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AFI Life Achievement Award Interview |
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Page 2 |
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QUESTION: In your early days, did you work as an apprentice to a master director or learn on the job or? ... LEAN - I worked with some good people. Yes. I was very lucky. I think the great thing is to work-try to sacrifice everything to work with good people. If you're lucky, a bit of it rubs off. QUESTION: Your relationship with playwright Robert Bolt is legendary in the industry. Will you talk about how you work with him? LEAN - Well, Robert once said, "By the time we're finished, we don't know who got what idea." When we work together, I don't think there is any competition, and quite honestly, I cannot remember very clearly who's thought of what. I'll give you one example. There's a cut I rather like in Lawrence, where he lights a match and says, "The trick is not minding that it hurts," and blows it out. Robert wrote this scene. And next there was a scene played in the desert at sunrise. I said, "Look, Robert, I don't quite understand what you're at." He said, "Nor do 1, really, but I always think when somebody blows out a match, the ember that disappears is somehow the red of the sunrise." And so out of that, I kind of put it in film terms. Robert hadn't actually written a film script before. It was the first one he had done. I don't think I'm very good with words, but I feel as if I'm swimming in my own water with pictures. And it's that kind of combination. QUESTION : Could you tell us how you use the camera to achieve those painterly images that tell us what's important in a scene? LEAN: Well, you know, it's a terrible job, making a selection on the screen, isn't it? A painter can do all sorts of things to bring up the image he wants people to look at. We are faced with photography. One of my greatest helps is the focal length of lenses. I start with a fairly wide angle, with everything very much in focus, and I gradually up the focal length so that I'll end on a closeup of somebody in which everything is a blur except the eyes of the face. And I use that again and again to choose what the audience looks at, because I try to take an audience by the hand and say, Come look at this. See that man sitting down at that table? He's being watched by a girl. QUESTION: Could you tell us about the conception and execution of Omar Sharif's entrance in Lawrence of Arabia? LEAN: On the mirage? I was out there on the mudflat, and another jeep was miles behind us. It came over the horizon, and the jeep, I must tell you, looked much better than the camel because the dust went up in the air behind it. Wonderful V shape, like an airplane in some wind tunnel. And I thought, What a wonderful entrance. Then some people said (and I'd heard it before) that you can't photograph a mirage. So I got out my camera, and I got the jeep to go farther away again, and I took a series of pictures. And it did come out. That's all there was to it. I can't bear second units, and on Lawrence of Arabia, Sam Spiegel got three. I was mad about dust devils. I thought we were going to have some in the picture. So to one of the units, I said, "You just go out in the desert and wait for dust devils." They got very tired and very sleepy but they got one. QUESTION: In films such as Lawrence of Arabia or Bridge on the River Kwai, characters such as T. E. Lawrence or Colonel Nicholson seem to be almost symbolic of all that may be thought of as the worst in British character ... they're very curious people but they're very contradictory. Is there any deliberate attempt to do that in your film? LEAN : No. I'm just interested in nuts. [Laughter] I think they make very interesting characters. When we were doing Bridge on the River Kwai, Alec Guinness said, "Now, tell me about the character." I said, "Well, Alec, if we were having dinner tonight, he'd be a bit of a bore." He said, "A bore? You are asking me to play a bore?" Never tell actors the truth. [Laughter] And we fought pretty well all the way through that film. Lawrence is a fascinating character. This Oxford don on camelback-I mean, it was absolutely nutty. Sort of intellectual, with a gang of Arabs on camels, you know. Peter O'Toole was very young in his career, and he could have done it better later. QUESTION : I read somewhere that Peter O'Toole was not your first choice for Lawrence. Could you talk about the casting? LEAN - It was a tough part to cast. The first person we went for was Albert Finney. He was very young. I spent four days doing tests with him. He decided he didn't want the part. And I said, "Why?" He said, "Because I don't want to be a star." I said, "Why don't you want to be a star?" He said, "Because I'm frightened of what it may do to me personally." I said, "I can only talk to you as a director. If you succeed and do become a star, it will give you good parts, the best parts." Anyhow, that may not have been the whole story. Maybe they wanted to put him under contract for Christ knows how long. But he went. I also thought of Brando. In fact, talked to him about it. I think he would have been wonderful, because there is a secretive creature. I think he's one of the greatest screen actors in the world. I think he's terrific. Hasn't had many good parts. I think he'd have been very interesting. And then I saw the film called The Day They Robbed the Bank of England, and Peter O'Toole was playing a sort of silly ass Englishman fishing. Anyhow, he got the part. QUESTION: Could you talk a little bit about how you have worked with various actors? LEAN: Dangerous subject. Well, it's intensely personal. I always try not to speak in a loud voice when I'm talking to an actor on the set. I gently take them aside, and I whisper because I don't want to give the impression, for their sake, that they are being told to do this or that by a teacher. I try to suggest things to an actor. I try as hard as I can to make them suggest something that I want them to think of. The trouble with actors is that it's a very, very difficult job, with this damned glass eye looking at them all the time. It's quite difficult talking to all of you here, but I'd rather talk to all of you than I would have a 100mm lens pointing at me. It's so concentrated. It's part of a director's job, I think, to get the actor to give as good a performance on the stage as he gave to himself in the bath in the morning. So I try to relieve them of their inhibitions. I try to get their confidence. I try to give them confidence. I can't bear some actors, the rambunctious type who think they know everything. You've got to knock them down and make them realize that they don't know everything. If you've really done your homework on the script, you, the director, know the part better than any damned actor, because you' ve been at it for months. I've had lots of actors who want to change dialogue. I stop them doing it. I won't have it. They took on the script, and they stick to it. I'm terribly tempted to tell you a rather long story about Sessue Hayakawa a. You know, I find constantly that actors really are not interested in anything but their own parts. We had a scene in Bridge on the River Kwai where they had all the troops lined up in front of them and Sessue gets up on the soap box and talks. We went -through a rehearsal, and I said, "What's wrong?" Because it was the speech and yet it wasn't the speech. I write very detailed shooting scripts, because I try to think of how it's going to look on the screen and describe that in the script. And I put down, Close ,hot, Colonel Saito, so much dialogue, close shot to Colonel Nicholson, listening. Long shot, the soldiers, close-up Saito. What Sessue had done was to learn all the lines that were only his. He had cut out all the lines that were anybody else's. I looked at his script. It marked the pages in which he spoke. He had thrown out all the rest and had bound it all together. Now, we came to the scene at the end of the picture. Alec Guinness is looking over the edge of the Bridge and he thinks he sees some wires. He goes up to Saito and says, "Colonel Saito, there's something rather peculiar going on. I think we better go and have a look." We walked off toward the bridge which leads down to the rocks, and Sessue stayed there like a rock. I said, "Go on, Sessue, follow him." He said, "I follow him?" I said, "Sessue, this is where you find the wires and where you get killed." He said, "I get killed?" [Laughter] He had thrown it away because he had no dialogue. |
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