- [first lines]
- Self - Narrator: Centuries ago an artist scrawled on a wall, "Let something of me survive." When my father died, he left these things to me. I looked through them, hoping to learn more about the man I thought I knew best in all the world. Here I found his wartime diary. He had written, "Life is a journey and it's always most interesting when you're not sure where you're going."
- Self - Narrator: He said, "I loved the adventure of doing things I hadn't done before." And one of the best remembered of his films of the '30s was a musical, "Swingtime" with Fred and Ginger's dance of parting.
- Self - Narrator: He was 10 years when his mother gave him a box Brownie camera. That's when he started to photograph what he saw around him. His mother was always a willing subject.
- Self - Narrator: He was director of photography and gag writer on 35 films for Laurel and his new partner, Oliver "Babe" Hardy. He said, "Until I met Laurel and Hardy, I didn't know comedy could be graceful and human."
- Douglas Fairbanks Jr.: [referencing the "Gunga Din" shoot] We were threatened with closing down the whole show, because, they said nothing seemed to match, they didn't have scenes connected, somethings were overdone, they were too broad, too comic. Other things were melodramatic. They couldn't see how they were going to be put together. Well, we knew because George was kind enough, sweet enough, to confide in us with what he had in mind. Sometimes he... had them all in the back of this own mind.
- Self - Narrator: Shooting "Gunga Din" he thrived on what he called, "the excitement of necessity - when you have only yourself to rely on." And he realized his first responsibility was not to the studio, it was to the audience.
- Ginger Rogers: With Fred and me, he gave us a quality that we really had never had before. He gave us that opportunity to talk to each other without speaking, to love each other without loving, without - a word. It was all done in a pantomime dance. And I loved that. It was his quality that he added that gave it that
- [click]
- Ginger Rogers: something special.
- Pandro S. Berman: He would never argue and if you called him up and said you wanted to do something someway that he didn't approve of, he would say, "Absolutely, you're right." And then he would go out and do it exactly the way *he* wanted to do it. He was a man of convictions - and polite - and soft-spoken - and stubborn as a mule.
- John Huston: [referring to "Gunga Din"] It was all the things that Kipling stands for. It catered to the adolescent in all of us. Yeah. Wonderful.
- Katharine Hepburn: I hated to see George go to the more serious pictures, and we used to have awful fights about that. Because, what he could do in comedy was really unique.
- Joel McCrea: I saw what a regular guy he was. He was a terrific and very original, interesting man. And so, I said that I want to do the picture, and he said you've *got* to do the picture. And I said I know it. And so we did, and we had the greatest time.
- Alan J. Pakula: One is struck by his rhythm. It is very different than the rhythm of a lot of other comedy. A lot of American directors, in particularly today, feel that when you do comedy, everythings got to be speeded up. And comedy is confused with cartoon. For any of them, I advise them running the last sequence of "Woman of the Year" of Katherine Hepburn, in the kitchen, and how George gradually, slowly, taking his time, builds each prop in that kitchen. And the more frenetic Katherine Hepburn gets in trying to show she can be a good housewife and cook a breakfast for Spencer Tracy, the calmer the camera remains, sitting there calmly, observing all of these things - rather stoically, almost like George. It's daring because it takes a lot of daring and courage to take your time with comedy.
- Katharine Hepburn: In a sense, Spencer and your father had a lot in common - in that they were, you know, just watchers. You know, they didn't have - I have a lot of facial expression and charm, you know - and they were sort of strong, silent men. So, that Spencer was very influenced by being around George - to just watching the scene.
- Joel McCrea: He never tried to show you how to act. He never said you're not giving enough. He never bawled anybody out. I never saw him do anything but instill confidence.
- Joel McCrea: If somebody said, "Now we can make this over and you can have Clark Gable. How would you like that?" And George said, "Not for this. I wanted McCrea for this." You see, he had that kind of confidence in himself. So that if it were somebody better, which like Gable or Cary Grant or somebody, George would say, "No, for this, I want you."
- John Huston: [on the D-Day Invasion] A great occasion, all together, those days - when hopes ran higher for the world than I've ever known them to - before or since. And I know that George had that high sense of the fate of the world when he thought, with the rest of us, that everything was going to be all right forever afterwards.
