ABSTRACT
Directors play a significant role in ordinary thought and talk about film. We often choose to watch films on the basis of who directed them (“I'll see anything Tim Burton directs”), and we commonly evaluate and interpret them in light of other works in the director's oeuvre (“It's the best he's directed since Edward Scissorhands [1990], and it shows that his films have not, in fact, become more sentimental”). We also compare one director's oeuvre with another's (e.g., Hawks' films with Ford's and Lucas' movieswith those of Spielberg). Perhaps even more basically, we regularly identify films by reference to their director (“Have you seen the new Scorsese film?”).
