by Paul Cronin
This essay first appeared in the book “GEORGE STEVENS: INTERVIEWS”

At first glance, George Stevens appears to be the quintessential Hollywood director. But a closer look at his achievements shows him to be much more than just the creator of some of the smartest melodramas and screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s, and several of the most important and enduring studio dramas of postwar American cinema. As a leading producer/director of his era, Stevens repeatedly pushed against the Hollywood grain, and nearly twenty-five years after his death, his achievements remain largely unexplored.

A man of the West – he was born in Oakland, California – Stevens’ formal education was abandoned when he became an actor and later a stage manager in his parents’ West Coast touring stock theater company. (Though very intelligent and extremely well-read, Stevens’ spelling was notoriously bad.) At the point when it became clear that cinema was replacing live theater as the American public’s entertainment of choice, Landers and Georgie Stevens moved south to Los Angeles with their son. It was here, at the age of seventeen, where Stevens became an assistant cameraman at the Hal Roach Studios, cutting his teeth on a series of Westerns, many of which featured real cowboys. As James Silke explains in his introduction to his 1964 interview included in this volume, “The city boy went outdoors and learned to ride, rope and climb mountains. The young Stevens thrived on the new life and experiences that opened up for him to explore.”

Within three years Stevens, who trained under the tutelage of cinematographer Floyd Jackman, had started work on the first of dozens of classic Laurel and Hardy shorts as a cameraman and gagman (he also shot many of the Our Gang and Harry Langdon comedies). After having solved the problem of Stan Laurel’s blue eyes which did not adequately register on orthochromatic film stock (Stevens suggested panchromatic film be used instead), Roach decided to give the enterprising young man his first opportunity to direct. The result was the 1930 short “Ladies Last.” After moving to RKO in 1933, Stevens started work on a series of highly regarded light-hearted feature entertainments, including one of the first Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, and the classic adventure yarn “Gunga Din.”

By the time he went to war in 1943, Stevens also had the first pairing of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy under his belt with “Woman of the Year,” and the Cary Grant comedy The “Talk of the Town.” While in Europe, moving with the Allies from D-Day through to the battle for Berlin as the commander of a group of writers and cameramen (which included William Saroyan, Irwin Shaw, Ivan Moffat, who worked on the script “Giant,” and William Mellor, who would win Oscars shooting “A Place in the Sun” and “The Diary of Anne Frank”), Stevens used his own 16mm camera to shoot some unique color footage. This includes sequences at the liberation of Paris, the meeting of Russian and American troops at Germany’s river Elbe in April 1945, and the entry of American troops into Dachau concentration camp in southern Germany. As several of the conversations in this book suggest, Stevens’ wartime experiences had a profound effect on him. “It must have changed my outlook entirely,” he told James Silke in 1964. “Films were very much less important to me.”

Consequently, Stevens’ films underwent something of a sea change on his return from Europe. Between 1951 and 1956 He produced his “American Trilogy,” three films that are more sober and, as several critics have suggested, thought-provoking than the pre-war work. “A Place in the Sun” (which, writes Donald Richie, expresses the ‘attitude of the mature artist’), “Shane” (a film that Edward Countryman and Evonne von Heussen-Countryman note ‘considers violence where there is no law, both in terms of what a shooting does and as a historical problem in America’s development’), and “Giant” (the epic that, as critic Richard Schickel noted recently, caused many think differently about America’s racial problems) solidified Stevens’ international reputation as a director of quality American drama. His final films, which include “The Diary of Anne Frank,” certainly influenced by his experiences at Dachau, and “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” the epic re-telling of the life of Jesus, were a fitting end to a career during which he earned two Academy Awards for Best Director, and numerous other nominations and awards.

