Ishirō Honda, Japanese director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1911)
Ishirō Honda (Japanese: 本多 猪四郎（いしろう）, Hepburn: Honda Ishirō, 7 May 1911 – 28 February 1993) was a Japanese filmmaker who directed 44 feature films in a career spanning 59 years. He is regarded as one of the most internationally successful Japanese filmmakers of the 20th century.
Honda entered the Japanese film industry in 1934, working as the third assistant director on Sotoji Kimura's The Elderly Commoner's Life Study. After 15 years of working on numerous films as an assistant director, he made his directorial debut with the short documentary film Ise-Shima (1949). Honda's first feature film, The Blue Pearl (1952), was a critical success in Japan at the time and would lead him to direct three subsequent drama films.
In 1954, Honda directed and co-wrote Godzilla, which became a box office success in Japan, and was nominated for two Japanese Movie Association awards, it won an award for best special effects but lost to Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai for best picture. Because of the film's success in Japan, it spawned a multimedia franchise, being recognized by Guinness World Records as the longest-running film franchise in history. The film not only established the kaiju and tokusatsu genres but helped Honda gain international recognition leading him to direct numerous tokusatsu films that are still studied and watched today.After directing his eighth and final Godzilla film in 1975, Honda retired from filmmaking. Honda's former colleague and friend, Akira Kurosawa, would, however, persuade him to come out of retirement in the late 1970s and act as his right-hand man for his last five films.