Creator Thumbprint / Live-Action Films

Creator Thumbprint in Films.

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• J. J. Abrams will name something after his Grandpa Kelvin, such as the USS Kelvin in Star Trek (2009) and Kelvin Ridge in The Force Awakens. He also has a marked fondness for lens flare.
• Wes Anderson has a style so specific to him and him alone that Honest Trailers joked that he was essentially "his own genre." Hallmarks of a Wes Anderson film include, but are not limited to:
  • Perfectly symmetrical shots where the camera is at a right angle to the action (facing it straight-on or in profile)
  • A muted pastel color palette
  • A Bittersweet Ending
  • and Whip Pans.
• Judd Apatow's films feature a lot of Improv, Manchild and Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonists, Vulgar Humor, and pop culture references.
• Dario Argento
  • His films usually have protagonists who are involved in the arts or some creative profession and are foreigners.
  • Jessica Harper in Suspiria (1977) and Jennifer Connelly in Phenomena are based on Creator/Disney's Snow White.
• Most of the films that Darren Aronofsky has made so far have an underlying theme to the plot of the main character (or a main character) going on a path of self-destruction because of an obsession (finding proof of his theory on π, becoming a flawless dancer on Black Swan, drugs on Requiem for a Dream, returning to the ring on The Wrestler, etc.).
• Michael Bay:
  • EXPLOSIONS!
  • A Motion Parallax.
  • Planes or helicopters flying into the sunset or while surrounded by one.
  • Patriotism or military porn.
• Luc Besson
  • Nigh-invincible action heroes.
  • Strong, kickass Action Girls dressed in skimpy clothing.
  • The Bad Guys Are Cops, Police Are Useless, or even Bad Cop/Incompetent Cop for his depictions of law enforcement in his movies.
• Shane Black:
  • There is No Fourth Wall.
  • He loves Christmas, to the point it becomes An Asskicking Christmas.
  • Many (if not all) of his characters carry revolvers, including Roger Murtaugh and Holland March.
  • Home attacks.
  • On that topic, a Supervillain Lair which is often the site of either Cold-Blooded Torture or Storming the Castle.
• Matthew Bright uses lurid violence, Serial Killers, strong profanity, and hard-edged satire seen in his films Freeway and Bundy.
• Mel Brooks puts plenty of penis jokes in his movies: Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, Spaceballs, and especially the musical remake of The Producers (which, admittedly, he didn't actually direct). Also, his use of Nazis as walking punching bags (he is Jewish, after all).
• Chris Buck
  • It's not one of his movies until at least two parents meet horrible, horrible, horrible deaths.
  • He also seems to enjoy Plucky Comic Relief characters who are blissfully unaware of the things that could kill them, such as Chicken Joe and Olaf.
• Tim Burton has a few:
  • His films contain strange hands — severed hands, mutilated hands, prosthetic hands, gloved hands, and artistic representations of hands — in far greater proportion than is common. The only remotely sexual connotation attaches to the leather-glove fetishism in Batman (both Jack Napier and Max Shreck favor dapper black gloves, and both exhibit sexual and/or sadistic attitudes toward the film's heroine). The Nightmare Before Christmas uses the lyric "bony fingers" three times.
  • Burton also likes German Expressionist cinema (Johnny Depp Looks Like Cesare in over half of Burton's films), which is a visible influence of his work. Sometimes he admits this, like how Christopher Walken's character in Batman Returns is named "Max Schreck". This also feeds into his lower-level fixation with spirals. Spiral hair, spiral feathers, spiral coattails, spiral plants, spiral embroidery... maybe he eats a lot of curly fries or something. And stripes. Especially on snakes.
  • Scary clowns, dark woods, tile floors...
  • Burton seems to have a thing for dogs, as there are some dropped into every one of his movies at some point. Frankenweenie (both versions) even has a dog as the main character!
  • A theme that comes up in almost all his films is that of parents separated in some way from their children. This is either because a family gets split up due to mass chaos (Mars Attacks!), the main character is an orphan (both Batman films), the character really should have parents but doesn't (Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Edward Scissorhands)... but most commonly because the character has major Parental Issues (Beetlejuice, Batman Returns, Sleepy Hollow, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and to a lesser extent Mars Attacks!). Interestingly, Big Fish outright has this as the movie's theme, and it's arguably Burton's attempt to come to terms with it and for once depict a normal and loving (if troubled) family, possibly in the wake of his father's death from cancer.
• Star Wars sound tech Ben Burtt is the driving force of the resurgent popularity of the Wilhelm Scream.
• James Cameron has his distinctive shots of feet, female protagonists and the presence or imminent threat of nuclear weapons (except Titanic (1997), for obvious reasons) in his films. He's also got a huge interest for the ocean; while this is less apparent in his fiction work (though this one does include Titanic, again for obvious reasons), his documentary work heavily revolves around this subject.
