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Lean's comments suggest that a principle reason for the falling out of the two formerly successful collaborators-apart from Wilson's exasperation with Lean's exacting demands for continual rewrites-seems to have been that each wished to pursue a fundamentally different approach to the subject. Lean's interest in Lawrence was primarily psychological-" I've always been fascinated by these 'English nuts.'- Lean explained, "and Lawrence was a nut, of the most wonderful kind"-whereas Wilson wanted to situate Lawrence's exploits within the broader political context of Anglo-Arab and other international relations of the WWI period. As a filmmaker, Lean had never been interested in social and political themes and Wilson's script contained numerous politically charged scenes, including an Ottoman execution of Syrian rebels in the presence of Prince Feisal. Given his political orientation, Wilson may have been reluctant to eliminate such scenes, or to focus on a psychological character study at the expense of what he felt were more important socio-political aspects of the larger historical drama. In a 1964 interview with the French film magazine, Positif, Wilson explained why he dropped out of the project: "The film was at the point of being shot when I found myself again in conflict with David Lean over questions of the film's themes and the nature of the character. We had arrived at an impasse and I withdrew."5
Lean, of course, may also have been wary of the sensitive political nature of his subject which had undermined several earlier efforts to make a film about Lawrence's exploits in Arabia, including a production planned in 1936 by Alexander Korda. As Korda's nephew, Michael, wrote in Charmed Lives (1979), a collective biography of his famous filmmaking family, Winston Churchill did not want to alienate the Turks, potential allies in the event of another war with Germany. In the Fifties, a J. Arthur Rank production of Lawrence of Arabia also fell prey to politics. The film was canceled a month before shooting was to begin. The failure of the Rank production, like Korda's, was due in part to the legacy Lawrence left in the Middle East. As William K. Zinsser wrote about the latter project:
… the movie was to be made in Jordan with Glubb Pasha's Arab Legion [for extras]. Then Glubb was ousted, and British prestige went with him. Next there was talk of making [the film] in Egypt, but the Suez crisis arose. Finally, it was to be made in Iraq, and the Iraqi revolution broke out, bringing as a last mockery the assassination of King Felsal, grandson of Lawrence's great friend and ally. Rank abandoned the film project, understandably.6
After delivering his third and final draft of the screenplay at the end of January, Wilson's contract was terminated in February 1961. In accepting the terms of the settlement, which included his waiver of two and one-half percent of the film's net profits, Wilson wrote to Spiegel's attorneys that the termination agreement “in no way constitutes a waiver of my right to screen credit, because writer credit will be determined after the picture is completed, on the basis of my contribution to the shooting script, and in accordance with procedures established by writers' organizations in the United Kingdom and the United States for the determination of credit.”7
With preproduction already underway and a start date for shooting rapidly approaching, Lean urged Spiegel to find another screenwriter quickly, preferably someone who could explore the personality of Lawrence, as playwright Terence Rattigan had done in his controversial stage production, Ross, in 1960. It was on the London stage, in fact, that Spiegel and Lean found their new screenwriter. After seeing Robert Bolt's critically acclaimed play, A Man for All Seasons, at the Globe Theatre in London, both men were so impressed with the quality of the writing that they asked Bolt-a former history instructor and BBC radio playwright-to rewrite the dialogue for their Lawrence script, despite the fact that he had, never written a screenplay before. As Bolt recalled the events some years later:
Sam Spiegel asked me to go and see him and said that he wanted me to rewrite the dialogue in a script which he had on Lawrence. I said, "No, I don't do rewrites and I know nothing about the film. " He named a figure and I said, "Say no more, give me the script. " I read the script in the train on the way home and rang him and said, "I can't do it, I don't know what you're saying about Lawrence and I don't know what the script's about. " He said, "All we want is the dialogue." I explained that there was a close connection between the intention and the dialogue. But he's a very clever man. "Look," he said, “you've promised me seven weeks work, so why don't you just start? So I started and he brought David Lean back from Arabia. David Lean was refusing to shoot the script he'd got because he didn't like it.. They said, "We could find someone else to do the script but if you would like to go on with it... " I contracted for another seven weeks and finally crawled out, fourteen months later, more dead than alive.8
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