List custom field values in alphabetical order without repetition

Question

You could do a custom SQL query:

global $wpdb;

$query = "SELECT DISTINCT meta_value FROM $wpdb->postmeta WHERE meta_key = 'director' ORDER BY meta_value;";
$directors = $wpdb->get_results( $query );

foreach( $directors as $director ) :
    echo $director->meta_value;
endforeach;

one thing to note here though is that since you’re not querying the associated posts, you could get values that belong to unpublished posts, if that’s a concern.