> There's this Illusion in public that what the public sees is the directors initial vision. But largely it's the work of hundreds of people, morphing over time to try and find what will be right.

Critics can have this illusion, too: Auteur theory posits that films have an author, that author being the director, and you can see that director's style manifest in the films they make. Sometimes, sure, this is obvious: Hitchcock, Kubrick, Tarantino... they all made or make films with a distinctive stamp on them.

Where this theory runs aground is where your comment comes in, filmmaking as a collaborative process. Citizen Kane was, for example, definitely a collaboration among at least three people: Welles, Mankiewicz, and Toland, the director, screenwriter, and cinematographer, respectively. They each contributed to the film as a finished product, a thing of words and images.

And then there's the failure of the auteur: Ed Wood, Tommy Wiseau, people who had creative control through working outside the Hollywood system and, frankly, blew it. Plan 9 From Outer Space might be the Citizen Kane of laughably bad science fiction films, but it's not the Citizen Kane of films. To make a baseball analogy, Wood tried hard, had plenty of heart, got up there, swung for the fences... and spun around like a top a few times before landing flat on his face, never even whiffing the ball. There's a reason Burton made a sensitive film about him and his efforts.