This polarity perhaps explains the variety of directors she worked for - among them Peter Brook, Yuri Lyubimov, Terry Hands, Mike Alfreds and Michael Grandage - as well as the very different directors for whom she was a particular favourite, John Dexter, Bill Gaskill, Jonathan Miller, Max Stafford-Clark and Howard Davies.
"He's one of the very few directors who can make films that speak to the senses," said Anocha Suwichakornpong, an award-winning Thai director who is part of a new wave of independent filmmakers here.
His reputation hasn't scared away the very best directors.
At the very least, directors Eduardo Sanchez and Dan Myrick deserve praise for reviving the nearly-forgotten genre art of doing it all with shadows, rather than gore, ghouls and digitals.
Love him or loathe him – and I've done both in my time – Gaspar Noé is one of the very few directors who is actually trying to do something new with the medium, battling at the boundaries of the possible.
Nolan has proved himself to be one of the very best directors of his generation, especially since his last two films, The Dark Knight and Inception, are universally-acclaimed masterpieces.
Yet in these pages Keaton does share a trove of the very private director's letters (one, signed "the fabulous Mister A, a man with healing humour"), tossed in amid the (touchingly equally valued) diary entries of her mother.
"Kelly is the very rare director who, when she tells you to do the chore in a scene, she actually wants you to do the chore," Stewart said.
The very renowned director Abbas Kiarostami was denied a visa when he was coming to the US to debut his film Ten.
German critics have torn into the director for betraying the very notion of "director's theater," a mid-20th-century style that he helped establish wherein directors are not only permitted but compelled to radically reinterpret classic texts.
