- On the set, the director is the captain of the ship, commanding general, the signal-calling quarterback, the waggon master, the father figure.

- William Wyler in a few words?

Well, to me, (chuckles) his daughter, he is one of the great directors of all time.

His films have won more awards than any other filmmaker by a long shot.

- "Ben Hur", William Wyler.

(audience applauding) - And the Academy Awards speak for themselves.

He won 12 nominations and three wins.

And of the actors that worked for him, 31 Oscar nominations came out of that in all four acting categories.

- Everyone from Bette Davis to Barbara Streisand towards the end swore to their last breath, "That man got the best out of me that I could have possibly achieved."

- Is well known for doing movies in every genre.

He'd make a Western, it would be an iconic Western.

He'd make a war film, and it would be the war film.

He'd make an epic, and it would be an epic that surpassed every other film in that genre.

- But because of that, I think he didn't have one, like, he wasn't a John Ford, just making Western.

- My father was very unhappy and upset with the critics of the "nouvelle vague", who felt they had discovered this great auteur theory, and they only valued directors who could do maybe one thing.

- So perhaps it's time for a reevaluation of William Wyler, because there is so much really stylish quality in his work and so much that's good.

(dramatic music) (dramatic music continues) (dramatic music continues) (gentle music) - My father was born in 1902 in Mulhouse.

At that time, it was called Mulhausen because it was part of Germany, and it was the area of Alsace-Lorraine, but right after World War I, it became part of France again.

- He always described his family as being French, not being German.

He said that they spoke French at home and they felt as if they were French.

- His father was actually Swiss-German from a town called Endingen, where there were many Wylers.

As Jews, they were often kicked out of certain cities, and then they would move across the border to Switzerland.

His father had a clothing store in Mulhouse, and of course, I think he wanted his sons to take over the store.

- So, he was sent to learn the business at a well-known store in Paris called Cent Mille Chemises, 100,000 Shirts.

But he got in trouble there for gambling and was sent home in disgrace.

- My grandmother, Melanie, didn't know what to do with Willie, who was clearly not interested in the family business and unhappy, so she contacted her distant cousin, Carl Laemmle.

- [Narrator] Carl Laemmle, president of the Universal Pictures Corporation, one of the world's greatest producers.

- And Carl Laemmle was an amazing man who immigrated to America from Germany, started investing in the nickelodeons around the turn of the century, and created Universal Studios, and was really a pioneer of the movie business.

And he ran Universal Studios, which existed both in New York and in Los Angeles.

(upbeat music) - He used to come back every summer to Europe, because he felt also that young men in Europe, Jewish men, had no future there, and he would bring them back to the United States, and he would pay their way over, and then he would deduct a certain amount of money every week from their salaries, and they would start working for him.

- He said, "How would you like to come to America?"

I was thunderstruck, because at those days, it was like making a trip to the moon.

(dramatic music) - [Melanie] When he came to the United States, he brought his violin and a pair of skis.

He never imagined himself going to America.

(dramatic music continues) (dramatic music continues) - So he went to work for Universal in New York.

He was carrying cans of film around town from one movie cinema to another.

And after a year or so, he realised that the real fun was in Los Angeles, and once again, Uncle Carl paid his way and gave him a job, and again, he paid him back $5 a week.

- [Melanie] He came to Los Angeles and, again, started sweeping floors and, you know, he was the assistant to this and the assistant to that.

And in those days, that's how you learned the film industry.

You became the assistant to the editor or the assistant to the cameraman, the assistant to the makeup person, until you were given a two reel Western to shoot.

(dramatic music continues) - He's not being given the opportunity to create, he's being given the opportunity to do his job.

He learned his craft in silent movies the way a working man learns his craft.

That is to say he was not directing great stars or great projects, he was doing, for instance, you know, 20, maybe, little two reel Westerns.

I mean, that's mastering the basics.

It's a kind of film school thing.

- At the time, pretty much one Universal Picture Western looked pretty much like another.

They were pretty interchangeable.

And quite frankly, it's hard to tell one of Wyler's from someone else's.

And even William Wyler admitted this.

Years later, he said, "There's only so many ways that you can film someone getting on a horse."

