About John Ford
John Ford is the quintessential director’s director.
He made almost one hundred and fifty films in his career. That’s not a typo. He won the Best Director Oscar four times, plus two more for his wartime documentary work, and he hardly attended any award functions. You like him already, don’t you?
Important: Just because a director is influenced by John Ford doesn’t mean he or she copied John Ford. Everyone is more or less influenced by someone. Even experimental cinema is over a hundred years old, so there’s little you can do that hasn’t been done before.
John Ford’s influence on Steven Spielberg
John Ford’s influence on Steven Spielberg is common knowledge.
There are many aspects of Spielberg’s style you can attribute to John Ford:
Reflections in mirrors is one great example, even when they aren’t necessary.
The camera moving in to a close up of a face at a dramatic moment is also something John Ford did a lot of. Spielberg made it his own.
Complex blocking is also something Spielberg was influenced by. In Stagecoach you can see how the actors move in and out of the frame like a choreographed dance. Each actor doesn’t overlap the other, either by talking or action. This ensures the audience can follow every single movement and dialogue, like following breadcrumbs.
The way tracking shots are constructed are also similar. Take note of the depth of composition and blocking. The frames of both directors are rich with detail. They don’t cut corners!
Spielberg was definitely also influenced by the action scenes of John Ford. The breathtaking chase sequence in Stagecoach, released in 1939, is textbook cinema.
The way the camera moves gracefully is also something Spielberg inherited. Of course, Spielberg took it to a whole new level. In camera movement and blocking, there’s no equal to Spielberg.
I think the greatest way Ford influenced Spielberg is in the casting of extras. Look at the brilliant way Steven Spielberg cast extras in Schindler’s list, or Munich. And observe how immaculately John Ford did the same. Look no further than The Grapes of Wrath, where almost every actor, every child and every extra feel like they were picked through some magical mode of time travel. It’s almost as if you could enter that world and live in it, it’s that real.
Ask any director how hard it is to cast one or two actors perfectly. Casting hundreds perfectly is incredibly rare.
My casting and rehearsal process is outlined in detail in The Ultimate Guide to Dialogue Scenes.
John Ford’s influence on Akira Kurosawa
The great Akira Kurosawa also was influenced by John Ford. The use of wind, fire, rain, and horses are prevalent in both director’s films. I’ve heard when Ford met Kurosawa he observed: “You like rain a lot, don’t you?”
They understood each other because they were perfectionists who couldn’t stand mediocrity.
The “hero saves the day” scenes from My Darling Clementine and Seven Samurai are surprisingly similar. We’re introduced to two larger than life characters, and the objective is to show that with almost zero dialogue. Wyatt Earp decides to risk his life for a shave and some peace. Kambei does it for similar reasons, and is happy to get rid of his hair in the process.
It’s an incredible homage.
Look at how the characters in Stagecoach are introduced one by one, and compare that to how characters are introduced in Seven Samurai. The most interesting character, the star in both cases, is introduced last, as a surprise. They almost didn’t make it!
I’m not implying one copied the other. All the directors mentioned here are giants in their own right. Everybody is influenced by the giants that paved the way. The greater the director, the greater the influence.
What makes John Ford special is he directly influenced a huge number of legends.
Akira Kurosawa went on to achieve mythical status. He stretched out the most suspenseful moments and reduced dialogue. He is the very definition of pure cinema.
Another way Kurosawa was influenced by Ford is in the use of shadows as a compositional technique. Ford loved shadow play, and he framed his actors through doorways, or just used the shadows created by lighting to compose seamlessly pretty frames. Kurosawa, with his background in painting, just mastered composition. His compositions and elegance are unmatched.
The confrontations are drawn out for greater theatrical effect. But just like John Ford, the violence is over in a flash.
John Ford’s influence on Sergio Leone
The director who adopted both Ford and Kurosawa’s styles together and amped it up by ten thousand is Sergio Leone. He made Westerns in which the gunfights are stretched out to full operatic effect, and dialogue is kept to a bare minimum. People just stare at each other and wait until the music stops. Then they shoot. And we hang on every nail biting second.
You can find Ford’s influence all over Leone’s work. I’ll highlight a quirky one. One signature technique Ford used is the surprise pan, with a musical flourish. Leone did the same thing, with actors popping out of nowhere.
John Ford’s techniques have been influencing countless directors, including one Quentin Tarantino.
John Ford’s influence on Quentin Tarantino
Tarantino hates John Ford, or so he says. But he can’t help being influenced by him.
Compare The Searchers to Django Unchained. It’s almost the exact same story, but with black men. Or should I say ‘helpless’ black men and women? Django needs Dr. King Schultz to escape. His wife needs Dr. King Schultz. They both need him to die.
Don’t. get me wrong. I enjoyed watching Django Unchained, but you can in no shape or form assume it’s a film about slavery with a positive slant. Tarantino famously said he hated Ford because Ford wore a KKK costume as an extra in D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. So what does that make all the actors who wore the same outfit in Django Unchained?
I don’t get it. What I see in John Ford is a man who worked in a different time, and still had his characters mouth great dialogue about liberty, equality, freedom and justice. What I get from Tarantino is entertaining dialogue about burgers, skulls and tipping.
With Tarantino’s films, I’m entertained. With Ford’s films, I’m a better man. Or at least, I have no excuse not to be.
Tarantino likes to have his actors talk a lot, generally about things that don’t have any relevance to the plot. The actors make it interesting, and it’s fun to watch. John Ford’s characters talk a lot, too, but they mostly talk about the situation they are in, and the world as they see it. There’s a lot more moralizing in Ford’s films.
