Year (2006)

The Director: Ridley Scott

The Surprise: He was the great visionary whose unparalleled world-building (from Blade Runner to Gladiator ) made him the go-to guy for visual complexity. So why is he slumming it making a cosily middlebrow drama about Russell Crowe living in Provence?

Is It Really So Strange? Even great directors need a holiday. As it happens, Scott owned a house in the French region and wanted to capture its beauty on-screen, and decided to invite his ongoing collaborator Crowe (in the second of their five films together) for some R&R.