Five directors who "Get it."
What is "it," you ask? Well, the thing they have and others don't.
1. Martin Scorsese
I would watch grass grow if it was filmed by Martin Scorsese, and it would of course have a killer soundtrack. Thanks to my parents unwisely having allowed me to see Goodfellas on HBO at age 13, I spent the next two years neglecting my education in favor of petty crime. And I don't regret a moment of it, because it was the most fun I had until college. The cautionary parts of the movie had gone right over my head, but the part where Henry Hill did whatever he wanted and collected money as if it were laundry lint made perfect sense to me. And somehow it worked and I got away with it for two years. Basically, Scorsese is the devil - but the devil you love. He breathes driving, pulsating life into everything, including more benign subject matter like "Kundun" and "Hugo." A true avatar of the Italian-American spirit, no matter what subject he's addressing.
2. Stanley Kubrick
As visceral as Scorsese is, Kubrick was ethereal, and yet equally powerful. His cold eye was piercing with the light of a thousand suns, razor-sharp, and yet the environments he created were woven with impenetrable intricacy and immersive experience. Every moment is fraught with pagan intensity, glaring eyes laden with meaning, words packing a weighty wallop, and visuals from heaven's own vault. Reportedly a tyrant to work with, his actors' sacrifices on set were always worth it. Unfortunately, he's dead, so there will never be another entry from the Director of Directors.
3. Roman Polanski
Geniuses tend to be crazy or immoral in some way: Scorsese created one of the most beautiful films of all time (if not THE greatest) based on the life of a useless junkie hoodlum and made it seem like the most epic thing ever; Kubrick was a sadistic tyrant who emotionally and sometimes physically tortured his cast to get the desired performances out of them; and Roman Polanski...well...you know. But Polanski's movies tend to be seamless Gothic masterpieces, as if immaculately conceived from wafting smoke in the midst of a symphony orchestra. If there is an "it," he most definitely has it.
His Holocaust film "The Pianist" is probably the best movie ever made on the subject, reducing colossal horrors and wrenching chaos to the human-scale struggles of one man's survival. No self-important melodrama or sweeping, operatic depictions of larger events - just desperation, fear, and determination amid events not under the main character's control. Polanski's contributions to the horror (Rosemary's Baby) and noir (Chinatown) genres are no less amazing, and I happen to also be a fan of his more deprecated smirky horror movie "The Ninth Gate," which I recommend to anyone who hasn't seen it.
4. Paul Thomas Anderson
Paul Thomas Anderson is basically all of the writing talent of David Mamet with the addition of good camera instincts, music, and an extended attention span. While it's often difficult to enjoy his movies as entertainment because they're so kaleidoscopic, and also hard to remember details about them for the same reason, there are so many powerful scenes with inescapably weighty performances, perfect soundtrack accompaniment, and unexpected dialog that you almost have to grudgingly admit that Anderson gets it. Probably the most iconic example would be Mark Wahlberg's character Dirk Diggler hitting rock bottom in a crack house in Boogie Nights just as his friend goes berserk and tries to rob armed drug dealers.
You can see it in his face as he's internally collapsing, all while chipper Rick Springfield music plays in the background and a sleazy crackhead/dealer played by Alfred Molina dances around manically in his underwear. It's the most ludicrous, pathetic thing ever, and the two main characters (including John C. Reilly's character) know it and try to bail, setting in motion a piss-pantsingly realistic shootout. If you were ever in a situation where you were around two really dangerous people who got into a fight, you can sympathize with the main characters as they ran like rabbits from the scene.
5. Coen Brothers
Technically these are two directors, but since they always work together, I'll include them as one. They not only "get it," but they get it in a way that no one else does - their films all have a certain grounded, solemn moral sensibility, even when the material is purely comedic. Even in a movie as deliciously silly as The Big Lebowski, the characters are profoundly solid, and rooted in human truth. And in their remake of True Grit, an Oscar-nominated action-Western, there's a pervasive air of tragedy and horror every time someone gets shot - no one is a disposable redshirt, even if they have barely any screen time. Even though the main character is an old-hand gunslinger with a long line of bodies behind him, you see his face darken and collapse when he's forced to shoot someone. The Coens are by far some of the most humanistic filmmakers, and yet their morals are never preached - simply embodied in living motion.
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No really, great post. Thanks. 
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