The Saturn Award for Best Director (or Saturn Award for Best Direction) is one of the annual awards given by the American Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films. The Saturn Awards, which are the oldest film-specialized awards to reward science fiction, fantasy, and horror achievements (the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation is the oldest award for science fiction and fantasy films), included the Best Director category for the first time at the 3rd Saturn Awards, for the 1974/1975 film years.
The award is also the oldest to honor film directors in science fiction, fantasy and horror. It has been given 36 times, including a tie for the 1977 film year.
James Cameron holds the record of the most wins with five (for six nominations), while Steven Spielberg is the most nominated director with eleven nominations (for four wins). Only two other directors have won the award more than once: Peter Jackson (three times) and Bryan Singer (two times). At the 22nd Saturn Awards (for the 1995 film year), Kathryn Bigelow became the first (and currently only) woman to win the award, 15 years before becoming the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director.
Famous quotes containing the words saturn, award and/or director:
“It is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close; and to speculate on what we may yet find at galaxy’s edge. But in the process, we have lost the human element; not to mention the high hope of those quaint days when flight would create “one world.” Instead of one world, we have “star wars,” and a future in which dumb dented human toys will drift mindlessly about the cosmos long after our small planet’s dead.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.”
—Robert Graves (1895–1985)
“When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, the whole country’s ready to let go. You heard of that market crash in ‘29? I predicted that.... I was nursing a director of General Motors. Kidney ailment, they said; nerves, I said. Then I asked myself, “What’s General Motors got to be nervous about?” “Overproduction,” I says. “Collapse.””
—John Michael Hayes (b. 1919)