You’ll also see the other signature techniques in Tarantino’s films like the zoom into a close up, the long shot montages, and the graceful camera moves. Unfortunately you’ll also see some of the bad aspects – like insignificant female characters. Kill Bill is about a female protagonist strong enough to survive death multiple times. But in the end, when she meets the man she is after this whole time, she caves like a puppy and gives him a death he doesn’t deserve. What’s even more strange is why she didn’t go after him immediately. As a side note, notice how the first and last to die both use children as a shield. Black Mamba’s hardcore, but stereotypically mommy soft.
What about Tarantino’s stereotypical depictions of Asians, and anybody who is not white?
Samuel Jackson is never morally right in any film, and he’s in every film! When you see patterns over an entire career, they are not accidents. John Ford took a lot of flak for his depiction of women in film and anybody who was not white. He tried to make amends in later films like The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, but they were baby steps.
Ultimately, I got this from IMdb:
“I am a liberal Democrat and a rebel. [on Native American Indians] We’ve treated them badly, it’s a blot on our shield; we’ve robbed, cheated, murdered and massacred them, but they kill one white man and God, out come the troops.”
John Ford (1967)
I enjoy Tarantino’s films and have great respect for his directorial work. But he had it coming.
For those of you who want some perspective, Tarantino doesn’t like Ford very much: https://thenewbev.com/blog/2019/03/ulzanas-raid/
Here’s a quote from 2012: “One of my American Western heroes is not John Ford, obviously. To say the least, I hate him. Forget about faceless Indians he killed like zombies. It really is people like that that kept alive this idea of Anglo-Saxon humanity compared to everybody else’s humanity — and the idea that that’s hogwash is a very new idea in relative terms.”
You can google ‘Tarantino John Ford’ for older comments, etc. I just used his (Tarantino’s) own yardstick to measure Tarantino. It might come as a shocker, but John Ford isn’t the person Tarantino makes him out to be. Even during the shitty times Ford made films in, he found a way to make his characters moralize about humanity in general. Watch Young Mr. Lincoln and The Sun Shines Bright for amazing humanitarian work that truly shows Ford is not the racist Tarantino makes him out to be.
Tarantino, on the other hand, hasn’t made a film about anything that’s actually useful to humanity. That’s cool, entertainment is what it is. But when Tarantino the moralizer opens his mouth about morals…
I don’t want to waste my time or yours arguing about the details. I leave everyone here with enough juice to form their own opinions.
John Ford’s influence on David Fincher
John Ford moved the camera when the actors moved. When they start moving, the camera starts, and it stops moving when they stop. This is a classic camera movement technique that David Fincher follows to a T.
It helps hide the movement and keeps it graceful. This can be done for longer shots as well as simpler, quicker shots. Ford hated to move the camera unless he had to, so the intentions behind any camera movement are quite clear.
Then there’s the change from shallow depth of field to deep focus. John Ford hardly used closeups. Or should I say he hardly abused closeups? The closeups are softer, with shallow depth of field. Otherwise we have a lot more depth in the frame. David Fincher does the same. When they use closeups, both directors make it special. It has to mean something.
That’s not all. John Ford hardly moved the camera during dialogue scenes. They’re typically mid shots and long sequences of dialogues. He once famously advised John Wayne (when he became a director) to shoot one dialogue scene, and follow it up with scenery, or a visually striking scene, and then keep repeating that formula.
David Fincher keeps his camera steady and simple, and lets the scene play out by itself.
After a dialogue scene the next one is a visual scene of some sort. The wide shots are classic frames without any virtuoso camera technique. At most a simple pan of the camera. You get the idea. Whether they know it or not, all these directors are the beneficiaries of the John Ford style.
The master of dissolves and the fade to black
One aspect of John Ford’s style that’s not often talked about is his use of the dissolve. If Kurosawa is known for his wipes, John Ford should be known for his fade to blacks and dissolves.
A fade to black is not fashionable in modern cinema, because a lot of people think it draws too much attention to itself. One of the best uses of the fade to black I’ve seen is in The Grapes of Wrath. Every time it happens, its effect is emotionally powerful. John Ford knew how and when to use dissolves. It’s a great lesson, that:
Everything in filmmaking is useful when done tastefully.
My favorite John Ford movies
My favorite John Ford film is Stagecoach (1939). Every technique mentioned in this video is in that one film.
Others I highly recommend:
- The Grapes of Wrath (the book is better!)
- My Darling Clementine
- The Searchers
- The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
His own favorites were Young Mr. Lincoln and The Sun Shines Bright. Please watch them to know more about his political and moral ideologies.
John Ford’s characters
And that brings me to John Ford’s characters. It is the aspect none of the other directors in this list have matched. Some have come close in a few movies, like Spielberg in Schindler’s list or Munich, or Kurosawa in Ikiru, High and Low, etc. But typically these directors focus on characters who are larger than life. You won’t see them in real life, any more than you’ll see a Spiderman or an Iron Man or a T-Rex.
John Ford’s characters could be giants like Wyatt Earp or Abraham Lincoln, but somehow you can relate to them. But that’s not why his characters’ are special.
What is most special about John Ford’s characters is that they are kind.
They have kind faces, they have kind eyes, they talk kindly, and behave like human beings. They believe in doing right, and even if the villains are the epitome of evil they just want to be heard, most likely you’ll feel empathetic to their cause.
It is a casting and writing decision, spanning a hundred plus movies over several decades. Just like brilliant camerawork, or editing, or amazing chase scenes, or deep, rich frames and world building, it took work and never happened by itself.
The casting and writing choices clearly show the inner workings of the kind giant known as John Ford.
Today’s cinema has left behind those kind faces. They are as rare as American Indians in film. We need a lot more of those. People need to be reminded often they have a better side.
