One of the best scenes in Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical film The Fablemans is David Lynch’s brilliant cameo as the "greatest director ever," John Ford. According to Spielberg, the events of the encounter are mostly accurate, which makes me love both John Ford and David Lynch just a little bit more. After asking Spielberg to point out the horizons on a couple of paintings, the story goes that Ford said, “When you're able to appreciate why it's at the top, why it's at the bottom, you might make a pretty good picture-maker…” Of course, Lynch’s language in the film was a bit more colorful.
My dad loved westerns, and since John Ford directed some of the best of them, I grew up watching films like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Stagecoach, and The Searchers. I think of all of Ford’s films that I’ve seen, The Searchers is my favorite. I love the way he uses long shots and wide lenses to convey scale and let the viewer absorb the landscape—several of the shots look like paintings.
The Searchers was the first major motion picture to have a dedicated BTS documentary attached to it.
If you’d like to dive a little deeper into the mythology of John Ford, there’s a terrific post on Cinephilia & Beyond that gathers together a number of essays, interviews (including Martin Scorsese talking about the first time he saw The Searchers), and documentaries with and about Ford and his career.