The director Steven Spielberg called “a classic painter”
There are few names as synonymous with the entire fabric of cinema as Steven Spielberg, the undisputed master of the blockbuster. Not only is he the winner of three Academy Awards, two BAFTAs and the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award, but the Ohio-born director is also the most commercially successful director of all time.
Over the years, Spielberg has provided countless iconic cinematic moments, from the underwater terror of Jaws to the wonderment of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, from the awe-inspiring Jurassic Park to the harrowing nature of Shindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan. Quite simply, the legendary filmmaker has delivered time and time again.
Whenever Spielberg prepares to direct a movie, he has a method of getting ready by immersing himself in art. He often consults the work of painter Norman Rockwell, particularly his 1947 painting ‘Boy On High Dive’, but also makes sure to watch the movies of one of the all-time greats.
“I try to run a John Ford film, one or two before I start every movie,” Spielberg once told AFI. “Simply because he inspires me, and I’m very sensitive to the way he uses his camera to paint his pictures and the way he frames things.” Evidently, the visual nature of painting, capturing the scene, is of a vital nature to the art of directing a movie.
Continuing to explain the brilliance of Ford’s works, Spielberg added, “The way he stages and blocks his people, often keeping the camera static, while the people give the illusion there’s a lot more kinetic movement occurring when there’s not.”
For Spielberg, his predecessor director is himself a “classic painter” in the way he “celebrates the frame” rather than just “what happens inside it”. He went on to point out some of the films of Fords that he watches before directing a new project, naming The Searchers (“have to almost every time”), The Informer and Tobacco Road.
The director talked at length about Ford’s 1939 western Stagecoach, starring Claire Trevor and John Wayne in his breakthrough appearance. It tells of a group of strangers travelling on a stagecoach through a dangerous part of Apache territory, and Spielberg admires Ford’s use of nature.
“I really admire Stagecoach because, for one thing, it was John Ford’s first foray into Monument Valley, so he was starting to use landscape art to help to tell his story,” he said. “To create God’s Country and put little figures in a grand landscape, and he began to bring nature into his films. More than any of his silent movies, this was where he began to use nature as a character in his pictures.”
