There’s a reason why the divorce rate for directors is so high, it’s because they’re also married to their work. Most directors work in incredibly different ways to one another, as some of them will spend years on the production of one movie, whereas others will set strict deadlines and quickly move on from one movie to the next. And there are other directors who will even work on multiple movies at the same time.
It’s an extremely rare occurrence, but with the rate at which some directors work, there’ll be times when they release two movies within the same year. It might have led to many sleepless nights, but with these directors, it paid off massively.
Robert Zemeckis
Robert Zemeckis is not only always hard at work, but he has his fingers in so many pies when it comes to the types of movies he’s working on. He could be working on a CGI Christmas movie one minute and an epic biopic the next minute. The year 2000 saw Zemeckis in one of his busiest periods, as the year saw the release of both What Lies Beneath, which was the first time that the director tackled horror, and Cast Away, which has become one of the best Zemeckis movies.
Tim Burton
Though there have been a lot of interesting unrealised Tim Burton projects that could have been great, the director instead decided to create his own version of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory.
Though the movie is more of an adaptation of the novel than a remake of the original, it’s such an inferior movie that’s regarded as one of the worst remakes ever. However, that isn’t the only Burton movie that was released in 2005, as Corpse Bride was also released, and saw the director revisiting stop motion.
Clint Eastwood
The director has a lot of underrated movies that he’s directed, but Clint Eastwood’s twofer is a couple of his most celebrated movies ever made. The 2008 movie Gran Torino sees Eastwood in arguably one of his greatest roles of all time, and Changeling is one of the greatest mystery crime dramas, as it’s based on the real events of the 1928 Wineville Chicken Coop murders.
Steven Soderbergh
Steven Soderbergh is one of the busiest filmmakers alive and nobody works at the pace he does. It’s not even close, as the director has released over 20 movies since the year 2000. The peak of this workaholism came in 2001 when he released both Erin Brockovich, a biographical legal drama, and Traffic, a movie so epic it has an exhaustive amount of behind the scenes facts.
John Hughes
It’s a known fact that John Hughes was a workaholic, as it’s said that he wrote Planes, Trains, and Automobiles in a single weekend. John Hughes was an icon in the 1980s, as he’s responsible for so many great coming-of-age movies such as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and many others. But in 1985, Hughes directed two of the most iconic 80s movies ever; the Saturday detention movie The Breakfast Club, and the sci-fi movie Weird Science, which is a must watch for any teenage boy even 35 years later.
Ridley Scott
Ridley Scott has been in the business for a long time, and in that time he helped create one of the most fascinating franchises in cinema. The first Alien movie is the scariest sci-fi movie of all time, and though there were many sequels in the time since, Scott wouldn’t properly return to the series until Alien: Covenant in 2017. Not only is it one of the better Alien movies, but Scott also directed the great, Oscar nominated All The Money In The World the same year.
Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg is inarguably the greatest living director and arguably the greatest director in cinema history, and he didn’t reach that point without releasing several movies within the same year on several occasions. One of the most momentous times this happened was with two extremely high-concept movies both starring Tom Cruise, Munich, and War of the Worlds. War Of The Worlds was a huge movie and though it’s full of plot holes, it has just as many intense scenes.
Denis Villeneuve
It could be argued that Denis Villeneuve is the best director of the 2010s. As the filmmaker was making French movies in the 2000s, he was snapped up by Hollywood and has since released some of the decade’s most epic movies, including Sicario and Blade Runner 2049.
But 2013 might have been his very greatest year, as he directed Prisoners, a very Fincher-esque crime movie, and as a victory lap, he quickly followed up with Enemy, a strange and mysterious movie about a man who finds his doppelgänger.
Francis Ford Coppola
In 1974, Francis Ford Coppola released one of the greatest movies of all time, if not the greatest movie of all time, The Godfather Part II. But just before that, he also released The Conversation, an incredible San Francisco based movie about a surveillance specialist. It’s unfortunate that these two movies were released in the same year because, as great as it is, The Conversation, unfortunately, lives in Part II’s shadow, especially as it’s sandwiched between that and the first Godfather in Coppola’s filmography.
Steven Spielberg (Again)
And this is why Spielberg is considered the greatest living filmmaker. Not only did he direct one of the greatest cat-and-mouse chase movies of all time, Catch Me If You Can, which pits Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio against each other, but he also made Minority Report in the same year. Minority Report is an incredibly ambitious sci-fi epic and it paid off, as it remains one of the greatest ever adaptations of a Philip K. Dick novel.