Stevens’ training at the hands of figures like Hal Roach meant that by the time he was given the opportunity to direct himself, he had a wealth of technical experience to draw from. Edgardo Cozarinsky writes in Richard Roud’s Cinema: A Critical Dictionary that Stevens “can be seen ‘doing something’ with every scene of his major films.” Yet nearly thirty years after his death, Stevens remains a relatively ignored figure in American film history. Even though many cinemagoers know his work, most would be hard pushed to name the director of “Shane” and “Giant.” One reason for this is perhaps due to a certain snobbishness on the part of film scholars. Unlike figures such as Nicholas Ray, Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, Stevens was never heralded as an auteur and paraded across the pages of French film magazines in the 1950s and 60s by the critics of that country. But in several crucial respects, Stevens can most definitely be considered as the ‘author’ (or at least, one of the authors) of his films.

A look at his body of work reveals Stevens’ filmmaking strategy over his forty year career: quality over quantity. Unlike many of his Hollywood contemporaries, some of whom produced a film a year (and sometimes even more than that), Stevens always spent lengthy periods of pre-production working with his writers on the screenplays of his films, a process that can be documented as early as Alice Adams in 1935. As Stevens tells Mary Anne Fisher in her 1963 interview, “For me it’s absolutely necessary to start from the very beginning. I can’t think of coming and contributing something anywhere along the line other than the very start… The ‘auteur’ concept is certainly the most desirable form of filmmaking, from my point of view.” Antonio Vellani, producer of “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” was present at numerous script conferences over a period of several years. For Vellani, Stevens “was primarily a writer, with an extraordinary control of the craft of screenwriting.” In fact, as Stevens’ interview at the American Film Institute with James Silke makes clear, on at least one film he was writing as the same time as shooting, injecting a vibrant improvisatory nature to some of his work (an influence, perhaps, from his work with Laurel and Hardy), though as Edward Countryman and Evonne von Heussen-Countryman make clear, this was “much more the product of knowing where he wanted to take the film before he started shooting than of simply making it up as he went along.”

As well as contributing to the writing process, Stevens often did extensive historical research for his films himself during pre-production. “I’ve always been of the opinion that a director should never touch a film without his having a basic knowledge of its contents,” he explains to William Kirschner in 1963. As such, as he goes on to explain, Stevens worked with a former member of the Dutch resistance during pre-production, and spent considerable time with Otto Frank, father of Anne, in the Amsterdam apartment where the Frank family hid from the Nazis, all to ensure that “The Diary of Anne Frank” was as true to reality as possible. When talking about “The Greatest Story Ever Told” with Bruce Petri in 1973, Stevens notes that “There is enormous responsibility involved in the subject matter. I wouldn’t have felt comfortable in going into the production of the film without the kind of study we did. Not only historic study, but more importantly Gospel studies. We had to approach our research with humility, reverence and a good deal of energy.” As a consequence, Stevens spent three years active researching before shooting a feet of film, including a lengthy visit to Israel in 1962. Stevens even hired a technical advisor for “Shane” who gave notes about everything from the costumes to the eating habits of the characters. “I believe that if you make a film properly today, it’ll be watched by people in fifty years time,” Stevens explains to Bruce Petri. “These pictures are around for a long while,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1955. “We want them to be good.”

More evidence for Stevens’ authorial status comes from the fact that he was vehement that the film director retain control of his work and be able to affect every element of a film’s production. Always anxious to assert his rights as a director, something he did no matter whose feathers were ruffled in the process, Stevens did not hesitate to ensure he had absolutely everything he needed in order to end up with precisely the film he wanted. Much to the chagrin of his producers, his technique – the result of what has been called his ‘laborious perfectionism’ – was to obtain coverage of a scene from every conceivable angle which – as William Mellor noted – meant that Stevens’ editing rooms were full of “about three times the usual amount of film.” But it also gave Stevens as many options as possible when editing, a process he was usually directly involved in.

