1. think of woody allen and bergman. both have used sven nykvist, but
hannah and her sisters is ultimately a woody allen movie despite its
bergmanesque touches because its overall tone and spirit is
unmistakably allenian.  godard has worked with different cameramen but
all his films are, above all, godardian. godard wanted belmondo for a
certain movie and didn't get him. it's still a godard movie, with or
without belmondo.

2. jack nicholson has worked with milos forman, john huston, dennis
hopper, but under antonioni's wing, he was an antonionian
character--in the passenger.
of course, some directors are less demanding and perfectionist, and
are willing to let others work autonomously or interpret things their
own way.  but directors with strong personalities or total visions
want complete control and they get it.  and, it usually helps to have
a director with a strong vision and personality because
cinematographer, editor, sound guy, actors, etc. need instructions;
they may offer advice to the director but as a reponse. if  everyone
on the set does as he pleases, it's gonna be chaos. they need a man
with a comprehensive, unified and unifying vision. unlike sports,
there is nothing left to chance in art.  a coach tells a running back
to do whatever but it's stop-and-go and much is a matter of chance and
the other team. but art is worked on and on until you come up with a
fully realized product. if a shooting goes wrong, you reshoot it. if
an actor bumbles his lines, you make him read it again. and, in order
to bring it altogether, you need a guiding hand and vision.  if there
was no director, he would have to be invented. the writer would have
to take the director's job or the producer. or the actor. or the
cinematographer.  all these areas of filmmaking are specialized. it's
the director who's the comprehensive author behind the film.

3. a movie--even a great movie--need not be personal. of course, most
movies are not, for which the main author is the box office or
catering to public taste/demand.  but, midnight run is a great
nonpersonal movie with a formulaic script which was intelligently
written, wonderfully acted, ably directed.  a great car may not be a
work of art but it's a great piece of engineering and it's better than
shit pretending to be art.

4. however, i can't imagine a personal film without an overriding
author, and in most cases this author is the director or the director
in tandem with the writer, or on occasion with cinematopher or
composer.  last year at marienbad is a sterile writer's exercise but
resnais and his cinematographer's visual expression is breathtaking
and has to count for something. and, once upon a time in the west is
basically leone and morricone. leone furnished the visual language but
it'd lose half its power without morricone's outstanding score. it's
like jagger/richards or holland-dozier-holland. cooperative alchemy.
still, leone is the more important author since even without
morricone's score you'd have the movie but no leone, no movie; indeed,
no reason for the music to even exist.
the writer/director partnership is usually much more important. among
personal filmmakers, the director is often the writer--mamet,
antonioni, kurosawa(co-writer), bergman, lynch, peckinpah(co-writer),
coppola(co-writer).
still, usually in a movie partnership, the writer concedes that his
role is subservient to the director. he accepts that it's up to the
director to execute the final product.  he accepts that the director
is the boss and has the final say. otherwise, if the writer overrides
the director's decisions, then the writer is the defacto director,
just as demi moore who overrode joffe for scarlet letter was actress
as defactor director, a horrendous one from what i hear.
this is probably why the best writers work on novels or plays since
they know not to expect full autonomy working on a film where producer
or director is the ultimate boss.  no wonder that so many movies are
based on novels completed by  writers working on their own.  they
could not have produced those novels with a producer or director
breathing down their necks. indeed, when writers agree to work for
film, it's usually as a hired hack and don't get to do what they
really wanna do.  faulkner, gatsby, huxley, hemingway all worked for
hollywood, writing thirdrate scripts or doctoring them, but they were
always on the sideline.

the director is really a misnomer. a film director does more than
direct or interpret. he creates. a stage director is ultimately
limited by the stage. he may guide actors in a manner or call for
certain set designs but the stage remains static. ultimately, it's
actors and the script.  besides, the stage can never convince the
audience as a completely autonomous reality.  this is not so with
movies where the director--with all the technological power in his
hands--can do so much more to interpret, reshape, expand, explore,
warp the original material. rather than just a guide, he becomes the
shaper. not merely a presenter, he takes us on a journey. in music, we
think of composer and the conductor.  the movie director's conduction
is composition.
a director cannot NOT create. the medium becomes the art. our senses
becomes digested thru his vision.

