The Searchers

Near the top of the director’s best films list is John Ford’s 1956 western, ‘The Searchers’. He has previously said that he watches the film every time he’s getting ready to make a new one and that he even watched it twice whilst creating 1977 sci-fi classic ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’.

Spielberg said: “'The Searchers' has so many superlatives going for it. It’s John Wayne’s best performance. It’s a study in dramatic framing and composition. It contains the single most harrowing moment in any film I’ve ever seen. It is high on my twenty-five-favourite film list.”