Moreover, Stevens was one of the first major producer/directors in Hollywood. His contract with Liberty Films, the company he established in 1945 with fellow directors William Wyler and Frank Capra, gave him ‘full autonomy’ in his filmmaking, including ‘the right to edit, cut and score’ his work as he saw fit. As Gene D. Phillips explains, the eventual failure of Liberty Films (the company was disbanded after producing only one film, Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life) was due to Stevens, Wyler and Capra being too ahead of their time, and though the company prefigured the independent movement in American cinema that exploded in the 1960s, in the 1940s “it was still a bit too early for Hollywood to accept fully the concept of independent production companies, since the studio system would remain in its heyday until the early 1950s.” Of his friend, Fred Zinnemann has said: “To the young members of the Directors Guild who were idealists and who wanted to make good films, George was a sort of Pope, or certainly a Cardinal. He was one of the few people who could stand up to the front office. We all learned that we could have some measure of success if we didn’t give up. Nobody at the studios took film seriously as a creative medium. George was one of the people who instilled in the studios that film was more than that.”

At one point during production on Shane he was requested by the Production Code Adminstration to tone down the killing of Torrey (Elisha Cook Jr.). Stevens gave his audience no quarter by rigging Cook Jr. up to a block and pulley system, which meant that when hit by the bullet from Jack Wilson’s gun (played by Jack Palance), his entire body flies backwards into the mud. For Stevens, the scene played a crucial role within the story a whole, one intimately linked to what he talks to both Robert Hughes and Joe Hyams about in their conversations included here. “You know, the one thing I wanted to do with “Shane,”" he explains to Hughes, “was to show if you point a .45 at a man and pull the trigger, you destroy an upright figure.” Needless to say, Stevens ensured that the scene passed the censors’ eyes without alteration. And in a well publicized case, Steven sued Paramount and NBC in 1965 when the television station planned to screen A Place in the Sun with commercial breaks, and in what he saw as ‘a distorted, truncated and segmented version.’ NBC, argued Stevens at the time, had replaced the film’s dissolves with fades “at the expense of the artistic integrity, the mood, effect and continuity of the film…It’s like taking the cadenza out of concerto.” His court case became something of a cause celebre, and as The New York Times noted in May 1966, led a group of influential Hollywood directors ‘to launch a vigorous counterattack in their campaign to reduce or eliminate commercial interruptions from motion pictures shown on television.’

“I have brought this action,” explained Stevens (as quoted in Variety), “not only because of its significance as applied to the specific picture involved, but also because I think the issue is vital to all filmmakers and one of key importance to the general public. I believe that, with respect to a film which has been accorded the attention and acclaim of a vast audience, the film itself is entitled to receive, and the public to enjoy, the same integrity in its presentation which led to its original acceptance.” In the same statement, issued at the time Stevens filed his complaint, he makes explicit reference to the ‘dollar and cents conjecture’ that he discusses with Mary Ann Fisher in this volume. “A motion picture should be respected as being more than a tool for selling soap, toothpaste, deodorant, used cars, beer and the whole gamut of products advertised on television,” he told Fisher. “The audience too should be respected by being presented with a film as they remember it, and for those who have not seen it, as it was intended to be seen. Anything less is a degradation of the film and its audience.”

Though much of his filmography reads as a list of financial successes, Stevens was forever hoping to affect his audience’s emotions rather than his producers’ wallets. All of his films are emotionally honest, a reflection of Stevens’ own way of looking at the world. In George Stevens Jr.’s film about his father, Stevens recalls walking through the gates of Dachau. “When a poor man, hungry and unseeing because his eyesight is failing, grabs me and starts begging, I feel the Nazi, because I abhor him, I want him to keep his hands off me. And the reason I want him to keep his hands off me is because I see myself capable of arrogance and brutality to keep him off me. That’s a fierce thing, to discover within yourself that which you despise the most in others.” And in terms of the industry he so loved, regardless of his box-office security at the studios for much of his working life, Stevens sought real change. The Los Angeles Daily News reported in 1948 that “Stevens would like to see the motion picture industry set up a fund for the production of non-commercial films, which could be turned out one a year by different studios, and exhibited in small houses… It would offer an outlet for Hollywood’s own craftsmen who deplore the emphasis on commercialisation, and obviously it would please select audiences.”

