A fair point, to which I offer this pushback: The great directors in question (and they are great, no question) may be directors of great vision, but it is also their regular trusted collaborators who make these visions happen. For example Steven Spielberg is all but inseparable from composer John Williams. Can you imagine Jaws or E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial without their score?

Considering the latter, the (often improvised) child performances are an astonishing element of the film's brilliance. Spielberg had the wisdom to use many of those take one improvisations in the final cut. And speaking of the screenplay, the great unsung hero of that film is Melissa Mathison, who wrote something with extraordinary poignance and sensitivity. Spielberg may have orchestrated all of these elements to make a personal statement (about childhood innocence, not judging by appearance, divorce, the fact that love and pain are inseparable, and so on), but it was Mathison who gave that film its beating heart.

Please don't misunderstand me: Spielberg is a singular director, but I cannot think of him as the sole author of any of this films. Rather, he is the tip of an often brilliant iceberg of collaborative genius.