• Frank Capra and Jimmy The Raven.
• The Coen Brothers
  • They seem obsessed with hair, or at any rate like to portray characters who are, and/or characters with bizarre or terrible haircuts. Also, every film will feature at least a few of the following: someone vomiting, a bellowing fat man (usually played by John Goodman), and an Implacable Man who seems to be the Anthropomorphic Personification of pure evil.
  • They are also fond of: regional accents, scenes with dogs, failed kidnappings, a Briefcase Full of Money, powerful men behind desks, and shots of walking feet.
  • Less obvious but nonetheless notable, at least seven of their films feature a car wreck where one of the main characters is the driver or did something to cause the wreck.
  • Almost all of their films are set in the past...even if it's the very recent past, and the time period has no impact on the plot. Though several of their films are straightforward period pieces (O Brother, Where Art Thou? is set during The Great Depression, Barton Fink is set in 1941, Hail, Caesar! is set in 1951, The Hudsucker Proxy is set in 1958, etc.), others are a bit stranger. The Big Lebowski came out in 1998, but takes place during the Gulf War in 1991; Fargo came out in 1996, but takes place in 1987; and No Country for Old Men came out in 2007, but takes place in 1980.
  • They really love to homage Westerns and Film Noir (sometimes both at once, as in The Big Lebowski and Hail, Caesar!). Between films like No Country for Old Men, True Grit and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, they've done almost every flavor of Western imaginable, and they've covered nearly every corner of the Sliding Scale of Seriousness Versus Silliness. Ditto for films like Miller's Crossing, Blood Simple and Fargo, which do the same for noir.
• As a boy, Wes Craven was bullied by a kid named Fred Krueger. Before this name became attached to Craven's most iconic baddie, his earlier film The Last House on the Left contains a villainous rapist named Krug.
• Screenwriter/director Richard Curtis seems to have a thing for Americans. Aside from the Bridget Jones films, which were adapted from another medium and were a collaboration with several other writers, every theatrically released film he's ever written has been a British comedy featuring at least one American character, though that may be due to the UK cinematic convention of having an inexplicable American in the cast to coax the US market. Ironically in Love Actually he has the British prime minister played by Hugh Grant gives an epic "The Reason You Suck" Speech to the American President played by Billy Bob Thornton.
• Films by the prolific Warner Bros. director Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) usually included at least one shot where the characters are offscreen and seen only through their silhouettes on a wall.
• The films of Guillermo del Toro always include slime, aspects of Clock Punk (or at least, clocks), things in jars (often People Jars), and references to Roman Catholicism. The supernatural and monsters of any sort are extremely common, and he's also greatly interested in the Spanish Civil War.
• Gareth Edwards has had monsters with tentacles appear in all of his films except for Godzilla (2014), where the tentacles were planned for the enemy monsters but abandoned at the concept stage.
• Coleman Francis
  • Coffee? He loves coffee!
  • Light aircraft and vigilantism.
• Mel Gibson:
  • If he is starring in a film, chances are his character will like dogs.
  • The characters he plays display Catholic tendencies.
  • His attachment to a film (actor, director, or otherwise) does tend to suggest the presence of torture and suffering. In front of the camera, you have Mad Max and the hacksaw; Lethal Weapon and the electric sponges in the shower; lots of Conspiracy Theory; Payback; and the end of Braveheart. On the other side of the lens, there's some in Apocalypto, and there's The Passion of the Christ.
  • On that note, Gorn. This is seen a plentiful in The Passion Of The Christ and Apocalypto.
• All of John Glen's James Bond movies feature Disturbed Doves and a Bat Scare.
• Alfred Hitchcock would appear as a bystander in all of his films. When he found out that people would watch the films for his cameo and get distracted from the story, he started making his appearance in the first few minutes. There's other stuff, too, like villains dying from falling from great heights, tall 'cool' blondes, and the MacGuffin.
• Peter Jackson likes to leave a distinct mark on his projects.
  • The Morris Minor or one of its variants appears in most of the director's early films.
  • He has a penchant for shooting close-ups with very wide-angle lenses.
  • Gorn played for laughs as much as drama.
  • His productions base the creature design of creepy-crawlies and monsters on the native wildlife of his home country, New Zealand.
  • Transparent Green Ghosts that look like half-mummified corpses.
  • His favourite film is King Kong (1933), and he works references to it in his other movies.
  • It wouldn't be a Jackson film without a Creator Cameo from the director himself, his children, and frequent recurring actor, Jed Brophy.
• Duncan Jones is apparently a big fan of the song "The One and Only" by Chesney Hawkes.
  • In Moon Sam's alarm clock plays it.