Many of Hollywood’s most popular actors – including Irene Dunne, Katharine Hepburn, Alan Ladd, Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, Montgomery Clift and Ginger Rogers – all give some of their finest performances in George Stevens’ films. Said John Ford: “George Stevens can take an ordinary performance and edit it into a brilliant one, the way a good newspaperman trims a reporter’s story to make it read better.” As Rock Hudson, star of Giant, explains, “I asked a lot of people, ‘What’s it like to work with George Stevens?’ They all said, ‘Just make yourself a piece of putty, put yourself in his hands, and he’ll do it all.” Stevens also commanded great respect from many of his fellow filmmakers, who elected him twice as President of the Screen Directors Guild. It also speaks volumes that in the midst of problems during the filming of “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” the directors Jean Negulesco and David Lean (fresh from his international success “Lawrence of Arabia”) volunteered to shoot second-unit to help pull the production back on its feet.

Stevens’ body of work seems more coherent and impressive than if the films are taken individually. To look at the thirty-four features as a whole allows audiences to become aware of the themes that so pre-occupied Stevens throughout his career. Critic Gilbert Adair has written that at his most personal, “Stevens might be described as a chronicler of the pursuit of happiness, that craving for self-betterment.” To Donald Richie, one of the key ideas found in the films is that of “the outsider; the story of these pictures is how the outside reacts to his situation.” One can probably find a character in each of Stevens’ film who fit this mold, from Alice Adams to Anne Frank, from Shane to Jesus, from George Eastman in “A Place in the Sun” even perhaps to Jett Rink in “Giant.” But more than this, there is a profound humanism in his work.

To order a copy of George Stevens, please visit the American Masters Shop.

Director George Stevens influenced generations of filmmakers with such Academy Award-winning classics as “A Place in the Sun” and “Giant.” Now AMERICAN MASTERS presents the broadcast premiere of a moving tribute to the Hollywood great. Created by his son, George Jr., himself an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning writer, producer and director, “George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey”. Below are edited excerpts from an interview with the younger Stevens:

Q: What first got you interested in doing this film?

A: After my father died in 1975 someone asked me if I would write a book about him. I gave some thought to that, and then it suddenly occurred to me that he was a filmmaker, and I’m a filmmaker – I should make a film about him.

Q: What was your approach to making the film?

A: I wanted it to be a motion picture drama, not an informational documentary. I didn’t want it to be dry. I wanted it to move the audience, much in the way that my father’s work moved audiences.

Q: When you were making the film, did you learn anything surprising about your father?

A: I think the most interesting thing I learned was listening to a tape recording of my father talking to Kevin Brownlow, the film historian. He was recalling, as a child, being in the theater in San Francisco, night after night, when his mother and father were performing. He would sit under the stage and do his homework. And he remembered – he must have been nine years old – being under the stage and waiting for the moment when his father, above him, would climb the steps to the guillotine, playing Sydney Carton in “A Tale of Two Cities,” and make that speech: “It’s a far, far better thing that I do, than I’ve ever done before…” He then would hear the sound of the guillotine. Then silence from the audience. He said there was a moment, and then all hands would come together as one in applause. I realized that from an early age, he was schooled in sensitivity to the audience. His parents were doing Shakespeare and Dumas and Dickens and so as a boy, he was gaining this understanding of drama. I think that served him throughout his career.

Q: Among your father’s possessions, you discovered 16 mm color footage he and his crew shot during World War II. The film was shown for the first time publicly in “A Filmmaker’s Journey.” Please tell us about this discovery.

A: One day I asked the American Film Institute projectionist to screen a reel of this war film. As I sat alone in a small screening room vivid color images appeared on the screen. It was footage of a warship at sea on a blustery morning and I soon realized this was color film of D-Day – and that I was, at that moment, the first person to see that historic event in color except for those who were actually there on June 6, 1944. And then a figure walked into frame in helmet and battle gear and it was my father, age 39, on the deck of the HMS Belfast on his way to the greatest seaborne invasion in history. I was deeply moved and believed an audience would be moved as well.

