{"id":241330,"date":"2026-01-19T20:13:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-19T20:13:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/241330\/"},"modified":"2026-01-19T20:13:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-19T20:13:10","slug":"martin-scorsese-guillermo-del-toro-on-the-greatest-story-ever-told","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/241330\/","title":{"rendered":"Martin Scorsese, Guillermo del Toro on ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Saturday, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures<\/a> in Los Angeles presented the world premiere of a new 4K restoration of George Stevens<\/a>\u2018 \u201cThe Greatest Story Ever Told<\/a>\u201d (1965), one of the most ambitious and experimental of all Hollywood epics. Director Martin Scorsese<\/a>, whose Film Foundation<\/a> was instrumental in restoring the film (and whose \u201cThe Last Temptation of Christ\u201d is the only biblical epic that rivals \u201cThe Greatest Story\u201d in its audacity and complexity), provided a video introduction in which he celebrated Stevens\u2019 masterpiece as the summation of his work.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u200aThe film was shot in Ultra Panavision 70 with lenses that yielded an aspect ratio of 2.76 to 1, and it was breathtaking,\u201d Scorsese said. \u201cBut it wasn\u2019t just the size of the image, it was the imprint of the man behind the camera who knew how to fill that frame, how to compose it. And composer seems like the right word to describe George Stevens and the extraordinary level of artistry he reached at that point in his life and career.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"'It<\/a> \"Martin<\/a> <\/p>\n

Scorsese explained that when Stevens came back from World War II, his work took on a new sense of purpose and urgency in powerful works like \u201cA Place in the Sun,\u201d \u201cShane,\u201d \u201cGiant,\u201d and \u201cThe Diary of Anne Frank.\u201d \u201cHe began to pay very close attention to evil, to the greed and the hatred and the raw murderous violence that can overtake us all if we don\u2019t all pay attention,\u201d Scorsese said. \u201cThose pictures are grand cinematic canvases, but they\u2019re also urgent warnings to take care of our goodness and our love.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although Stevens was not a particularly religious man, he saw in Jesus Christ a way to explore those themes on their grandest scale. \u201c\u2018The Greatest Story Ever Told\u2019 is the summation,\u201d Scorsese said. \u201cIt\u2019s the final movement of Stevens\u2019 multi-picture symphony. Stevens chose to enact the story on a scale of mythic grandeur and timeless immensity. This picture was years in the making at a cast of thousands.\u201d It also felt of a piece with Stevens\u2019 Westerns thanks to the unusual choices the director made when it came to locations.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was set against the backdrop of the American West in locations that we normally associate with Westerns,\u201d Scorsese said. \u201cDeath Valley, Moab, Utah, Pyramid Lake in Nevada. It\u2019s an extraordinary idea and it was really controversial because most biblical epics up to that time been shot somewhere near the Middle East or in the Middle East.\u201d Scorsese noted that the film was part of a trend that included Nicolas Ray\u2019s \u201cKing of Kings\u201d and Pier Paolo Pasolini\u2019s \u201cThe Gospel According to St. Matthew\u201d that brought a new immediacy to the story of Jesus Christ. \u201cThey turned away from the conventions of the period.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scorsese added that the production encountered \u201cone calamity after another\u201d and ultimately didn\u2019t fully realize Stevens\u2019 vision. \u201c\u200aNevertheless, Stevens put everything he had into the telling of the story of Jesus and you could feel it from the first frame to the last,\u201d Scorsese said. \u201cHe wanted to embody the tragedy and the redemption of humanity on every level. In a way, his ambitions were so grand that it wasn\u2019t possible to realize them fully, but the sheer intensity and artistry of the picture is moving all on its own. There\u2019s nothing else quite like it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"GREATEST\u2018The Greatest Story Ever Told\u2019Courtesy Everett Collection<\/p>\n

Stevens\u2019 son, filmmaker George Stevens Jr., supervised the Film Foundation\u2019s restoration and appeared in person at the Academy Museum<\/a> to introduce Guillermo del Toro, a lifelong Stevens enthusiast and Film Foundation board member who was present to deliver a 20-minute lecture on \u201cThe Greatest Story Ever Told\u201d before the film. As a Catholic raised in Mexico, del Toro estimated that he had seen \u201cThe Greatest Story\u201d over 20 times \u2014 and he sat with the audience in the Academy Museum to watch it again in its exquisite new restoration.<\/p>\n