- It was very daring at that point to manage a location shoot with everything that you had to face down out in the Mojave, back in that era of Hollywood.

So, it demonstrated to the brass that he could be a kind of a managerial dynamo.

It got him to the next level of him being given the more coveted projects.

- Hey, wait a minute, where are you going?

- Well, I'll tell you, sweetheart.

I think I'm going over to rob the bank.

- He comes into sound film.

I believe that sound made him.

I think that sound, being able to add the dialogue, have the acting performances, that's where he comes into his own, as you see, say, in a movie like "Counsellor at Law", which is an excellent film.

- When Barrymore and William Wyler worked together, Barrymore was still one of the biggest stars in the world.

He was a slightly faded star because he already had the drinking problems that would plague him for the rest of his career.

It was very difficult for John Barrymore to remember his dialogue, and it was difficult to get him from shaking, physically shaking on camera.

And so Wyler had a very difficult time in his first experience with a star.

- "Hastily and happily."

Get that right out and send it by a messenger in a taxi cab.

Wait a minute!

Get Charlie McFadden to take it.

He can help Mrs.

Simon off the boat and with her luggage.

(door slams) - He did say that the fact that he did a good job with John Barrymore, who was known as difficult actor, that definitely raised his profile in the industry.

(gentle music) - Willie Wyler is a great director.

He's out shooting films, he's directing people, he's working all the time, but he's playing around.

He's got a motorcycle, he's driving from Downtown LA to Universal Studios.

Don't you think that there were many relationships with all the actresses?

(upbeat music) - So in 1935, my father made a movie called "The Good Fairy", and my father, um, loved women.

(laughs) He worked with a number of women, Margaret Sullavan included, from "The Good Fairy", who were very strong-willed, who had their own opinions, and they would fight a lot on the set, but obviously, a relationship developed, and Margaret Sullavan became his first wife.

- I am his good fairy.

- Over the long term, they didn't get along.

She wasn't ready to have children and have a family, and he wanted children and a family, so I think that's what the end of their marriage was.

- "Dodsworth" is a really interesting film, because this is around the time that Wyler and Margaret Sullavan, their marriage was dissolving.

I think that tends to emerge in this particular work.

- Will you get your divorce here?

- Yes, I suppose so.

- "Dodsworth" was a very unusual product for its time, and it was a big deal for Goldwyn to hire William Wyler to direct that picture.

(upbeat music) Samuel Goldwyn was Hollywood's most prestigious and most powerful independent producers.

The independents, like Goldwyn, could produce quality films because they weren't working on an assembly line.

- When my father got together with Sam Goldwyn, he certainly felt that that gave him the opportunity to make really good movies instead of the sort of B movies that he was making at Universal.

- Both of these men wanted quality, and both of these men wanted success.

And I think that perhaps that is how people see him, as a representation of a prestige film by Hollywood, because a lot of his films are adaptations of plays or novels, which in his day, was considered to be the top of things, the aspiration of Hollywood, to be taken seriously and to show that Hollywood could be as important as a novel or a play.

(gentle music) - Preston, I wanna leave.

- Well, we haven't danced yet.

Shall we?

- No.

- In 1937, "Jezebel" goes into production.

Now, this is a high watermark for Bette Davis.

She is directed to an Oscar win by Wyler.

And really, the legend that we know as Bette Davis was truly born when "Jezebel" was released.

(upbeat music) She's luminous in "Jezebel".

Wyler's camera loves Bette Davis.

He doesn't just shoot Bette Davis, he loves Bette Davis with his camera.

It's in every pixel, it's in every grain speck in every shot of that film.

And when I say Wyler loved Bette Davis with his camera, it wasn't just his camera, he loved Bette Davis.

- They eventually had a brief affair, apparently.

But apparently, a lot of the dialogue that Henry Fonda was supposed to have was actually handled off set by Wyler.

And so when you see Bette Davis, with her eyes sparkling and flashing, delivering this flirtatious dialogue to Henry Fonda, it was actually to her director, it was actually to William Wyler.

- Pres, I'm kneeling to you.

- Julie, don't.

- Wyler and Davis were a doomed couple.