Q: Do you have a personal favorite of your father’s films?

A: Oh, I tap dance around that. In a weak moment, I would say “Shane.” One summer when I was 17, I worked reading for my father. My first job was to break down Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy,” listing every scene and every incident, because he was about to make “A Place in the Sun” from it. I was also reading stuff for him that came to the studio. One was a little book by Jack Schaefer. I went one night with it in my hand and said to my father, “This is really a good story, you should read it.” He was in bed, reading, he put down his book, and said, “Well, why don’t you tell me the story?” So I walked around his bedroom, trying to tell him the story of “Shane.”

Q: Please describe your father’s archives.

A: He kept much of it in a storeroom on Ventura Boulevard – at Bekins Storage. I’d go out there occasionally with him, and it was just a room with stacked shelves and things up against the wall, and some of it very well organized. It was only after he died that I realized that that room contained the evidence of a man’s life. And it was the foundation for the film. It included scripts from Laurel and Hardy, photographs from his entire career, memorabilia from the war – bricks from Hitler’s fireplace, and a German machine gun. There was a tall, two-door filing cabinet. You open the door, and all of his awards were in that cabinet. He never had Oscars in his office, or Directors Guild awards. But they were all crowded together in this tall cabinet at Bekins Storage.

Q: You talked to so many incredible people while making this film – are there any highlights?

A: I had a wonderful conversation with Cary Grant. I sat at his house, and talked with him. He just loved my father, and spoke about him so winningly. I said, “Well, I’d like to come back and film this,” and he said, “Oh, no, I couldn’t do that.” I asked why, and he said, “Well, if I did it for George, I’d have to do it for Hitch, and the others. I will do a voice interview, but I won’t let you photograph me.” So he came to Washington one time. And we did a voice interview, which worked perfectly, because we used it over color footage of Gunga Din, him climbing up on the elephant and all. When we had the premiere of “A Filmmaker’s Journey” at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Hal Roach was there, Frank Capra was there, Jimmy Stewart, Cary, Jack Lemmon – all of Hollywood. Warren Beatty was the host and Cary sat in back of me. When it was over, there was a tremendous response, and Cary tapped me on the shoulder. He had tears in his eyes, and he said, “I should’ve let you photograph me.”

Q: Your father directed some of the greatest films in Hollywood history. Why didn’t he have the name recognition of some of his peers?

A: He was really the filmmaker’s filmmaker. In his day, John Huston, Fred Zinnemann, King Vidor, and Frank Capra looked to George as the one to be admired, both creatively and as a conscience of the Directors Guild. Today, directors ranging from Mike Nichols, Robert Towne, Warren Beatty, Michael Mann, Paul Thomas Anderson, oh gosh, so many say he was the model. Woody Allen cited “Shane” as the American film that interested him the most; Spielberg recently talked about the impact of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” and you know Steven’s mastery of telling story with sound and picture. So my father is highly regarded by the people who make films, and somehow less interesting to the auteur film critics. Mike Nichols said recently, “It’s much easier to do only one kind of thing. If you’re Hitchcock, that’s okay, you’re a master of suspense. If you do a lot of different things, you confuse and annoy people.” Some critics really like to be able to pigeonhole filmmakers, and it’s very hard to pigeonhole George Stevens. If you want to start with “A Place in the Sun,” “Shane” and “Giant,” what some call his American trilogy, I’m not sure anybody ever made three successive masterpieces like that. And he is the same man who made the great romantic comedies, the classic musical, “Swing Time,” and the quintessential adventure film, “Gunga Din.” What seems most notable about his career is that all his pictures are pictures of quality, and they have a kind of consistent humanity.

Q: What was the most important thing as a filmmaker that you learned from him?

A: The single most important lesson was respect for the audience. He never bought into the popular studio idea that the audience has the mentality of 14 year olds and should be talked down to.