  • In Source Code it's Christina's ringtone.
  • A Deleted Scene in Warcraft had Hawkes himself as a minstrel, playing a medieval-fantasy version.
  • In Mute (2018) it's used as videogame music.
• Joseph Kosinski, director of TRON: Legacy, Top Gun: Maverick and Oblivion, is a graduate and adjunct professor in architecture; this can be observed in the designs of the buildings and other materials in the worlds of those films which are all very carefully thought out.
• Stanley Kubrick
  • He liked filming bathroom scenes, often in connection with character death.
  • CRM-114 shows up a bunch.
  • Kubrick was also fond of doing The Oner in most of his films.
  • So many Kubrick films contain the "head down, eyes up" pose, that he's the Trope Namer for Kubrick Stare.
• Most films directed by John Landis (with the notable exception of Animal House) feature the phrase "See You Next Wednesday." Even the Michael Jackson "Thriller" video incorporates it in background dialogue.
• Spike Lee loves his Dolly Shots. His very first use of it was in School Daze but it wasn't until Mo' Better Blues that we see the one that he is more renowned for.
• Stan Lee appears in every movie based on one of his Super Heroes. This carries over to cartoons and video games like Spider-Man (PS4) where he appears running a restaurant MJ and Peter eat at. Sadly, after his death in 2018, he only had a handful of pre-recorded cameos left before this trend stopped completely.
• It seems that the neo-noir nightclub-like lighting of John Wick was producer (and uncredited co-director) David Leitch's idea, as the man's directorial efforts to date have an abundance of scenes being lit by neon lights.
• George Lucas
  • Every movie he creates features the number 1138 at some point, as homage to his first film, THX 1138.
  • Most have at least one scene with a speeding vehicle (THX 1138, American Graffiti, Star Wars movies, Indiana Jones, etc.). Though this may have less to do with Author Appeal and more to do with the majority of his films being action films, where speeding vehicles can be expected.
  • The number 327 is also frequently encountered, although it's not clear why. One theory is that Lucas' first car was a Chevy 327.
• David Lynch
  • He seems to really enjoy scenes of women singing. There's the Lady in the Radiator from Eraserhead, Dorothy Vallens in Blue Velvet, the biker bar chick in Twin Peaks and the whole Club Silencio scene in Mulholland Dr., though all these instances are probably done for atmosphere more than anything else.
  • He also likes facial injuries/deformity, shots of the road taken while driving, blinking/strobing lights, red curtains, and fixed shots of the elderly moving slowly. Oh, and terrifying imagery in abundance.
  • That's besides his whole "dark underbelly of suburbia" thing, the dominant theme in much of his work.
  • From the '90s onward, coffee, especially in Twin Peaks and What Did Jack Do?.
• Christopher McQuarrie:
  • Accurate firearms usage and tactics.
  • The countless Surprisingly Realistic Outcome moments, almost to the point of Deconstruction.
• Sam Mendes' entire filmography contains:
  • families (real or surrogate) that are screwed to oblivion
  • scenes taking place in heavy rain
  • flawed parental figure(s)
  • Actresses who are married to directors (especially his own wife)
  • and crucial characters getting killed by the end of the film.
  • The only time where ANY of these tropes didn't happen was in Jarhead.
• Christopher Nolan's films:
  • Every one of them is about a guilt-ridden male character's attempts to atone for a past mistake or failing, usually involving a woman who came to — or ends up coming to — a tragic end.
  • They would be a third shorter if he left out all the birds-eye view cityscapes.
  • Inception can be seen as a "Nolan's greatest hits" in terms of director trademarks. There are metaphysical motifs, things that are not what they seem, a character side story serving as a metaphor for the protagonist or film overall, and a twist ending to a character story or film.
  • At least one of the main characters will carry a small, innocent-looking object around (such as a playing card, a coin, a bouncing ball, or a spinning top) which we are treated to many close-up shots of.
  • And if Cillian Murphy is in the movie, at some point he will have a bag over his head.
  • The Dark Knight Saga and Inception even have their own credits FONT.
• Park Chan-wook: Explicit violence and sexuality interwoven with tragedy and Black Comedy. Expect the violence to be disturbing.
  • Revenge, specifically how Revenge Is Not Justice
  • Protagonists who are The Quiet One, often devolving into Anti-Heroes or He Who Fights Monsters.
• Jordan Peele has Animal Motifs, which often overlaps into Rule of Symbolism. All of his films thus far have a significant animal theme — this ranges from deer to rabbits to horses.
• Film producer Jon Peters appears to really like Giant Spiders, as noted in our article on Executive Meddling.