5. there are certain movies where the director is replaceable, like in
the average hollywood genre movie where the formula is
well-established and the director merely goes thru set motions. in
these movies, the director is as replaceable as the editor or sound
guy or cinematographer... unless the director is a man of supreme
talent and vituosity, capable of doing stuff others can only dream of.
 think of john ford, steven spielberg.  ford westerns are genre pieces
and so are spielberg's action spectacles but only they knew how to
realize their full potential.
however, this is certainly not the case with personal films. replace
kurosawa with mizoguchi on seven samurai and it's a totally different
movie. have sydney pollock do the wild bunch and it'll be something
else. peckinpah's persona would have been somewhat different, i think.
i can't imagine masculin-feminin by anyone other than godard.
mulholland drive and eraserhead are lynch all the way. 2001 is kubrick
though dr. strangelove is a great alchemic product of the genius of
kubrick, sellars, and terry southern though kubrick still deserves the
lion's share for its greatness.

6. there are probably cases where film language is less important than
the dialogue, music etc.  in a wordy script, the dialoguist may be
deemed the personal artist. think of glengarry glenross where mamet is
the true author.
and, singing in the rain can't just be credited to stanley donen. gene
kelly and musical folks deserve as much credit. now, singing is not a
personal film, and glengarry glenross is a personal play but not a
personal piece of filmmaking which is all very fine.  still, the point
is in any personal work of art, there has to be a strong authorial
personality at the center. in film, it's usually the director but it
can the writer on occasion, as in glengarry glenross.
perhaps, nondirectors could be even more often the auteur in art or
personal films except that movies, by its nature, favor image over
language, either for  art or entertainment.  most art
directors--except bergman, etc--primarily focused on the
image--kubrick, resnais, truffaut, even godard where his characters
are usually sockpuppets, bresson, kurosawa(esp. throne of blood and
ran).

7. even where director's art is not the central focus of a movie,
director is often crucial. stop making sense is basically a talking
heads concert movie but it works beautifully because of demme's sure
and deft hand.  a same concert can be filmed by two different people
and look utterly different just as if we hand out digicams to students
to film the same event, they can be drastically different in terms of
quality, interest, and skill.
the genius of spielberg becomes apparent when we compare saving
private ryan to enemy at the gate. both are comparable productions but
spielberg knows how to use the smallest details for maximum
thoroughgoing impact whereas the other guy only paints with big
prosaic brushstrokes.

8. bresson is a case where the power of the director is unmistakable.
but, it's also true in a less obvious way with tavernier. and some
directors are clearly out and out auteurs in every way,
self-sufficient artists who indeed resent any notion of compromise
with actors, technicians, moneymen: tarkovsky, godard, rivette,
takeshi, lucas of thx 1138 and attack of the clones--his best films.

9. i think the problem with auteur theory really began as the result
of french new wavers and andrew sarris's realpoliticking and
dogmatizing.  any impassioned theorizing simplifies and invites a
backlash.  extreme auteurism is just stupid but so is extreme
anti-auteurism.  both are cases of rigid constipated mentalities
unable to deal with subtlety and nuance and such.  it's ideology vs
ideololgy and has little to do with art, thought, or truth.
still, in today's cinema, some auteurism is what we need when we are
being inundated by the likes of jackson and other videogamish
nonsense, when what passes for an art director is tarantino doing
postmodernist beni hana with blaxploitation, kung fu and yakuza and
noir.  not that i like genuine auteurs like pt anderson, solondz, and
other such boogerish ilk, but i still prefer to have a decade be
defined by happiness and magnolia than american pie, LOR, pearl
harbor, and other such crap.  but i draw the line with remake of
psycho and far from heaven. that's for the pigeons.