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AFI Life Achievement Award Interview |
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Page 3 |
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QUESTION: Did you think of any parts, specifically, for Alec Guinness? LEAN: Yes. [Laughs] The part of the priest in Ryan's Daughter. It was a heck of a part. I've had various tribulations with Alec. He's a convert to Catholicism. And he wrote me two or three pages of things that would have to be altered for him to play the priest. So I said, "Thank you very much for being so frank," and then gave it to Trevor Howard. QUESTION: How do you keep somebody from being sentimental? LEAN: Sentimental? Well, I try to avoid saying to an audience, Nudge, nudge, isn't this touching? If the scene is really good, you don't do that, do you? And I try to be very truthful about things in that way. I don't like sentimentality, but I love big emotional scenes. I think one of the best emotional scenes I've ever seen is Willy Wyler's in Best Years of Our Lives, where Fredric March comes back at the end of the war. And he goes to his house, and the door's opened, I think, first of all, by a girl who's obviously his daughter. And she opens her mouth, and he puts a hand over it, and then a boy appears, and you gradually become aware of the bottom of the longer passage, of a door, and you also know that the wife is behind that door, because she's the other member of the family, and then she comes out. It makes me choke even now. He's a master at it. I think it's because he has a wonderful heart. He had a wonderful heart, Willy. I loved him. QUESTION: I'd like you to talk a little about adapting a novel. We saw Great Expectations last night. So many people have adapted -unsuccessfully and some successfully. And you have made films out of a number of such significant novels. LEAN: I think the thing is to not try to do a little bit of every scene in a novel, because it's going to end up a mess. Choose what you want to do in the novel and do it proud. If necessary, cut characters. Don't keep every character and just take a sniff of each one. When we were going to do Great Expectations, we thought that we were completely incapable of tackling such a master as Dickens, and so we looked around and asked, "Who really is an expert at Dickens?" There was a lady novelist called Clemence Dane in London who had also written several plays, and she was sort of a Dickens expert. She did a script, and it was absolutely awful because she did just what I've said. We said, "It's no good." And I said, " ' Let's have a go." I got the book and quite blatantly wrote down the scenes that I thought would look wonderful on the screen. What I did was try to join up those scenes and write links between them. Of course, you have to have a narrative. QUESTION. You always have the most interesting characters in your film in the foreground, like Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India. How did you decide to give her that much interest? LEAN: Mrs. Moore is a wonderful part, and I'll tell you the interesting thing. Have you seen Peggy Ashcroft before? No? That's it, you see. She's very, very well-known in England on the stage. And she's a great stage actress. And we always said, I wonder what the Americans will say? Because here you see an old lady-we're exactly the same age, actually-who is a very accomplished actress. In England I don't think she would have quite that additional impact that you got. In part [her impact] is due to this wealth of experience. She can do it off the back of her hand, I can assure you. QUESTION :How do you perceive her character in the film? I didn't quite understand the scene when she was at the caves and you cut to the process shot of the moon and then the fuller shot of the moon. I realized something mythological was going on, but I couldn't pinpoint exactly what was happening. LEAN: Well, I'll tell you what I was trying to do. I don't think it succeeded. You see, in the book, Mrs. Moore is a very religious lady. Hence, she wears a cross, and in the mosque scene at the beginning, she says, "God is here." And when she goes to those caves, [author E. M.] Forster says, "Those caves were sealed before the coming of the gods, before the coming of man . . ." and so forth. In other words, they were a kind of vacuum when the world was made, and then, I think his expression is, "Man grew curious and drilled a hole." And Mrs. Moore loses her faith in there, or her faith is badly shaken. Well, thank you very much-put that on film! So I had her come out, flop back in her chair, look at the moon, have the girl come up. I had her put on dark glasses because I was going to put everything from the moment that she put on the dark glasses seen through a strange color so all her POVs would be strange. We failed in the special effects, and I dropped that, so she in fact puts her glasses on for nothing. But I thought that that space and the surface of the moon, with the line, "Like most old people, I sometimes wonder if we are passing figures in a godless universe," was the best effort I could make at saying that her faith was shaken. QUESTION : You seemed to really take your time in telling the story, yet it keeps our interest. I'm thinking particularly of the scene in the monkey temple. Could you talk about pacing? LEAN: I just obeyed my instinct. It had to be slow because a mood is slow, isn't it? I always imagined that girl had lived in a sort of vicarage, brought up in very proper surroundings. And I wrote that scene because in the book she's a bit of a stick. And then there was this question of an assault in the cave. I wanted to prepare the way for it being possible. I wanted to have a scene where a rather prudish girl becomes aware of her own sexuality. Now, this has got to be done slowly. There was a wonderful place in India where I went about 30 years ago. It was discovered by a couple of men who were tiger shooting, and they got into some thickets and realized there were some statues there. They realized they were erotic statues. These were all overgrown with creepers. Today it's a very nice little park. All the statues have beer. cleaned. I was there for a week with t camera just shooting photographs. %N,. reproduced it. It's a complete fake in the film. We built statues in plaster, put fake creepers around them, and the art director, John Box, stuck them up against the background of trees in various places. And then we built a sort of platform for monkeys. I had her push her way through on a bicycle, had I,,-of shots of her, shots of statues, shots of monkeys and so forth, and it's just t cutting job, really. That temple only exists on film. QUESTION: What advice can you give us in terms of staging large crowd settings? Most of the directors we've talked with have never done the human spectacles that you have done. LEAN - The most important thing, I think, is to get people's enthusiasm. It you say, "When I hold my hand up, you cheer," they'll cheer. Or, "When I put my hand there, fall down on the ground," they'll fall down on the ground. It's no good. I get on a microphone and try, as simply as I can, to describe what the scene is and explain what I would like them to give the camera. I try to give them a feeling that they're contributing to something. The Indian crowds were simply wonderful. They're the best crowds I've ever worked with. Very, very emotional. I'd do one take, two takes, probably print take three, which was the end of it. I'd say, "Cut." And I would applaud them. And they would applaud me, and everybody applauded everybody, and that was the end of the shot. QUESTION :This is kind of a gush but I'd just like to thank you for making Passage to India. It sounds like you had to put up with a lot to do it. LEAN: How sweet of you. That's no gush. Yes, well, we did. Nobody wanted it, you see. We came over here because the only people who put money up for films are the Americans. One studio said they'd do it if we put in an explicit rape. And that, thereby, ruined the story, of course. And another person-not American-wrote what he thought was a fascinating memo to me-he wrote words to the effect, "Our audiences are young people. Young people are bored by old people. Cut the old dame." QUESTION . As a director, what's the difference in working on a large-scale picture and a more personal drama? LEAN. If you are on a picture that is just a large-scale picture with no personal drama, it's no good. The whole thing in the big picture is to try to keep the personalities up there in the foreground except when you want the background really to take over. People often ask me about doing big location pictures. And I'll tell you a funny thing: Most people forget to take the long shot. On Lawrence of Arabia, they sent a second unit to the Suez Canal. There was a shot of a double we had taken the close-ups of Peter O'Toole, but over his back-across the canal, with the man on the motorbike yelling across the canal, "Who are you? Who are you?" We got the stuff back, and I said to Sam, "Where's the long shot? It's got to have a long shot of the canal." |
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