But then it was his turn, and he was invited to direct Alien in 1979.
He was at one point on board to direct Alien 3 after producer Walter Hill saw The Navigator and was blown away by it.
He'd just got home from directing Alien Resurrection in the US and now wanted to make a small, romantic film set in Montmartre about a diffident Parisian waitress.
Jeunet, who began his career in France with the award-winning Delicatessen (1991) before travelling to Hollywood to direct Alien Resurrection (1997), has imported some US practices to his film-making style - such as the use of focus groups to assess whether the story's plot needs simplifying or clarifying.
O'Bannon had originally assumed that he would direct Alien, but 20th Century Fox instead asked Hill to direct.
Giler, Hill, and Carroll had been impressed by Ridley Scott's debut feature film The Duellists (1977) and made an offer to him to direct Alien, which Scott quickly accepted.
And, you could argue, he should have been nominated another couple of times for directing "Alien" and "Blade Runner," two of the most enduring and influential sci-fi movies in film history.
David Fincher had graduated from music videos to feature films five years earlier, directing Alien 3 a stylish but ultimately unsuccessful franchise film (the final product reportedly undone by studio interference and tinkering), which would've sent plenty of novice directors packing.
In a shift Tindle says is similar to David Fincher's response to directing Alien 3, Miyazaki focused on his own creations afterward, including TV shows Future Boy Conan and Sherlock Hound, and the manga strip that would later become his first Ghibli film, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.
Ridley Scott-directed Alien films are, it seems, a bit like buses: you wait 30 years for one, and then two come along at once.
