David Lean

• 1. Introduction

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  David Lean spent fourteen years in silence after one of the most brutal critical encounters in cinema history. At a lunch in the Algonquin Hotel in New York, a gathering of the National Society of Film Critics spent two hours tearing apart his latest film, Ryan's Daughter, to his face. Time critic Richard Schickel asked him directly how the director of Brief Encounter could have made "a piece of bullshit." "It really had such an awful effect on me for several years," Lean later told a television interviewer. "You begin to think that maybe they're right."

  What makes that story so remarkable is what it was interrupting. Lean had just directed some of the most celebrated films ever made. The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago. He had won the Academy Award for Best Director twice. He would go on to become the only British director ever to win that award more than once. And yet the words of a handful of critics nearly ended his career permanently.

  Born on the 25th of March 1908 in South Croydon, Surrey, Lean spent more than sixty years making films that pulled audiences into landscapes as vast as the Arabian desert and as intimate as a suburban English railway station. This is the story of how a boy given a Brownie box camera at age ten became the director Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, and Ridley Scott all pointed to as a towering influence. And it is the story of what that silence cost him.

• 2. From Tea Boy to Editor

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  Lean left school in the Christmas Term of 1926, at eighteen, and walked into his father's chartered accountancy firm as an apprentice. He was bored almost immediately. Every evening he spent in the cinema instead. Then an aunt told him to find a job he actually enjoyed, and in 1927 he visited Gaumont Studios. His enthusiasm was so obvious he was given a month's trial without pay.

  He started as a teaboy. He became a clapperboy. By 1930 he was editing newsreels for Gaumont Pictures and Movietone. His path into feature films began with Freedom of the Seas in 1934 and Escape Me Never in 1935. He edited Gabriel Pascal's adaptations of two George Bernard Shaw plays: Pygmalion in 1938 and Major Barbara in 1941. He cut Powell and Pressburger's 49th Parallel in 1941 and One of Our Aircraft Is Missing in 1942.

  By the time he stepped behind the director's camera, Lean had edited more than two dozen feature films. As critic Tony Sloman wrote in 1999, "the cutting rooms are easily the finest grounding for film direction." That grounding would prove permanent. When Lean directed A Passage to India in 1984, he also edited the film himself, earning equal credit in three roles: writer, editor, and director.

• 3. Coward, Dickens, and Brief Encounter

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  Noël Coward was the first person to trust Lean with a camera. Their collaboration on In Which We Serve in 1942 launched Lean's directing career and began a partnership that produced three more films: This Happy Breed in 1944, Blithe Spirit in 1945, and Brief Encounter in 1945.

  Brief Encounter starred Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard as quietly restrained lovers caught between an unexpected passion and their respective middle-class marriages in suburban England. The film shared Grand Prix honors at the 1946 Cannes film festival and earned Lean his first Academy nominations for directing and screen adaptation. Johnson received a nomination for Best Actress. The film has since been ranked second on the British Film Institute's list of the Top 100 British Films.

  Two Charles Dickens adaptations followed. Great Expectations in 1946 and Oliver Twist in 1948 were the first films Lean directed to star Alec Guinness, whom Lean considered his "good luck charm." Guinness's portrayal of Fagin in Oliver Twist drew immediate controversy. The first Berlin screening in February 1949 provoked a riot among the surviving Jewish community. In New York, the film was condemned by the Anti-Defamation League and the American Board of Rabbis. "To our surprise it was accused of being anti-Semitic," Lean wrote. "We made Fagin an outsize and, we hoped, an amusing Jewish villain." The production code required eight minutes of cuts before the film could be released in the United States, a release delayed until July 1951.

• 4. Scale, Spiegel, and Arabia

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  Summertime in 1955 shifted Lean's career into a new gear. Partly financed by American money, it starred Katharine Hepburn as a middle-aged American woman pursuing a romance on holiday in Venice and was shot entirely on location there. Hepburn became Lean's favourite actress, and Summertime his personal favourite among all his films.

  The Bridge on the River Kwai arrived in 1957. Based on Pierre Boulle's novel about British and American prisoners of war in a Japanese camp during the Second World War, the film starred William Holden and Alec Guinness. It became the highest-grossing film of 1957 in the United States and won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor for Guinness. The role had required considerable negotiation: Guinness had battled Lean for more depth in his portrayal of the obsessively correct British commander determined to build the best possible bridge for his Japanese captors in Burma.

  Lawrence of Arabia followed in 1962, after extensive location work across the Middle East, North Africa, and Spain. The screenplay came from playwright Robert Bolt, rewriting an earlier script by Michael Wilson. It was the first Lean project Bolt worked on, and it would not be the last. French composer Maurice Jarre scored the film, winning his first Oscar for Best Original Score. Actor Peter O'Toole, playing T. E. Lawrence, became an international star. Lean received ten Oscar nominations for the film and won seven, including Best Director. On the American Film Institute's 1998 list, Lawrence of Arabia placed fifth among the greatest American films.

• 5. Zhivago, Lara, and Box Office

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  Doctor Zhivago in 1965 gave Lean his greatest commercial success. The film adapted Boris Pasternak's Nobel Prize-winning novel, which had been suppressed in the Soviet Union, as a romance set against the Russian Revolution and subsequent Civil War. Omar Sharif played the physician and poet Zhivago; Julie Christie played Lara.