- Self - Narrator: One night, alone in a Hollywood screening room, he watched the Nazi propaganda film, "Triumph of the Will". "That film," he said, "influenced my life more than any I would ever see."
- Joel McCrea: [referring to a romantic scene in "The More the Merrier"] It wasn't written that way. George just said you come home and you're, you know, you don't want to say good night, but you have to and so forth and so on, and he kind of went on. He said, "Let's just fool around with it a little bit." So, I was fooling around with it a little bit, and then all the time she was talking about he OPA and the CCC and all the different things - I was copping feels around with her all the time, and George was sitting back at the camera laughing.
- Frank Capra: [referring to a romantic scene in "The More the Merrier"] It was one of the funniest, sexiest scene I'd ever seen. I think it's probably the sexiest and the funniest scene I've ever seen in any picture. Their words talked government; their hands talked something else.
- Self - Narrator: Returning to America after four years, he said, "Films were much less important to me and, in a way, perhaps, more important." He would not make comedies anymore.
- Fred Zinnemann: There was a quality first of all in the way he portrayed human beings with a kind of truthfulness that was very hard to find in many other people's work. He gave the characters a kind of weight and a kind of reality and a sort of compassion. And it was almost unique. A compassion perhaps being the most important of all. He not only understood people who had trouble, but you became involved with what the troubles were.
- John Huston: With George, in all the things he did, there was an immediacy. I mean, I lived the material. I didn't comment on it as I went along. I just lived it - as the picture went along. He had me there - within the scene. I became a part of it.
- Rouben Mamoulian: You see his films and through it all, you see it with George Stevens eyes. You see his outlook on life - how he looks at war and honor and love and freedom. And I think no matter how you put it, a film is for a director are always autobiographical.
- Rouben Mamoulian: Somebody said that all arts aspire to the condition of music. Because music is really the finest art there is. It's the most intangible and yet the most powerful, and you *feel* it. And I think that film at its best was to aspire to the condition of music. It's really the music of images in movement. And this was strongest thing that came at you from the screen, when he was at it.
- John Huston: [referring to the Blacklist era] George brought all the influence to bear that he possibly could to direct these assaults away from these people and, in fact, defend the Constitution of the United States. He was - a very true - patriotic American, in the best sense.
- Fred Zinnemann: To the younger members of the Guild, who were idealist in terms of quality and wanting to make good films, he was sort of a Pope - or, certainly, a Cardinal.
- Warren Beatty: George Stevens defied all kinds of technical conventions. In particular, I'm thinking about the sound in "Shane". We were very impressed by it. In "Bonnie and Clyde" we wanted the gunshots to jump out at you like they did in "Shane". And I spent a lot of time with George and he described to me shooting cannons into trash cans and so on. And we did our sound of our gunshots in the same way, and it all came from George Stevens. And by the time we got - we were showing the picture, and I'm showing it in London to the critics. They all come in one night - and at the Warner Theatre in London, there were it seemed like 19 balconies, and sound was just all very quiet. It didn't jump out; it didn't surprise you. And I ran up to the projectionist, and I walked into the booth, and he was a little surprised to see me because I was in the movie. He didn't know I produced it. And he said, "You're the Producer of this picture?" And I said, "Yeah." And he said, "Well, I really helped you out on the sound here." And I said, "What?" And he said, "I made a chart here; I turn it up here, I turn it down here, I turn it up here." He said, "It's the the worst mixed picture that I've ever. I haven't had a picture so badly mixed since 'Shane'".
- [laughs]
- Max von Sydow: [referring to "The Greatest Story Ever Told"] You cannot create one version which will - everybody will approve of. So, in one way it was a failure, I think. But, I think it was a wonderful failure. Beautiful and very moving - failure, in many ways.
- [last lines]
- Self - Narrator: When my father died in 1975, a friend said, "He was a diverse man composed of many parts. The only time they converge is on a strip of film. That is when you can say, 'That's him.'"
- Self - Narrator: At the Dachau Concentration Camp, what they saw and recorded would not be forgotten.