One of the things I’ve admired about my father’s work, something I used as founder of the American Film Institute, is the idea of the test of time. Driving home from the Academy Awards, the year he won for “A Place in the Sun,” I was young and I was quite excited. He might have thought I was a little too excited. He looked over at me and said, “You know, we’ll have a better idea of what kind of a film this is in about 25 years.” I wanted the story of my father to be a film that lasts. So it’s particularly nice that 20 years after its making, A Filmmaker’s Journey has its place on American Masters.

Q: How did you come to narrate the documentary yourself?

A: Along the way, Orson Welles had offered to do anything, because he admired my father. John Huston and Warren Beatty were friends. I was thinking of one of those three to narrate the film. But Toni Vellani, a great colleague of mine, suggested I narrate it. I said, no, that’s kind of me putting myself in front of the story, but Toni persuaded me to at least try it. And I did, and it really made “A Filmmaker’s Journey” a very different picture. It became a son’s story about his father, rather than a more objective documentary.

Q: You’ve spent a great deal of your career dedicated to preserving and celebrating American cinema. Why do you think that’s so important?

A: I think that a country that doesn’t preserve its past and appreciate its creative legacy would be a hollow society. More simply put, what we call the golden age of Hollywood represents a most remarkable era of original creativity, and that work was in great risk of being lost. The preservation of it was tremendously important to American culture.

American Masters Online interviewed JAMES DEAN: SENSE MEMORIES filmmaker Gail Levin.

American Masters: What got you interested in this project? What drew you to James Dean?

Gail Levin: Interestingly enough, there is a sort of circular story to this film. There is a very famous photograph of James Dean taken in Times Square in 1955. He is walking in the rain, cigarette dangling from his lips, the beauty of 1950’s New York in varying shades of black and grey — foggy, misty and utterly compelling — in short a perfect picture… perfect composition, perfect subject, perfect era, perfect mood. I first saw this photograph at some point when I was in college and noticed that the photographer was Dennis Stock.

Instantaneously I fell completely in love with the whole thing — with photography first and foremost, with the time, with James Dean, etc… and, of course, I wanted to know Dennis Stock.

Years passed and in 2000 I had the opportunity to make the film MAKING THE MISFITS for Great Performances. That film involved the great photographers from the prestigious photo agency Magnum, of which Dennis is a member. At last I met him… and Dennis Stock has become my dear friend.

At the beginning of 2004 Dennis phoned me to tell me of the 50th anniversary of Dean’s death, September 30, 2005 and to suggest that much would be done to commemorate this anniversary and that we should make a film. And of course a centerpiece to this film is Dennis and that ever popular photograph of Dean in Times Square. T here is something to that symmetry which thrills me — that something/someone that so excited me in so innocent a way, has come full circle and become a subject that I am entrusted with in making a film.

Another aspect of the story of Dean I found quite compelling is that unlike others he may be compared with — Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, etc. — he managed to achieve legendary status with only three films, EAST OF EDEN, REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, and GIANT. And within essentially an 18 month period, with primary emphasis on the year 1955. He died at the age of 24, saw only one of those films released — ironically the film most identified with him, REBEL, had not yet been released at the time of his death — and within that very short trajectory Dean is still a force today. Marilyn Monroe, conversely, died at the age of 37 and had many more films to her credit, so Dean’s rise is unparalleled.

AM: Tell us about the title SENSE MEMORIES.

GL: I saw a book of essays by the German filmmaker Wim Wenders titled EMOTION PICTURES and it struck a very responsive chord in me with regard to James Dean and our film. This film is not a traditional biography with a traditional chronology… in fact it inhabits its own ethos, so to speak. It is interpretive, impressionistic, a “rashoman” of sorts, a collection of memories and moments — in the vein of “emotion pictures.” And the title is also meant to evoke the concept of the “method” in acting, drawing on memory, drawing on life experience to inform a part or a role. Though Dean was a member of the Actor’s Studio and at the time the youngest person ever invited in, he was really sort of the original method man — everything about him invoked his past, his own personal drama, his own angst. And so, this title, SENSE MEMORIES, means just that… something sensual, sensitive, even a bit sentimental and of its own sense.