It was a doomed romance from the very beginning.

But it says something for him, and it says something to her as well, that they continued to respect each other and they continued to work together.

Bette Davis said that Wyler made her a far better actress than she ever would've been.

And a compliment from Bette Davis of all people is... (chuckles) That's pretty rarefied.

It didn't happen very often.

She felt like most of her directors were fools.

- Now, Ti Bat, don't stand there with your eyes bulging out like that.

- Her famous entrance in "Jezebel", when she takes her riding whip and flips the bottom of her cape over her shoulder, which is a glorious entrance, a real movie star entrance, Wyler made her do over 40 times.

He reduced her to tears.

But the moment is spectacular, and Bette Davis recognised that when she saw the dailies.

(gentle music) - Willie, as Dad called him, was called Willie 40 Takes.

Dad said he rarely did that many takes.

He said rarely did more than 15 or 20.

And sometimes he wouldn't give you any direction.

He would just say, "Okay, let's go again.

One more."

And you'd say, "Well, what do you want different?"

And he would just say, "Better.

I want it better."

- Wyler had great taste.

He knew what he wanted.

But he did have trouble oftentimes expressing it.

You know, he was not a method actor's director.

He didn't give them a motivation.

- I want the actors to be thinking.

I don't want just obedience.

Of course, if we disagree on something, then it's gotta go my way.

- [Interviewer] That's right, that's right.

- But they're the ones have to do it.

They're the ones have to put themselves into the skin of another person.

They are the ones have to do the performance.

I can help them, but I can't do it for them.

- [Interviewer] Yeah.

- Actors were both scared of working with him and very happy to work with him.

As Bette Davis once said, "If Willie Wyler asked me to jump into a river, I would, because he would've had a reason to do it."

(gentle music) - In 1940, Wyler gives us a film called "The Letter", and you can kind of see the early workings of the visual style that would become synonymous with Wyler, even from the opening shot.

(gentle music) - The opening of "The Letter" is a continuous pan shot, which goes from a rubber tree dripping rubber into a pail.

You see shots of the house of the owner of the plantation, you know, in the background.

And you see shots of rubber workers on this plantation sleeping in hammocks.

Some of them are socialising.

And you are lured into the slowness of the pan.

And all of a sudden, bang, you hear this gunshot.

(gunshot bangs) And again, Bette Davis, like she makes in "Jezebel", makes this great entrance.

She walks out of the house and fires bullet after bullet after bullet into her lover.

- "Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang."

(gunshots banging) It's just a spectacular opening.

It's totally wordless, and it hooks you.

You cannot leave that film from that moment on.

(workers yelling) He has a very clear understanding of space, he has a very clear understanding of composition and the frame at the relationship of all these things, and of where he really wants to place his actors.

It's what makes him a great director.

It's a very high quality work.

(gentle music) - It's virtuoso filmmaking at its finest.

And you have to look at it and wonder why Wyler didn't get more credit for that as a director.

If Hitchcock had directed that scene or if Orson Welles had directed that scene, they'd still be studying and they'd still be talking about it in film school.

(gentle music) - When I met Talli, she was a young actress under contract to David Selznick, and was one of those who was testing hopefully for the part of Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone with the Wind".

But I was lucky.

She didn't get the part.

(audience laughing) She got me instead.

- They met and they got married after three weeks.

They only knew each other three weeks when they got married.

So it was quite a whirlwind romance, and turned out to be a great marriage.

She married my father, who wanted a family, and got her pregnant with me immediately, and she didn't work a lot after that.

She mostly had children and took care of the family.

But she was very smart, and ultimately, she had a very good place in Hollywood, because everybody knew that my father, English was his third language.

He read slowly, and he always had a pile of scripts to read, and she became his reader, and everybody knew that she needed to like the script or he wasn't gonna see it, and that gave her a certain position.

- The language that's spoken at home was only English, except when my parents didn't want any of their children to understand what they were saying, and then they would speak French.

So, we all then wanted to learn French because of that.

- I learned French and not German.

My father was not... Because of the war, I think he really didn't want us to learn German.

(dramatic music) - Wyler wasn't defined by his Jewishness, but as World War II approached, it became more and more something he thought about.

