(Credits; Far Out / Harald Krichel / Martin Kraft)
Tue 28 October 2025 19:45, UK
If there are two people whose opinions you should probably take into consideration when it comes to matters of cinema, surely it is Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg.
Establishing themselves as two of the greats, the contemporaries have built careers to envy. No, more than envy, they’ve built careers to study and aspire to.
Commonly, accolades like being deemed one of the world’s most influential directors come in retrospect. But for both Scorsese and Spielberg, that moment undeniably arrived when they were both still relatively young.
By the time Scorsese was making movies as bold as Taxi Driver at 39, or Spielberg was unleashing Jaws when he was only 27, their power was already too strong and too obvious to deny that these two not only would be two of the greats, but already were.
So when it comes to their views on the best movies ever made, the opinion can be trusted. Sure, these things are subjective to a degree, but through the eyes of experts, they spot things that the average audience doesn’t. They also have access to a peer pool of the biggest names in the industry, meaning that they can be a pretty trustworthy source of whether a certain film has had a broad impact or is held close by a mass of famous names.
The fact that Spielberg and Scorsese alone share the same favourite movie is a sign that it’s an important one. If it influences two names as big as that, then it must have some magic to it.
For both, it’s The Searchers – a 1956 John Ford movie, starring John Wayne. It’s a somewhat controversial one. John Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, a veteran on a rescue mission to save his niece. But quickly, his mission becomes darker, devolving into a spree of hate.
“He literally acts out the worst aspects of racism in our country,” Scorsese told AFI about the movie. “It’s right there. You can see the hate. And you can also see how he could go that way.”
It’s a staggering and impactful watch for him, and one that felt like a changing of the times as he added, “It was 1956, the repression of the ‘50s and things were changing,” he added, explaining, “The movie business was changing, and what you could say in a movie too…These films are coming out and they’re showing this underbelly of the American psyche at that time.”
For Scorsese, The Searchers is a landmark movie, and Spielberg felt the same, as he said that before he begins making a film, he always watches a film, and it’s often this one. “I turn on a John Ford film – one or two – before every movie, simply because he inspires me,” he said, “Ge is like a classic painter. He celebrates the frame, not just what happens inside of it. I have to look at The Searchers. I have to – almost every time.”
Impactful in a different way, Spielberg was moved by Ford’s eye. Covering both bases of content and aesthetics, The Searchers stands out to the two greats as perhaps the most important movie ever made, given the amount of other important flicks it inspired, even just within their own works.
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