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Q: Were there any problems in restoring the colors?
A: Not really, because Eastman camera negative is great. Over the years the color had shifted, it had faded just a little bit. To determine the proper timing, I was able to find one of the few surviving Lawrence 35mm Technicolor dye transfer prints, which don’t fade at all. Bill Pine, the timer at Metrocolor, did not use a Hazeltine but timed every shot by eye. Everyone at Metrocolor did an extraordinary job. They did it for the love of the film and David Lean. David, because of their extraordinary quality, considers them to be his laboratory.
Q: Apart from a few minor imperfections, it looks fabulous.
A: There are imperfections, and they disturbed me originally, but not any more. David’s feeling is that if you don’t have some imperfections, people won’t believe it’s a restoration. It’s a phoenix risen from the ashes, that’s what it is.
Q: After you had spent more than a year restoring Lawrence to its original 222-minute length, how did you feel when Lean wanted to cut it?
A: Actually we restored it to 223 minutes because we added material that was never in it before.
Q: What was that?
A: It was all in the beginning of the second half, the scene between Arthur Kennedy and Alex Guines, things like Kennedy saying, "I understand you’ve been given no artillery."
After we’d completely reassembled the film, David screened it and said, "It’s great, now let’s cut it." And I said, "Huh?" He saw that I was not happy, so he puts his arm around me, walked me away, and said, "Look, do you want to have the perfect restoration of the December 9th, 1962 premiere, or do you want to make Lawrence of Arabia the best film we can make it? If you want to do that, let’s sit down and take a scalpel to it, let’s do the director’s cut," and that’s what we did.
Q: What material did he cut?
A: The only scene that he questioned was the first officer’s club scene, with the pool table. [To explore Lean's thoughts on re-editing Lawrence, see Director’s Notes--ed.] He felt that it showed a side of Lawrence’s personality you probably shouldn’t see at that time. Other than that, he made only editorial trims. No entire scenes were cut. He tightened it as an editor, not a director, and most of the things he trimmed needed to be trimmed. For example in the second attack on the Turkish train, where Auda gets his horses, there’s a shot where Anthony Quayle pops out of the top of an armored vehicle and fires a flare gun. In all the previous versions, he comes out of the vehicle, he tries to cock the pistol but it doesn’t cock, so he cocks it again, and then finally fires it. But you don’t need to see him not being able to cocks he pistol. That’s gone now. There were also trims in the first scene with Lawrence and Dryden; there was a bit after they left Murray’s office and before you see them walking down the corridor. It didn’t belong in there.
Q: We were sorry to see that the balcony scene between Allenby and Lawrence wasn’t completely restored.
A: There were two problems with it. First, the dialog didn’t work, the dubbing of Jack Hawkins’s voice was just too different. Charles Gray did an absolutely Herculean job, but, impassioned as he was, the voice just didn’t work perfectly. Second, because of the way the film originally cuts, there’s a question of where Dryden is all this time.
Q: Do you think the deterioration of the Lawrence negative was more a result of the particular printing process, the improper storage of materials, or the natural ravages of time?
A: If I had to weight one more heavily than the other, it would be the overprinting first, and quality of storage second. Ravages of time? Not really. If properly stored, those materials should not have gotten to that point.
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