(supporters chanting in German) No educated person, no cultured person, no person operating in Hollywood in the 1930s could be unaware of the rise of Hitler and its impact on both the world and on Hollywood.

Number of exiles would start coming over, escaping what they knew was going to be a plague of violence and destruction.

And Wyler certainly was kept abreast of developments through his connections with the family that remained in his hometown, and he was concerned about their safety.

- The point, say, of 1940, Americans were isolationists, really.

They were like, "No, we're not going over there again.

We just got out of there.

We had World War I. That's enough for us.

Keep out of that."

So when it came time to do "Mrs.

Miniver", which was a charming little novel about a British housewife, really, he wanted to bring it into a bigger situation and make it more about what was really going on in the world and what was going to happen.

(siren wailing) (shelter rumbling) - You know, many people will say, "Mrs.

Miniver", it's a propaganda film.

He wanted the United States to get into the war on behalf of France and England.

- [Steven] There was a very gripping scene in the movie where a German paratrooper corners Mrs.

Miniver in her kitchen and tries to attack her.

- Move or make noise, I shoot.

- And you keep thinking that possibly he's gonna turn out to have a heart of gold after all, but he doesn't, he turns out to be just even more horrible than you might imagine than he was, which was very brave at the time.

- We will bomb your cities, like Barcelona, Warsaw, Narvik, Rotterdam.

Rotterdam we destroy in two hours.

- Louis B. Mayer, like many of his fellow studio heads who were still doing business with Germany all the way up to the attack on Pearl Harbour, wanted Wyler to tone it down.

- And Wyler refused.

He said, "Maybe if we had six or seven Germans in the movie, I could make one of them sympathetic, but we've got one, we've got one German to represent the entire country, and I'm not gonna make him a nice guy."

- And we will do the same thing here.

(soldier yelling in German) - Germany was the second largest film market, and crucial for the studios to run their business, or so they thought.

In fact, the Germans had approval on many of the scripts in Hollywood at the time.

- It's ironic that studios, that were almost without exception run by, now, Jewish American, in some cases, emigres, would be so concerned about their business with Nazi Germany, but that was the sad reality.

And "Mrs.

Miniver" was one of the first films that a major studio put out that took sides, and it was foursquare against Nazism.

- Well, at the end of the movie, the preacher makes the very famous speech, which Wyler wrote, by the way, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour.

- This is the people's war.

It is our war.

We are the fighters.

Fight it, then.

Fight it with all that is in us.

And may God defend the right.

- [Gabriel] And the speech was reprinted in Look Magazine and distributed all over the United States.

- It may be an apocryphal story, but it's said that Winston Churchill sent a telegram to the studios, saying that the effectiveness of "Mrs.

Miniver", and especially that closing sermon, was equal to 100 battleships.

(engines buzzing) (explosion booms) - Shortly after the smoke had cleared over Pearl Harbour, Hollywood, like the rest of the United States, rallied, and something called the First Motion Picture Unit was the consequence, which was basically a conglomerate made up of all the studios and the greatest talent that they could offer.

(trumpet sounding) - [Narrator] They are men of all crafts.

Writers, directors, cutters, electricians, cameramen, sound recorders.

- Directors such as Frank Capra, John Ford, John Houston, and William Wyler all volunteered their services for the war.

They were too old for service, but they wanted to contribute, as did so many Americans.

So, Hollywood went to war, and William Wyler went to war with Hollywood.

- [Narrator] Here are produced training, operational, and inspirational films, films which graphically illustrate what we're fighting for, what we're fighting against, and what we're fighting with.

- All right, quiet, please, here we go.

All right, rolling.

(bell ringing) - He considered himself an American citizen by then.

This was his country, and his country was in danger, as was the country that he'd grown up in, France, and so of course he wanted to be involved.

- My mother always said that my father was wild to get into the war, because he felt so personal about it, being Jewish, being French, Alsatian.

He felt very strongly that he wanted to have some part of it.

- The problem my father had was that, you know, he was 39 years old and a famous Jewish-French director.

No one wanted to send him anywhere near the front in Europe in case he got hurt or captured.

And he finally found a general in the Air Force and said, "I'm not sure where you're going, General, but wherever you're going, I'd like to go there and make a movie about it," and that's how he was sent to England to make a story about the Eighth Air Force.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] This is a battlefront, a battlefront like no other in the long history of mankind's wars.

This is an air front.

(dramatic music) - And he became an officer in the Eighth Air Force, and they gave him a very high ranking, because since he was making movies, they said, "Nobody's gonna talk to you if you're a private."

- Wyler made several documentaries literally under fire.

The best of these movies is a picture called "The Memphis Belle", which had a certain tension in that it was about the 24th mission of an actual B-17 squad flying to drop bombs over Germany.

And after 25 missions, if you could complete 25 missions, you would be removed from the front line.

So the people that were onboard this plane knew that if they survived one more mission, then they'd be taken out of harm's way.

And so Wyler took his cameras up inside the planes and filmed amazing battle sequences.

He ended up putting himself in danger and his crew in danger several times.

- [Narrator] Fighters at six o'clock.

- [Steven] And he faced genuine bullets, as opposed to backlot bullets, raining down upon him.

(gun firing) There's some astonishing stuff in these films that is not even matched by movies that replicated that sort of thing using special effects.

You have to wonder how he got all the coverage he was able to get.

(explosion booms) - [Narrator] They've hit this fort, but he keeps on his bombing run.

- He has several scenes of planes falling out of the sky and shooting at each other, where he seemed to get it from multiple angles, which makes you think that it was probably taken over several different engagements.

(explosion booming) - [Operator] B-17 out of control at three o'clock.

- One of the most powerful sequences in "The Memphis Belle," and a sequence that Steven Spielberg has said is one of the most powerful things he's ever seen in any film, is footage of a B-17 in a death spiral.

It's going down, and you see it spiral out of control.

And one by one, you see the crew who could escape.

- [Pilot] Watch out for fighters.

- [Erik] And I believe there's a lot less parachutes opening than men in that plane.

- [Pilot] Men still that in that B-17.

- Come on.

- The rest of you guys get outta there.

- Three more chutes.

(gentle music) - When "Memphis Belle" was finally released, the war office found the film too realistic.

How about that for a documentary, right?

(laughs) All the events are captured as they happen, so, you know, for the war office to say too real, yeah, war is too real.

- "The Memphis Belle" premiered in April 15th of 1944, a few months before the D-Day landing.

On the very day of the premiere, Wyler was in Washington, waiting to get a taxi cab.

- When the doorman said something antisemitic about somebody, and Daddy slugged him.

- Wyler didn't realise a military officer punching a civilian was a court martial offence.

And Wyler never did get the medal he deserved for his courage under fire.

- Well, he definitely had a temper.

And I think if you've been risking your life for your countrymen, and then you hear an antisemitic slur, damn right, took a slug at the guy.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] June 4th, 1944.

Rome was free, liberated after 21 years of fascist rule.

- Wyler was not gonna be kept away from the war and from the front lines.

(gentle music) Wyler got around.

He managed to be in Rome during the liberation of Rome.

He was in Paris.

He was all over occupied and soon to be unoccupied Europe in the closing months of World War II.

He wanted to be there.

He wanted to see for himself.

- My father asked the commanding officer if he could go to Mulhouse, which was just about to be liberated, and the commanding officer said he didn't know anything about it, wink, wink.

"Take the Jeep and a driver and, you know, be back after, you know, a week or so."

So, my father took his driver, who happened to be Ernest Hemingway's brother, and they arrived in Mulhouse, I think, the day or two after it was liberated, just after it was liberated.

(gentle music) And he went around the city and saw the damage and looked for his friends, most of which were gone because they've been sent to the camps.

(gentle music continues) On one hand, he was devastated.

On the other hand, he did say that he pulled into the square and hopped out of a Jeep, and a Mulhousien came up to greet him, and he responded to them in perfect dialect.

And the Mulhousien said, "Oh my God, the Americans are so smart to send a French speaker who knows the language."

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] This picture was photographed in combat zones by cameramen of the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces.

- He went back to do another documentary, this time on P-47 Thunderbolts that were engaged in air to ground warfare in Italy.

The problem with the movie about the P-47 Thunderbolts, this is a single seater fighter.

Wyler mounted cameras, colour cameras, under the wings of some of these planes, and gave the pilots on-off switches to photograph what they were doing.

And Wyler enlisted the help of a twin engine bomber called the B-25, which is yet another war plane, to get the footage he needed, the aerial footage, that he needed.

And in the course of these missions, 30,000 feet without pressurisation, it began to impact his hearing.

(engine buzzing) - He passed out in the plane when his hearing was damaged because it blew out the nerve in his head on one side, and damaged hearing on the other.

When he woke up, he was completely deaf.

- And he never knew if he would get his hearing back, and he was very distraught.

He didn't know if he was ever gonna work again.

- And it took him a long time before he then discovered he could work, and he discovered a method that he could work was he would sit under the camera, which is where he'd like to sit, and he would plug into the sound man's microphones, and that's how he could direct from then on.

(gentle music) - I think World War II definitely changed my father, because number one, he lost his hearing, and that was really the tragedy of his life.

You know, my father was very outgoing, very friendly, and, you know, he'd walk into the room and people would say, "Oh, Willie," you know, "Willie's here."

Once he lost his hearing and he couldn't hear, it was very isolating for him, and he had to get used to that.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) - So the first movie he does after World War II is about three veterans returning, called "The Best Years of Our Lives".

The three veterans represent three different sides of him.

You have the banker coming back to a bourgeois existence and a comfortable existence, just like he's a director coming back.

(doorbell buzzing) You have the guy with hooks who had his hands blown off, just like my father, whose hearing is completely gone.

And then you have the guy who looks like he's actually okay, but he has PTSD from flying in the planes.

- Gadorsky!

- Wake up.

- She's burning up!

Get out!

Get out!

- Fred, Fred, wake up!

Wake up!

- [David] And my father, I believe, had some PTSD from what he went through.

- Go back to sleep.

- [David] And that was his most personal film, the film that he cared about the most of all of his films.

- And in this case, I knew my subject, I learned it the hard way.

And somehow, when you have, when you get personally involved in the story, something gets on the screen that makes it human and real.

(gentle music) - He knew exactly what it was like to come home from the war terribly altered and try to, you know, fit in and renew your life again.

- And if you watch "The Best Years of Our Lives", there's a moment where the banker returns home and sees his wife in the apartment, and they run to each other and hug.

And that's exactly what my father and mother did when they met each other in the hotel in Chicago.

- So, "The Best Years of Our Lives" was an awards darling that year.

It won all the major Oscars.

Best Picture, Best Director, and a special Oscar for Harold Russell.

(gentle music) - Harold Russell, who was an amateur, who was not an actor, whose hands had been blown off accidentally in the United States, some dynamite went off that he was handling on a military base, and Harold Russell pulled it off in a magnificent performance that, again, is one of the great performances in American film.

- Boy, it sure is great to be going home.

Here you go, sailor.

- Sign on the dotted... - [Daniel] The first moment in the film is him being asked to sign for something, and this is the first time that we see Harold Russell's hooks, which was likely quite shocking to the audiences of 1946.

- This is a bold move and a transgressional move at the time in Hollywood.

(gentle music) But for a film that one could argue was an experimental art house film, a naturalistic, not unlike the films of Rossellini or some of the European directors who were working very authentically, "Best Years of our Lives" hit the magic.

- And it was the highest grossing American film, just Behind "Gone with the Wind", I believe, for many years.

After that, he struck out as an independent producer.

He worked at all the studios.

And he was instrumental in cherry picking his own projects.

(gentle music) - When the movie industry changed and he became more successful and could produce his own movies, yes, then he became a producer.

But I don't think he was ever... He was never that involved in it.

I mean, he didn't love producing.

You know, directing, that was his thing.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] His warmth of human understanding, his sure sense of dramatic values have made William Wyler's name on a motion picture the guarantee of great and enduring entertainment.

- So the next movie my father did was "Roman Holiday", which he thought was gonna be a fun thing, and a fun reason, and a reason to get out of Los Angeles, because it was the time of McCarthy, and things were very dark here.

