George Stevens won the Best Director Oscar twice, in 1951 for A Place in the Sun and in 1956 for Giant. He was also nominated in 1943 for The More the Merrier, in 1954 for Shane, and in 1959 for The Diary of Anne Frank.

At 26, Soderbergh became the youngest solo director to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Fest which garnered the film worldwide commercial success, among numerous accolades.

John Sturges made imaginative use of the widescreen CinemaScope format in the suspense interracial drama Bad Day at Black Rock, in 1955, for which he received a Best Director Oscar nomination.

In 1965, the Teshigahara/Abe film Woman in the Dunes (1964) was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

The biopic Patton was a major success for which Schaffner won the Best Director Oscar and the Directors Guild of America Award for Best Director.