Ridley Scott | No 15

Director: Robin Hood , Gladiator , Blade Runner Ridley Scott's fortunes can rise and fall quite spectacularly. One moment he's making the misguided comedy A Good Year , a film branded "a flop" only a week after its US release by its studio's owner, Rupert Murdoch. The next, his rough-and-ready take on Robin Hood grosses more than $310m internationally, regardless of the sniggering of some critics over the provenance of Russell Crowe's accent. The glory days of his most influential projects – Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator – may be well behind him, but Scott, 72, isn't on this list just for the films he has directed, but also for his guiding hand as a producer. He formed Scott Free Productions with his brother and fellow director Tony in 1995. Their television work includes Numb3rs, The Good Wife and the historical mini-series The Pillars of the Earth, while the brothers recently executive-produced the Duplass brothers' comedy Cyrus. Among Scott's current projects is Life in a Day , which he is editing into a film from footage uploaded to YouTube in the course of a single day, while two prequels to his 1979 horror smash Alien are in the offing – as is a film version of David Peace's Red Riding trilogy , to be relocated, with staggering predictability, to the US.