Name a director who has won the Oscar for Best Director: rare answers

Answering “Name a director who has won the Oscar for Best Director”? Our list has 77 answers, sorted below from the deepest cuts to the picks everyone types first. Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg and Mel Gibson only score 10. Deep cuts such as Lewis Milestone, George Roy Hill and Frank Lloyd score up to 100 points.

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Accepted answers: 77
Category: Movies
Deep answers (85–100 pts): 27 (35%)
Alternate spellings accepted: 1 answers
First letters: 19 different; J is the most common (11)

🐙 Abyssal: 9 answers (12%), 100 pts each
🦑 Midnight Zone: 18 answers (23%), 85 pts each
🐠 Twilight Zone: 23 answers (30%), 60 pts each
🐟 Sunlit Zone: 21 answers (27%), 30 pts each
🌊 Surface: 6 answers (8%), 10 pts each

The rarest answers

9 answers are Abyssal here, the ones we expect the fewest players to think of, including Lewis Milestone, George Roy Hill, Frank Lloyd and Leo McCarey. Each is worth 100 points, ten times a Surface answer.

🐙 Abyssal answers (100 points)

Lewis Milestone, George Roy Hill, Frank Lloyd, Leo McCarey, Robert Benton, Franklin J. Schaffner, Ethan Coen, Norman Taurog, Delbert Mann

🦑 Midnight Zone answers (85 points)

Tom Hooper, Michael Cimino, Robert Wise, Bong Joon Ho, Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert, Victor Fleming, Michael Curtiz, Michel Hazanavicius, Fred Zinnemann, Carol Reed, Jerome Robbins, Sean Baker, Joel Coen, George Stevens, John Schlesinger, John G. Avildsen, Frank Borzage

🐠 Twilight Zone answers (60 points)

Elia Kazan, John Huston, Billy Wilder, Sydney Pollack, Chloé Zhao, Bob Fosse, Frank Capra, Miloš Forman, Mike Nichols, Damien Chazelle, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jonathan Demme, Vincente Minnelli, William Wyler, David Lean, Barry Levinson, Jane Campion, William Friedkin, George Cukor, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Anthony Minghella, James L. Brooks, Tony Richardson

🐟 Sunlit Zone answers (30 points)

Roman Polanski, James Cameron, Martin Scorsese, Robert Redford, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Jackson, Oliver Stone, Richard Attenborough, Guillermo del Toro, Ron Howard, Warren Beatty, Robert Zemeckis, Steven Soderbergh, Danny Boyle, Paul Thomas Anderson, Ang Lee, Sam Mendes, John Ford, Kathryn Bigelow, Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu

🌊 Surface answers (10 points)

Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, Mel Gibson, Christopher Nolan, Woody Allen, Kevin Costner

Other spellings we accept

Type any of these and the game counts it as the same answer. Small typos are forgiven on longer answers too.

Bong Joon Ho: Bong

Rarity tiers are our own estimate of how few people would think of each answer. For strategy, read how to find One in a Krillion answers.