Del Toro provided rich historical context for the film, describing Stevens\u2019 path through several epochs of filmmaking. \u201cHe lived through every era of cinema,\u201d del Toro said before exploring Stevens\u2019 innovations during the silent period, his wartime documentary work, his seminal post-war American epics, and the influence he had on the New Hollywood. This last topic was where del Toro\u2019s lecture was most revelatory, as he explained why the perception of Stevens as a staid classical filmmaker is dead wrong, and that in fact Stevens was a modernist who influenced one of the most groundbreaking films of the 1960s, \u201cBonnie and Clyde.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to make the case today that this man influenced the New American Cinema,\u201d del Toro said. \u201cHe influenced Martin Ritt, Warren Beatty, Terrence Malick and many more.\u201d Del Toro gave the example of Warren Beatty studying the sound mix of \u201cShane\u201d and applying its principles to the climactic shoot-out in \u201cBonnie and Clyde.\u201d \u201cBeatty was the first man that noticed \u2018Shane\u2019 was a modern film by a modern master. Stevens insisted that the percussion, the brutality of a gunshot overpowers with its violence, and Beatty understands that this is a bold decision, a bold technique.\u201d<\/p>\n

In discussing \u201cThe Greatest Story Ever Told,\u201d del Toro insightfully drew parallels between Stevens\u2019 age and our own, both in terms of world politics and upheaval in the film industry. \u201c\u200aHis canvas became Ultra Panavision 70, with a spherical system that gave him extra space,\u201d del Toro said. \u201cWhen he shot this movie, there was a battle between TV and cinema \u2014 we\u2019re there again \u2014 and the battle was how to get people into theaters. One of the things was spectacle. The larger formats were getting people into theaters, but very few directors really knew how to use it and how to use it expressively.\u201d<\/p>\n

Del Toro added that Stevens used the vast potential of the Ultra Panavision 70 frame as a tool to examine his themes with sweep and intensity. \u201cYou can find out more about an artist by their art than by sharing space and time with them,\u201d del Toro said when explaining that \u201cThe Greatest Story Ever Told\u201d expressed Stevens\u2019 profoundly humanistic point of view. \u201cThis is a time and a generation that didn\u2019t signal virtue, they practiced it. They didn\u2019t tell you who they were, they demonstrated who they were.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"GREATEST\u2018The Greatest Story Ever Told\u2019Courtesy Everett Collection<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Greatest Story Ever Told\u201d represented a demonstration of all that Stevens had learned and felt about good and evil since liberating Dachau concentration camp during his time in the service, an experience that informed the film he made right before \u201cThe Greatest Story Ever Told,\u201d \u201cThe Diary of Anne Frank.\u201d \u201cOne of the questions he was trying to grapple with was that no one group crucified Jesus,\u201d del Toro said. \u201cWe all crucified Jesus. Stevens said there was no them, it was us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet for del Toro, what stands out about \u201cThe Greatest Story Ever Told\u201d and the rest of Stevens\u2019 body of work is its hopefulness and faith. \u201cHe realized that art and narrative have such a high calling to tell us what we are and who we are, and that compassion and decency are our superpowers,\u201d del Toro said. \u201cDon\u2019t let them lie to you that hatred is our superpower. It diminishes us, and Stevens understood this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stevens only made one film after \u201cThe Greatest Story Ever Told,\u201d the Warren Beatty vehicle \u201cThe Only Game in Town,\u201d which got made due to Beatty\u2019s reverence for the master director. \u201cWhat would George Stevens have done after this film if given another chance at the canvas he was grappling with?\u201d del Toro asked before closing his lecture with the memory of watching \u201cThe Greatest Story Ever Told.\u201d \u201cIf you grow up Mexican, every Easter you saw this movie. It\u2019s Saturday, but let\u2019s have Easter together.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Greatest Story Ever Told\u201d premiered at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, where Guillermo del Toro presented this year\u2019s \u201cGeorge Stevens Lecture on Directing\u201d\u2014 the museum\u2019s ongoing lecture series about the art of filmmaking. For information on future museum events, visit their website<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Saturday, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles presented the world premiere of a new…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":241331,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[71904,430,156,141901,141902,2793,111,139,69,141903],"class_list":{"0":"post-241330","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-academy-museum","9":"tag-celebrities","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-george-stevens","12":"tag-gullermo-del-toro","13":"tag-martin-scorsese","14":"tag-new-zealand","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nz","17":"tag-the-greatest-story-ever-told"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241330\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/241331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}