• Sam Raimi's car during college, a 1973 yellow Oldsmobile Delta 88, dubbed "The Classic", is in many of his films. For example, it was Uncle Ben's car in Spider-Man and Ash's car throughout the Evil Dead franchise. He even managed to sneak it into the western movie The Quick and the Dead as the undercarriage of a hay wagon.
  • He also adores torturing Bruce Campbell in the number of projects he casts him in; Evil Dead 2 and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness come to mind.
• All of the feature films from RedLetterMedia production company feature a VHS copy of Death List in a shot. These include Gorilla, Interrupted, The Recovered and Feeding Frenzy. In the latter, it's on a table while the characters are literally making a list of people who might die.
• Martin Scorsese's films often feature Catholic imagery, guilt-ridden protagonists, and the Madonna-Whore Complex in regards to love interests.
• Kevin Smith always stuffs his films with his favorite things: Star Wars, Jaws, hockey and comic book references, and talks about "unnatural" sex acts. He has a thing for girls with glasses, brought on by his wife. There are also Degrassi references. On a plot level, he has a tendency for relationships to be disrupted by the man's discomfort with the woman's previous sexual relationships.
• Zack Snyder:
  • Aside from the pretty imagery, slow motion shows up a lot in his films, especially faces being punched, firearms shooting and ammunition cartridge cases flying, falling and bouncing on the ground.
  • Visual references to Excalibur as well as visual references to Renaissance and classical art (especially works of art that were based on The Bible).
• Stephen Sommers loves scenes with people getting swallowed up by quicksand and the ilk (see The Jungle Book, The Mummy, The Mummy Returns and the Sommers-produced The Scorpion King).
• Steven Spielberg's first film, Duel, used a dinosaur roar sound effect as the tanker truck goes over the cliff, which he has incorporated into the climax of every film he's made ever since.
  • Considering that Spielberg had a tendency to include Lens Flares in his own films (though most of these from intense light sources that often backlit actors), it's not surprising to learn that J. J. Abrams is directly inspired by Spielberg's style,
  • Characters often talk over each other, resulting in two conversations simultaneously occurring or eventually merging in a scene.
  • There's a reason why Mystery Science Theater 3000 and RiffTrax often joke that any shot of a character staring in awe at something offscreen is guest directed by Spielberg.
• Quentin Tarantino
  • Tarantino has a Trunk Shot in each of his films.
  • When he heard it was being discontinued, he saved one last box of Fruit Brute cereal and tries to have a character eating it in every film he makes. He also has his own fictional brands, including Red Apple Cigarettes and Big Kahuna Burger. He also likes having stylized and often nauseatingly gory action scenes (though hilariously, he still found Mr. Creosote to be a bit too much to stomach).
  • He has a history of hiding himself as an extra, often times someone who dies.
  • He also loves shots of women's feet, to the point where it has become infamous - he gives long closeups of the feet of Beatrix Kiddo, Mia Wallace, and Sharon Tate.
  • On that note, Action Girls.
  • Characters with alliterative names.
  • Lingering, mouth-watering focus on the delicious foods his characters indulge in.
• Pixar's Lee Unkrich
  • He really likes monkeys. Guess what shows up twice in his directorial debut Toy Story 3?
  • And speaking of Pixar, nearly every film by the company will contain a reference to Pizza Planet or A113 (more info under Western Animation).
• New Zealand film director Taika Waititi incorporates an offbeat sense of humor (usually of the Black Comedy variety and laced with Bathos) and indigenous Māori themes in his films. That included his first major Hollywood feature, where his portrayal of the Kronan rock alien Korg was based on Polynesian bouncers he'd once met.
• John Woo:
  • Action sequences characterized by Gun Fu, Guns Akimbo, Bottomless Magazines, Leap and Fire, and the two-person point-blank Mexican Standoff.
  • Expect his characters to wield a Beretta 92FS or even two. Woo even stated that it is his favorite gun to use in his movies.
  • Honor Among Thieves and characters' attempts to maintain a moral code while engaging in immoral behavior.
  • He is also fond of Disturbed Doves for its symbolism, and since The Killer, they've shown up in all his work.
• Both of Alice Wu's feature films and the short film "The Note" (which she directed) focus on the experiences of gay Chinese-Americans.
• Karel Zeman seems to have put a thunderstorm in all of his feature films.
• Robert Zemeckis
  • He likes Historical In Jokes as well as putting real people in his films, either by getting the real person or by combining editing tricks with Stock Footage.
  • In a documentary made for the 2002 Back to the Future DVD, Zemeckis said he always felt the best Time Travel stories were The Time Machine and A Christmas Carol. Seven years later, he came out with his own version of the latter.
  • Which brings us to Motion Capture.
  • Casting actors, often the lead, in multiple parts (Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future Part II, Tom Hanks in The Polar Express, Jim Carrey and Gary Oldman in A Christmas Carol) and having them interact with each other.

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