  Initial reviews were lukewarm. Critics came around later, with director Paul Greengrass eventually calling it "one of the great masterpieces of cinema." Adjusted for inflation, it ranks as the ninth highest-grossing film of all time. Producer Carlo Ponti took Maurice Jarre's score and fashioned from it a pop tune called "Lara's Theme," released with lyrics under the title "Somewhere My Love," which became one of cinema's most successful theme songs. Cinematographer Freddie Young won an Academy Award for his colour photography.

  Four years later came Ryan's Daughter, set against 1916 Ireland's resistance to British rule and loosely derived from Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Robert Mitchum and Sarah Miles starred. The film earned $31 million and ranked as the eighth highest-grossing film of its year, winning Academy Awards for Young's cinematography and for John Mills in a supporting role. But the New York critics saw something else entirely, and their verdict at that Algonquin lunch would push Lean into fourteen years of silence.

• 6. Abandoned Projects

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  Between 1977 and 1980, Lean and Robert Bolt worked on a two-part adaptation of Richard Hough's dramatized account of the Mutiny on the Bounty. The first film, titled The Lawbreakers, would cover the voyage to Tahiti and the mutiny itself. The second, The Long Arm, would follow the mutineers afterward and the admiralty's pursuit via the frigate HMS Pandora. Warner Bros. withdrew funding, forcing Lean to consider combining the material into a single film, then a seven-part television series, before Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis agreed to back it.

  Then Bolt suffered a serious stroke. Lean felt Bolt's involvement was essential and could not proceed without him. Melvyn Bragg wrote a considerable portion of the script in Bolt's place. A $4 million replica of the Bounty was already under construction. Casting was complete. At the last possible moment, actor Mel Gibson brought in his friend Roger Donaldson to direct. De Laurentiis, unwilling to lose his investment over what he considered the minor matter of the director departing, agreed. The film was released as The Bounty without Lean.

  A Passage to India in 1984 finally broke the silence. Lean had pursued the project since 1960, drawn to E. M. Forster's 1924 novel of colonial conflict in British-occupied India. He rejected a draft by Santha Rama Rau, the playwright responsible for the stage adaptation and Forster's preferred screenwriter, and wrote the script himself. The film was nominated for eleven Academy Awards. Judy Davis received her first Academy nomination for her role. Peggy Ashcroft, at 77, won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, becoming the oldest actress to win that award. Roger Ebert called it "one of the greatest screen adaptations I have ever seen."

• 7. Nostromo and an Unfinished Life

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  In the final years of his life, Lean assembled what would have been his most ambitious cast. For a film adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Nostromo, he gathered Marlon Brando, Paul Scofield, Anthony Quinn, Peter O'Toole, Christopher Lambert, Isabella Rossellini, and Dennis Quaid. He wanted Alec Guinness to play Dr. Monygham. Guinness declined in a 1989 letter: "I believe I would be disastrous casting. The only thing in the part I might have done well is the crippled crab-like walk."

  Several writers worked on the script, including Christopher Hampton and Bolt, but their contributions were set aside. Lean decided to write the film himself, working with Maggie Unsworth, wife of cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth, with whom he had collaborated on Brief Encounter, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, and The Passionate Friends. The total budget reached $46 million. Lean had originally planned to film in Mexico but chose London and Madrid partly to accommodate Peter O'Toole, who had agreed to appear only if filming stayed close to home.

  Six weeks before production was set to begin, Lean died of throat cancer in Limehouse, East London, on the 16th of April 1991, at the age of 83. He was interred at Putney Vale Cemetery. The Nostromo production collapsed without him. A BBC television mini-series adapted the novel in 1997, unrelated to anything Lean had planned. He had been married six times and was survived by his last wife Sandra Cooke and by his son Peter from his first marriage. The AFI Life Achievement Award had come to him in 1990. His knighthood came in 1984, the same year his final completed film was released.

• 8. The Lean Legacy

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  Seven of Lean's films appear on the British Film Institute's 1999 list of the Top 100 British Films: Brief Encounter at second, Lawrence of Arabia at third, Great Expectations at fifth, The Bridge on the River Kwai at eleventh, Doctor Zhivago at twenty-seventh, Oliver Twist at forty-sixth, and In Which We Serve at ninety-second. Three of those films sit in the top five.

  Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese both name Lean among their primary influences. Spielberg was drawn to direct Empire of the Sun in 1987 in part because of his admiration for Lean, having originally signed on as producer for Lean's own version of the J. G. Ballard novel. Spielberg and Scorsese also helped restore Lawrence of Arabia in 1989, retrieving a film that had been substantially cut for theatrical release and further altered for television. The restoration significantly revived Lean's reputation with a new generation of filmgoers.

  Among the many other directors who have acknowledged his influence are Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Spike Lee, Sergio Leone, Paul Thomas Anderson, Lawrence Kasdan, Guillermo del Toro, and Christopher Nolan. Film critic Michael Sragow described Lean as "a superb romantic moviemaker and one of the slow but steady innovators of the cinema." Writer Andrew Collins, reflecting on Lean's centenary in 2008, pushed back against the easy reduction of his achievement to spectacle: the people in a Lean composition, Collins wrote, "may look like ants when first glimpsed against the vast sand dunes" or the icy Russian mountains, but the camera always returns to individuals, always invites the viewer to wonder about them and care. That instinct -- scale in service of the intimate -- is what the boy with the Brownie box camera spent a lifetime learning to put on screen.