There was a blacklist.

A lot of people had lost their jobs.

A lot of people had been fired.

A lot of people were scared.

And the buzz from the conservatives in the right wing was that anyone who made "The Best Years of our Lives" was a communist.

Because how could you show our soldiers being vulnerable?

How could you show our soldiers being weak?

You must be a communist in that case.

So my father then decided maybe it's a great idea to go do a movie out in Europe for a year.

And that's one of the reasons that he went to Rome for "Roman Holiday".

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] She's a princess, she's beautiful, and confidentially, she's a pixie.

(upbeat music continues) - "Roman Holiday" is very much a fairytale, as well as being a, you know, kind of a classic romantic comedy.

- And my father always had a great sense of humour and loved telling stories to laugh.

And if you look at his movies, whether it's Gregory Peck leading Audrey Hepburn to his apartment because she's so out of it on whatever drugs on "Roman Holiday", and he's trying just to get her to go to sleep, and she walks down a different path by mistake, and he's gotta pull her back, you know, that little bit, that little funny bit, that was him.

- There's an elegance and an eloquence about "Roman Holiday" that is missing from a lot of the efforts that tried to copycat it.

(Ann laughing) I just have these images in my mind, these indelible images.

The image of Audrey on the Vespa is also iconic.

- My father loved to work with young actresses.

He discovered a few people.

Of course, the biggest discovery probably is Audrey Hepburn.

He had heard about her, and she was in London, I think, and she asked somebody to shoot a test for her.

- You have to think that this is the first time that the people watching that screen test, the executives at Paramount and Wyler, would've seen Audrey Hepburn.

And yet they all used the same phrase, they all said, "She's enchanting."

(upbeat music) She got the movie.

She enchanted Paramount's brass.

She enchanted Wyler.

And then of course, she enchanted the audience, and she won an Academy Award.

- Ladies and gentlemen, in New York City, Miss Audrey Hepburn in "Roman Holiday".

(audience applauding) (upbeat music) - The same night that Audrey Hepburn picked up her Academy Award, "Roman Holiday" also won an Oscar for its screenplay.

Dalton Trumbo was actually the writer, but he'd been blacklisted.

- [Interviewer] Are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

- I believe I have the right to be confronted with any evidence which supports this question.

(gavel banging) - And so he had to use a pseudonym, and so he wasn't there to pick it up at the time.

But of course, William Wyler knew the truth.

William Wyler was one of the founders of the Committee for the First Amendment.

And what they did was very brave at the time, 'cause they all risked not working in Hollywood again and getting blacklisted or getting graylisted.

- Yes, it was courageous.

Wyler did support the Hollywood Ten and contributed money to their defence funds, and helped support some of the Hollywood Ten's families.

- A lot of the Wyler heroes of this era are what we'd say non-combatants, or pacifists, often, who are pushed into action.

Beginning with "The Desperate Hours", going into "Friendly Persuasion", and then going into "The Big Country", and then winding up at "Ben Hur".

(dramatic music) (dramatic music continues) - "Ben Hur" was William Wyler's idea.

I think "Ben Hur" was kind of hatched directly by God.

I don't know if it was created by a human being, even a human being as powerful as William Wyler.

The truth is, Wyler had actually been, I think, a second unit director on the original "Ben Hur" in the 1920s, so it's kind of ironic that he came around and ended up directing the big budget remake in the late 1950s.

(dramatic music) - "Ben Hur" was the most expensive film of its time ever.

It was budgeted first at 7 million, then at 9, then 10, then 12, then 15.

And they started filming, I believe, in April of 1958, and didn't finish until January of 1959.

That's just the filming.

That was the kind of risk that MGM was willing to take.

And everybody knew if the film failed, the studio would probably go bankrupt.

- There was a market for spectacle at that point in time in Hollywood history.

They were putting a lot of the money into... In order to lure people back into the theatres after television had arrived and cut into their profit lines.

(dramatic music) - The sets were spectacular.

The city of ancient Rome was recreated on acres of the lot by the Cinecitta Studios in Italy.

Everything about "Ben Hur" was gigantic.

But despite the fact that it was gigantic, the story was very intimate.

And that's what made it successful in large part, was the story and the characters.

You don't get that usually in a, you know, in most epic movies.

- I'm against violence.

Everyone knows this.

I've spoken against it.

I shall do so again.

- Then we're agreed.

Now, when can I come to see your family?

(gentle music) - Our entire family moved to Rome, and when we lived in Italy, we would be on the set, you know, quite a bit, to just sort of see, because it was exciting.

And I loved horses, so, in "Ben Hur", you know, there was a chance to ride horses, so I was very excited about that.

(dramatic music) (crowd cheering) - The logistics were astonishing.

The chariot race alone took four months to plan and three months to shoot.

- The Roman Forum for the chariot race was bigger than, you know, if you put 100 football fields together back to back to back to back.

(crowd cheering) (riders yelling) - There was no CG, no computer graphics in those days.

Most of it's real time, real actors, real stuntmen, real horses, real chariots.

It was dangerous.

There is a rumour that someone was killed.

It's not true.

(crowd cheering) My father's stunt man, Joe Canutt, who did double him for some of the scenes, was thrown out of the chariot in one scene.

He refused to tie himself in.

(crowd cheering) - "Ben Hur" proved that you could make this gigantic investment and hire someone with Wyler's skill, care, and precision, and it would likely pay off.

- On the set, the director is the captain of the ship, the commanding general, the signal-calling quarterback, the waggon master, the father figure.

- "Ben Hur" won 11 Academy Awards, including one, his third, for William Wyler, so it was a colossal success in every possible way, financially, artistically, and of course, personally, for William Wyler.

- For that confidence.

And to my fellow members of the Academy, for this, thank you.

(dramatic music) (audience applauding) - He made a great deal of money on it.

He was paid an enormous salary.

He got a percentage of the profits, which were enormous.

"Ben Hur" was one of the most successful American movies of its time.

But I think he also, there was a part of him that wanted to prove that he could make that kind of movie.

I think he found it a challenge.

I think that's one of the same reasons he made "Funny Girl".

♪ Are the luckiest ♪ ♪ People in the world ♪ - [Gabriel] He wanted to show that he could make musical, 'cause he never made a musical before.

- And so here was a musical, not only a good musical, but with this wonderful girl who hadn't been seen except on Broadway.

So, it was a chance to make Barbara Streisand's first movie.

- Hello, gorgeous.

- The musical was really on its way out at that point.

It was still a risk.

- Barbara Streisand.

(audience cheering) - [Daniel] And it was another hit, you know?

Big surprise.

- Oh.

Hello, gorgeous.

(audience laughing) - After "Funny Girl", he makes "The Liberation of L.B.

Jones", which is a much more honed in film.

(gentle music) - It's the most uncompromising American studio film about racism made in the United States up to that point.

And it was Wyler's first out and out financial flop.

- My father stopped directing movies after "The Liberation of L.B.

Jones".

He was older, and he started, was having lung problems from all the smoking.

- And he just couldn't imagine making a film without smoking, 'cause he'd been chain smoking for decades.

- He'd had a great career, he'd been working since he was 18, and he was ready for something else.

(gentle music) He was just an inveterate traveller.

He always wanted to go places and see new things.

And he and my mother would travel part of the year, and they would always go to Mulhouse if they were in Europe, and my mother would say, "Are we going to Mulhouse again?"

And my father said, "Yes, we're going to Mulhouse again."

(laughs) - In our travels, I'm never without my Super 8mm movie camera, complete with zoom lens and all the other innovations.

(audience laughing) It's a case of professional turned amateur.

(audience laughing and applauding) And you'll be surprised to hear that mostly, I make only one take.

(audience laughing and applauding) So by doing everything myself, I have at last become the complete and genuine auteur.

(audience laughing and applauding) - After he was retired, I don't think he had any nostalgia about making films again.

He came down to breakfast one morning and he said, "Oh my God, Talli, I had the worst dream.

I had such a nightmare."

And my mother said, "Willie, what's wrong?

What happened?"

And he said, "I dreamed I was working again."

(laughs) (dramatic music) (dramatic music continues) (dramatic music continues) (dramatic music continues) (dramatic music continues)