Time was, American directors found their style over the course of decades. But today, successive turns behind the camera don’t necessarily yield increasingly impressive results. The time-consuming, ego-taxing, and insular nature of modern movie development and production can leech the creative voice from even the most gifted storyteller. An exception to this is David Gordon Green. Since his long-form debut in 2002 with “George Washington,” this writer and director has made five features in eight years, each more emotionally and visually acute than the last.

The Arkansas-born, Texas-raised Mr. Green has created pictures that have mostly played in art houses — with the highly anticipated comedy “Pineapple Express,” produced and co-written by Judd Apatow and co-star Seth Rogan, due in theaters shortly. But Mr. Green appears to be on the threshold of a bigger and better box office. All the Real Americans: The World of David Gordon Green, a film retrospective that showcases Mr. Green’s elegantly evolving work, begins today at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Cinematek. It will appropriately climax with Mr. Green introducing a screening of “Pineapple Express” in advance of the film’s multiplex debut.

The World of David Gordon Green will also include five movies the director selected, in his words, for their complementary “atmospheric, character, or technical approaches” to his own work. Among the films he selected are Jack Starrett’s 1974 “The Gravy Train” (also known as “The Dion Brothers”), Charles Laughton’s brilliant 1955 “Night of the Hunter,” and the elephantine 1989 buddy-cop flick “Tango & Cash.”

Looking back on his film education and tastes, Mr. Green cites visits to Scarecrow Video in Seattle, where he lived in the 1990s. The shop is Washington’s answer to Manhattan’s Kim’s Video. “Scarecrow is an amazing video store/archive/nerd paradise,” the director said. “The composer of most of my movies used to work there, so I would go up there, and we’d just geek out for days and go through the shelves and find obscure movies that we’d read about but never seen.”

One such obscurity is Carl Foreman’s 1971 fable of teen anguish and militant environmentalism “Bless the Beasts and the Children.” The movie was dismissed in its day as little more than an attempt to mine the adolescent film market, à la Tom Laughlin’s surprise independent hit “Billy Jack,” and it has until now resisted rediscovery. “It’s not by any means a classic or a perfect movie,” Mr. Green said. “But I think it’s one that gets lost in the shuffle. It’s a movie that encompassed landscape and youth and nature in a way that we wanted to try to capture in ‘George Washington.'”

Mr. Green acknowledges that the “rhythm of innocence” in “Bless the Beasts and the Children” was vivid enough to warrant screening the film for his post-production crew while editing “George Washington.” Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 “The Last Picture Show,” a film that itself contains homages to John Ford and others, served as a creative inspiration for Mr. Green’s sophomore feature “All the Real Girls.” The filmmaker screened the Bogdanovich picture for his cast and crew before commencing principal photography. “We tried to take the truths and the rough texture of ‘The Last Picture Show,’ and bring some of those qualities and youthful moments of honesty to ‘All the Real Girls,'” Mr. Green said. Peter Weir’s sun-bleached 1975 gothic “Picnic at Hanging Rock” in turn provided a blueprint of sorts for Mr. Green’s snowbound small-town tragedy “Snow Angels.”

Mr. Green describes his latest film as a fusion of influences. “‘Pineapple Express’ is kind of a blend between ‘Gravy Train’ and ‘Tango & Cash,'” Mr. Green said. “Believe it or not, that’s how I pitched it to the studio.” Given that neither influence has developed much nostalgia or critical traction, the boardroom response to Mr. Green’s pitch was initially underwhelming. “Everyone kind of looked at me quietly for about four minutes before we continued the conversation,” the director said.

As far as the BAM program goes, “Gravy Train,” screening in an archival print and introduced by Mr. Green, is likely to be one of the highlights of the summer. The fact that it was co-written by Mr. Green’s sometime associate Terrence Malick, every cineaste-under-40’s favorite American filmmaker, suggests that the house will be full and will skew young for the single BAM screening.

“Tango & Cash” remains, Mr. Green admits, something of an attendance wild card. “It’s easy to say ‘Okay, we’re going to have a Kurosawa or Kieslowski retro,'” the director said. “But in terms of people who are going to retrospectives and are kind of digging back into movies of the past, I don’t know if ‘Tango & Cash’ is one people are primed for. I mean, I know me and my buddies will be there.”

Thursday through July 24 (30 Lafayette Ave., Fort Greene, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).