AM: Did you learn anything that surprised you about Dean while making this film?

GL: I don’t know that anything surprised me, but certain things have impressed me…

Dean was on his way to becoming an extraordinary actor, this had somehow not been explored before. He was a gorgeous creature completely alluring to both men and women and, I felt, quite ahead of his time in his tone and his look. Though often compared to Brando and very propelled by Brando himself, his attraction, energy, even talent was really something quite different. He himself is rumored to have said that on one hand he embodied Brando saying “screw you,” and on the other hand he evoked another great actor of the time, Montgomery Clift, saying “help me…”

There is no doubt he was a combination of both — vulnerable and threatening, sweet and suspicious, hot and cool.

But he took his acting chops seriously and though twitchy and probably off-putting in certain instances, his dedication to his craft was unquestionable. And this aspect of Dean has been, to my mind, quite overlooked. It is also what makes him very deserving as a subject for AMERICAN MASTERS.

AM: Are there any interesting anecdotes about the filming or, interviewees?

GL: First, I must point out that every single person in this film had a direct link to Dean and knew him personally. And, although I don’t know that this is anecdotal, a very present subtext in this film is that it is in fact fifty, count them, fifty years later. And while Dean is frozen in time, the others are not. It was quite arresting, for example, to meet Corey Allen, the robust, defiant “Buzz” of REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, and to see him with Parkinson’s disease… others visibly suffered other ailments.

However, they were also all quite accomplished,and all represent the triumph and true magnificence of life. And all also represent the extraordinary range of people who surrounded Dean, long before any of them were yet who they would become — including Dean. Each consummate in their own way, everyone in this film is exceptional, and everyone went on to achieve a certain greatness.

I would also like to make the point, that everything is first hand memory and that rather than think of these people as interviewees, I would rather consider them the characters of this film, of Dean’s life… they played a certain role in his life and I would like to think of them the same way in this film. They populate this film as real personalities not merely as interviews. If this were a feature, for example, someone might play the part of Martin Landau… here Martin Landau is himself.

AM: Could you describe the production process, anything about how you chose to shoot the film?

GL: Actually this is a very deliberate film in terms of our process. I worked extremely closely with the director of photography, Dewald Aukema, to achieve a very specific look and feel for the film. It was our desire to make the look for the “characters” very bold. We wanted to essentially de-saturate the color — almost to black & white, but not quite — just a tinge of hue in the shots. This is also to stay close to the feeling of the black & white photographs and also to remain close to the era — 1955… because the entire film is set in that year we wanted to make it very evocative all round.

Then the film clips, the archive footage from Warner Bros, our original footage is in color… and again, this to separate the man, the intimate side of the story telling, from the art, the films, the acting.

AM: What do you think is Deans legacy? Is he as influential now as he ever was?

GL: Perhaps it is a certain androgyny which Dean evokes that makes him so modern, so palpable, so timeless. Aside from his work, his image, his sultry brooding, his hot/cool edge remains inimitable. He came at just the right moment… informed an age with an aura at exactly the point he was needed and then just as immediately was gone. This is very powerful! He is forever young, beautiful, pained, brilliant, impossible, endlessly seductive… and he delivered three exceptional performances, so that adds to it as well. All three of his films remain in the public consciousness, particularly REBEL and GIANT and he has that seeming casual-ness that is forever in fashion — that seemingly heedless courage that is somehow eternal.

AM: What do you want viewers to take away from the film?

GL: I hope the audience will visit Dean in a new way… for those who don’t know of him, my hope is that they will be enticed to want to know more… more than just that indelible image. And for those who think nothing new can be derived from this subject, I hope they will feel this film a fresh look at an old story — a view of Dean that actually achieves something else and reveals a real original, the rarest and most sacred of characteristics…