What Google Image Search Thinks About Famous Movie Directors

By  · Published on April 10th, 2012

Recently, Flavorwire got a kick out of a post from Slacktory where they used that ever-present man behind the curtain called Google to see what our internet age connects with celebrities. Then, we got a kick out of Flavorwire’s answer which involved 25 famous authors and what the search engine had to say.

The experiment is simple. Type a name into Google Image Search, and the program automagically suggests more words to narrow down your search. Judging from entries like “white people problems” for J.D. Salinger and “death, oven, daddy” for Sylvia Plath, it seems like Google might be kinder to famous movie directors. Some of the responses fully encapsulate the person’s artistic output while others push toward the fringe, but all are shaped by what we’re searching for.

Here’s a few things Google thinks you should add to the names of some of your favorite filmmakers.

Stanley Kubrick (assassinated, self portrait, moon landing)

Martin Scorsese (cat, Hugo, eyebrows)

Alfred Hitchcock (silhouette, cameos, blonde, belly button)

Steven Spielberg (yacht, jaws, beard)

Francis Ford Coppola (winery, godfather, Heart of Darkness)

Orson Welles (fat, clapping, War of the Worlds)

Quentin Tarantino (Basterds, black women, explains Top Gun)

Clint Eastwood (cigar, daughter Playboy, do you feel lucky)

Charlie Chaplin (old, cartoon, smile, Hitler)

John Ford (eye patch, composition, and Monument Valley)

Woody Allen (Soon Yi, Manhattan, lobster)

Ridley Scott (Prometheus, egg, sketches)

Billy Wilder (theater, screenplays, fedora)

Frank Capra (Why We Fight, and the cinema of populism)

John Huston (Chinatown, The Dead, father of Whitney)

Peter Jackson (weight loss, cigarettes, The Hobbit)

David Lean (Dickens, lens, Brief Encounter)

Roman Polanski (Macbeth, arrest, Manson)

David Lynch (paintings, hair, rabbits)

James Cameron (submarine, Titanic, king of the world)

Elia Kazan (babydoll, HUAC, and Arthur Miller)

Joel Coen (and Ethan Coen, Garfield, Soundings)

Howard Hawks (Scarface, Omaha, The Thing)

Fritz Lang (Metropolis, fury, German expressionism)

Tim Burton (and Helena Bonham Carter, tattoos, graveyard)

If you do any experimenting, please fill us in with the comments section.

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Movie stuff at VanityFair, Thrillist, IndieWire, Film School Rejects, and The Broken Projector Podcast@brokenprojector | Writing short stories at Adventitious.