[3]: 9:00 At the age of 17, Hal Roach Studios employed Stevens as an assistant cameraman filming Rex the Wonder Horse in Utah.

[3]: 11:00–12:00  He worked as director of photography and a gag writer on 35 Laurel and Hardy short films, such as Bacon Grabbers (1929) and Night Owls (1930); according to Stevens he learned from this experience that comedy could be "graceful and human".

In 1934, Stevens was hired by RKO Pictures, and he directed the slapstick film Kentucky Kernels, starring Wheeler and Woolsey.

[3]: 15:00  In the late 1930s, he directed Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers together in the musical Swing Time and separately in A Damsel in Distress and Vivacious Lady, respectively.

In 1939, Stevens directed Cary Grant in the large-scale Gunga Din, costing over $1 million as RKO's most expensive film to date; though the studio feared its ballooning budget, it ended up a profitable success.

[5] He directed the romantic comedy The More the Merrier starring Jean Arthur, Joel McCrea and Charles Coburn for which he received an Academy Award for Best Director nomination losing to Michael Curtiz for Casablanca.

[6][3]: 57:00  Stevens helped prepare the Duben and Dachau footage and other material for presentation during the Nuremberg Trials;[8] this was released as the hour-long Nazi Concentration Camps (1945).

[9] In 2008, Stevens's footage was entered into the U.S. National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as an "essential visual record" of the war.

In 1950, during the McCarthyist scare and related Hollywood blacklist, Stevens defended Joseph L. Mankiewicz from Cecil B. DeMille's attempt to recall him as president of the SDG.

Stevens also directed the Western Shane (1953) starring Alan Ladd and Jean Arthur, the biographical Holocaust drama The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), and his biblical epic of Jesus, The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965).

[16] Academy Awards As a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, Stevens headed the Signal Corps unit that filmed D-Day and the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp.