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-Three days to get this ship ready to sail.

Then we'll send Hitler a telegram saying the

tarin's ready. You can start your war.

-I began my career as a very

bad accountant and

I really hated it. It was very dreary working

in the city of London and

I finally got

a job with a tea boy to the camera department

in the silent days.

And it was a very different kettle of fish from

now.

We worked in a glass studio,

a huge conservatory, because

the lights weren't very good.

And so we made every use we could of the

daylight.

-I first met David in about 1934.

We were working in the same studio.

I was a casting director.

He was an editor working with an American

editor-- an

American editor from whom he said he learned

all that there is to be learned about editing.

-In those days, the director, as some of them

do now, always cut his own films.

And he couldn't

cut this film without

being told how to synchronize film.

So the only person in the studio knew

how to synchronize film was the

editor of The Sun News,

the newsreel.

And he could spare two hours.

Now I hitched myself on as the director's

assistant, and in the two hours

I am very glad to say the

director didn't cotton on

to how to synchronize sound,

and I did.

-He always pays the most generous tributes to

this man with whom we first started.

The first American he started working with.

And towards the end of the thirties,

he became unquestionably the best editor

that we had in England at the time,

and I should think probably one of the best

there was anywhere.

-I became fascinated by it.

I still think it's a kind of magic sitting here

and juxtaposing images.

It's a wonderful job. Most interesting, the

whole of.

-Noel Coward, who I'd known for some years,

was approached by the head of the company,

which I was then working to ask if

he would make a film for the war effort,

and his first reply was no.

And then he happened to have

dinner with his friend Lord Mountbatten,

who told him the story of the destroyer Kelly.

And from that was born the film "In Which We

Serve".

-"In Which We Serve" was the first film I ever

directed or rather

co-director.

And I was rather young

and I was very frightened, and I mostly

remember it because I have always wondered if

the doormen would let me into the studio.

-Noel left practically all of it to David

and certainly all the action stuff was done

entirely by David and brilliantly done and

brilliantly worked out beforehand.

At the time we'd been shooting for about

four weeks.

He'd abandoned direction more or less

altogether, except for telling David

how the lines should be said

in his opinion.

What the intentions behind the scenes were.

-The first time I saw "Brief Encounter"

in a theater was

while we were on location making "Great

Expectations", it was a place called Rochester,

which was a rather rough neighborhood.

And in

the first love scene, a lady in the audience

started to laugh.

Nobody took much notice.

The second love scene.

She laughed more.

The third love scene it became worse and worse.

It proved completely contagious until

the whole audience was collapsed in laughter.

And I remember going home at night,

lying in my bed and thinking, how can I get in

the laboratory and burn negative.

I was so ashamed of it.

"Great Expectations" was my first Dickens film,

and after it had been shown,

all sorts of people thought I was a Dickens

expert. But in fact, I only read "Christmas

Carol".

And I suppose that's why in a way, in those

days, I don't know what it's like now.

It came off because I didn't know anything

about Dickens.

When I read the book, it excited me

and I just tried to put on the screen

what had excited me from the page.

I always felt guilty about "Oliver

Twist" because Noel Coward once said to me,

always come out of another hole.

And we did it as soon

as we'd done "Great Expectations" merely

because we couldn't find another hole to come

out of.

The greatest prize it had was it went very well

in England, but we went to the states was

tremendous hoo-ha about the

character of Fagin because they thought

that the film was anti-Jewish.

Now I hadn't no such

thought in my mind.

And unfortunately, after about two or three

years, they finally cut it

and they cut out all the humorous parts of

Fagin.

And in my opinion, the American version is

anti-Semitic.

Glad to see you. I say.

I'm sorry, my dear.

I think

you know what the big idea

is. I imagine that your pay

go down.

A great many of them made that

idea.

It just knocked them out.

The idea for the wash.

I hope you don't mean that work yet.

Oh.

I got the idea of

"Sound Barrier" through reading a paragraph

in an English paper.

It said that Jeffrey de Havilland

had been killed because his plane had broken up

over the timber estuary.

And they guessed that possibly

he'd been exceeding the speed of sound.

And in so doing, he'd hit some sort of

wall.

So we made a film about this wall.

"Summertime" was a great moment

for me because it was the first time I've met

and worked with Katharine Hepburn.

I think she's the greatest actress I've ever

worked with.

I've never known anyone who

combines a complete mastery

of technique with real

gift.

And this, of course, was her film.

"River Kwai" was the film

that really started me off

in my love affair with strange

and rather exotic locations.

And it was also a film that got me my first

Oscar.

"Lawrence of Arabia" was very lucky for me

because it was on that picture that

I started working with Robert Bolt.

It was his first screenplay.

And here's another thing

it also gave me the most

exciting year, if not the hardest I've ever

had in my life because I lived

in the desert for over a year.

"Doctor Zhivago" is the film that gave me my

first real battering from the critics.

It opened in New York.

And then it went to London, where I hope

there'd be a little kinder, but they weren't

they were worse than New York.

And then

to Germany where they were worse still.

In fact, by the time it had finished, I

had one horrible moment.

I'm rather ashamed of I thought I better

retire.

But then the money started pouring in

and it made me more made more money

than all the other films I'd made put together.

Ron's daughter isn't

a way an outcome of "Lawrence"

and "Zhivago" because on

both those pictures.

Robert Bolt and I were sattled

by the enormous weight of a book.

And so we said, why not?

Let's try an original.

And so we did.

It was also one

of the toughest pictures I've had to make from

a physical point of view.

This girl, Ron's daughter

rather reminds me of a

conversation I had with an Indian friend of

mine and we were talking about

romantic or arranged marriages.

He was a very intelligent, very modern

minded man.

And he said something which made me say to him,

Tell me, Krishna,

what side do you come down on?

And he said, I think I come down on the

side of arranged marriage.

If anything, I said, why?

He said, because

with a romantic marriage

you expect heaven.

Heaven does not exist.

And so therefore you are bound for

disappointment.

While in an arranged marriage, you expect

nothing.

And if you get something,

you think you are extremely, extremely

lucky.

Robert and I started this script.

We wondered where to place the story because

we wanted to make a

very ordinary, simple

love story or a film about

love. Let's put it that way.

And in my opinion, the script

is the most important thing in the whole film.

If you haven't got a good script, you can't

make a good film.

When, for instance, I worked with Robert Bolt.

I said that the person I wanted most please

was the writer.

He didn't believe me then.

But he does now.

An enormous respect for the writer because he's

the man who gives the actors their words.

He gives them their characters.

He gives them really everything the author

gives me when I have to interpret the visual

point of view.

-When I'm writing a script for David.

I write it with David.

That is to say, we live

in the same building for a year.

And we work at it day by day.

-When we've finished writing

the script, when Robert's finished writing it

down, I

got by myself for the typewriter

and I start page 1,

scene 1 and I will

write close up so-and-so,

so-and-so. So-and-so, so-and-so.

Two medium

shot sounds and sits down at a table

and does this. And I'm sitting at a typewriter.

I'm trying to visualize pictures

that will flock together and look

as if they're a continuous movement.

-It is awfully difficult to compare director

somebody, but he has his own individuality

and everybody directs

pictures his own way.

The one distinguishing

quality for David is that when you

prepare a script with any one of those

other excellent and very

competent directors,

you kind of expect that at best

you'll get on the screen.

But the transposition of your script, just

the way you expected it when it's very good.

Sometimes a little less with

David. The result is always

invariably an element of added surprise.

He always bring something added

to what the script called for.

Whether it is in

photographic setups or whether it is

surprise cutting notions

that occur as he shoots the picture.

-David, he puts three years into a film.

A year with me on the script, a year

shooting, a year cutting and dubbing.

This is not because he is a leisurely worker at

all. He works like a coal miner,

literally seven days a week, literally 12

hours a day.

-My idea when we finished

writing the script and we

do spend a long time over it is

to get what we've written on the screen.

And if I can avoid

it, I won't change a line of dialog

and I keep in every intention

that we had in that script.

That's my job.

I'm trying to get the actors

to be the characters

in the script.

That is my only guideline.

And I'm very,

very wary about changes.

I am very, very wary about improvisation

because it leads

one,

if one's telling a story, it generally leads

one off on the side tracks.

And I think they can be very dangerous.

-Take one.

-If you could see how hard we have been working

here, I know you would forgive me, dear, for

not writing more regularly.

-When was that written?

-July the 20th.

-Eight weeks.

-But now the war seems really to have stopped.

The hospital is emptying and I shall have more

time.

I may even get time to write some verse.

-I don't really believe in the screen test

because you set somebody in front of a camera.

They're on trial.

They are generally given

a scene that they have to play

with an unimportant actor because you are not

going to get important.

They're all good actors coming along and

wasting their time on an unknown person.

And I think it's terribly unfair.

If you

if I have done it from time to time

and if somebody is 25 percent

good, you can automatically say they'll jump up

to 75 when they're in the actual film.

-I don't think it's a very good idea.

I think you will have to work on hunches.

I like meeting people, talking to them.

I have an idea of a character, a very strong

idea of the character I want to play.

And I think I wonder if you would do this by

asking a few questions.

And if they seem, as it were, simpatico

with the type of character I had in mind,

I'd generally take a plunge and go for.

-Actors are very restless people on the

whole.

And the poor actor is

told, right, we'll see you in four days

time. And he's rather like a puppet.

Sit back, put on the shelf.

And I suppose that accounts for it a lot.

They get very excited by their work, which I

understand very well. It's a kind of drug.

They go up to a high pitch in a seat.

They do a couple of days work on it.

And you say you've done wonderfully.

If they had been good, they'd they damn well

know it may go away high.

If I've done something which I think has come

off quite high in the evening.

I suppose I'm a kind of a nut in the way.

Most important thing in my life is my work.

I love getting near a camera and

a camera crew and

I like being filmed in rather wild places.

I find wild places exciting.

I think it's marvelous.

And I like showing things

on the screen that people in the

normal way don't see.

Starting the "Summertime", I saw Venice.

We had to shoot in Saint Mark's Square

and the shopkeepers all say, do you

realize you're ruining our business?

How much will you pay us?

We are losing this and that and everyone's

at the mercy of the inhabitants.

Then after that, I went to the deserts

of Jordan and Morocco.

Some of the most stupendous days I've ever had

in my life,

and I've got this bug of making

movies outside, mostly because

traveling excites me.

And it's really like a continual

cruise through life.

I'll never except when I'm very old,

go back to that dark hole and

return to the studio.

Costumes are always a problem.

The actual detail work,

I think is not all that difficult

because you can go into

museums and libraries

and you can copy styles.

Of course, it needs real flair

to give that extra something

about a costume.

One of the most difficult things about doing

costumes for a picture is

making them look as if they really belonged

to the actors.

A lot of the people in the wardrobe department

spend hours with pumice stone,

razor blades and knives

wearing down materials at the

elbow, putting in leather patches,

and gradually they begin to look used.

But it's a very difficult thing to achieve.

Alexander Porter said to me once about

a certain director he's a bloody fool,

he thinks he only has to direct the actors.

And of course, as far as one can.

One has to direct everybody's job.

That is, give them help.

The art director, for instance,

we've got to talk together for hours.

He does a lot of drawings

and we discuss the sort

of settings should be the sort of atmosphere

we want to create.

The advantage of building sets

as opposed to using real

places is that

it's much cheaper.

We built a Moscow street

in Spain for "Zhivago".

Now, the alternative would have been to go

to Moscow if we'd been

allowed in Moscow, which we would not have

been.

It would've been almost impossible to work in a

Moscow street. I mean, I've tried it.

I've tried it in Venice, but it cost a fortune.

But in the case of "Ryan's Daughter",

we wanted very much to give the

idea of a very isolated

community.

So we built a village

in the desolate part of the West Coast,

which was surrounded by hills.

But there was another building inside.

And I think it achieved

what we were after.

It's a cheap thing to build sets.

We've got the people there.

They're paid anyhow and one only have to pay

for the materials. And that, compared

with the disadvantages

of shooting in real places, is enormous.

Working with crowds can vary.

Actually, I prefer working with

amateurs.

Bedouin in the desert,

although most of them never been to a movie,

got the hang of the thing pretty quickly.

And we explain

to interpreters what they were supposed

to be recreating

and they did it very, very well.

In fact, an amusing sideline on this is that

when we had a whole string of camels

and riders as a distance

where they couldn't hear us yelling for them to

start, we used to fire a very

pistol into the air which would go off with a

loud bang.

And after about a couple of weeks, the camels

all started on the first bang

for the signal to stop.

We used to fire two bangs and the camels

automatically stopped two

bangs.

In Ireland, we had

a lot of extras from the very tough districts

of truly, and

the Irish are very natural actors.

We used to explain the scene to them.

I don't believe in not explaining the scenes

to the crowd.

Trouble is the same with ordinary actors.

You got to get them

simmering and make the first tape when they

come to the boil.

It generally runs down after that spontaneity

goes.

I've been

very bewildered by this question

of sex and the permissiveness

on the screen.

I've tried to keep my feet on the ground.

Think it's a wonderful thing that we've got

more freedom mean not long ago we couldn't have

a married couple in the same bed.

We used to have to have twin beds

and I think it's marvelous that's broken down.

And I'm not as if we're alarmed by

it at all.

I understand very well what's happened

and that the whole thing started in England

is no accident. I think where we had this

rigid control, this rigid

puritanism, and it's no

wonder that that is where

swinging London got its name and

why it got its name because

it was so rigid.

I mean, I know I was brought up a Quaker

and when I was young, I wasn't

even allowed to go to the cinema because it was

a wicked place.

It also poses a terrible question for a

director because of

the type of love scene he shows.

If you're with it, you show

everything.

If you are old hat, you'll evade and

it's frightfully hard to

strike a balance. I think one's just got to say

what does the story need?

It's very difficult to show

sexual love because the body

is just an instrument.

It's a light to one's imagination,

surely, and that's a tough one to show

on the screen.

It is impossible to make a really well-made

picture without spending money.

-It's not a question of wasting money, but to

get optimum results takes

time and nothing is more expensive in films

than time.

And David, as a man, is a perfectionist.

And if he is making a film, he wants to get

as near to 100 percent

of what he visualized from the script as he

possibly can.

-David is a perfectionist and he wants

everything

exactly the way he visualizes

it. And you can't do this on a shoestring.

You've got to have all the equipment with you,

the realism that you get from

shooting a picture on occasion is

very, very important as opposed to

the old fashioned way that we used

to do years ago, shooting everything in the

studio.

And usually with David Lean and David Lean and

sort of pictures you nearly always get spring,

summer, autumn, winter.

So as you try during the summer to get your

summer scenes and then you know that later on

you're going to get your autumn scenes and then

your winter scene.

So this makes for realistic

atmosphere for the whole picture.

-When one becomes a professional, the very fact

that one's been given a lot of money

to make a film with is

automatically if it were a dirty

word. Money is a dirty word nowadays.

I don't know why it should be.

I don't think the public had this attitude at

all. I think if they go

into the theater

and they start to be gripped by what's up

on the screen, they don't give a

damn. If it cost nothing,

as it were, or it cost a lot.

If they're involved now, are excited by the

images they see.

All that goes out the window and they will go.

I've spent months

working with a great big traveling circus;

actors, technicians,

people who work overseas

and wind machines and we have

thousands of vehicles

and we chase all over the country and

say that we are one of the last of the

traveling circuses.

At the end of it all. Here I am in a very, very

small room and the whole thing

is just on that.

And it is wonderful peace and quiet.

When I make a film, I can't help

seeing it as

a cutter sees it.

And every scene that's played,

although I'm standing by the side of the camera

and not looking through it,

I think I see an oblong.

In a curious way, I've got so used to the shape

that I can put oblong around the person.

And I also, although we

are sitting on the set with live people, I

see it as the picture,

but I'm sitting in here now

and I think, yes, that's very good.

That's all I know that pity.

But I can cut to a close up, which I'm about to

take there and come back to you there.

And I try

to shoot the cutting room in mind.

Of course, I make many, many mistakes.

I don't think anybody can precut a

film. I start from the beginning.

I try not to have any cutting

down while I'm shooting it because

if I wait till the end of the picture,

there's a marvelous excitement starting at reel

one with a whole load of film

and telling a story

in pictures, in fact, very often

I can't wait to grab the next bit of film

to see if that longshot cuts onto that close

up. It's very exciting.

I've often come out of the theater and heard

the audience saying, wasn't it wonderful

photography?

I've sort of walked along beside them

eavesdropping.

And very often they're not referring to

photography at all.

They're referring to cutting.

As a cutter you decide what

an audience should look at when.

And this is a very fascinating business.

This is one of the reason why, of course, the

people object to films.

They say you make dogs and children act.

Up to a point you can, but you

can't really cheat a great performance.

I was very frightened of a scene we had in

which a whole group of dragoons

charge a procession.

I was frightened of it because I've seen so

many horsemen charging

people. The sword comes, swords

come out.

You have close ups of the sword being

lifted and the close up of

a man with head being split open, falling down

the street. And it's bong, bong, bong,

bong. It's a kind of bore.

And I got the idea.

I'm not showing any of it at all.

So what I did was this.

I had the dragoons charged

down the street.

The people start to run.

Little incidentals, some running backs

of the drum rolling down the street.

And then at the moment,

the clash came a couple of

big close up of Omar Sharif

and I stayed on him.

Hearing the yells and the cries offstage.

I held it for quite a long time and then cut

back to the street and they have the bodies

lying there.

Thank goodness it I think worked,

but if it hadn't worked, I'd have been cooked

because I didn't shoot any of that

saber bashing.

As far as music is concerned,

I always think of it as soon

as we start writing the scenes,

very often visuals

will carry

a complete point.

And I like long silence

sequences where people don't talk.

Now, sometimes this is very good with natural

sound.

And I'm always saying the sound editors, the

people who do the soundtracks,

don't be too natural with your sound

use sounds as an orchestration

to the picture.

Many's the time music has saved

me, I've made a mess of a scene

or in the case

of an actress, and you should be

soft.

And if she is hard, a little bit of soft music

will do for her.

I really use them as effects, I think.

And on top of that, I like a good tune.

-To what extent the picture is

commercially held by music is

really difficult to determine because one never

knows how many people would have seen the

picture without the help of the music.

But one thing is definite that in some

cases the popular success of a

musical tune in the record world

and the television world and so on,

it stimulates the attendance

at the cinemas to such an extent

that you notice visible

and marked increase in

attendance.

And that was true,

for instance, in the picture that David Lean

made

"Doctor Zhivago", which

began extremely well, but not as

well as it did once the music became

much more popular.

It helped us a great deal, I'm sure with

"Bridge on the River Kwai", the jaunty

whistling tune has becoming an international

success, although it preceded our picture

and its origins by 40

years.

When you're young, when you've got a small

budget, when people

are not really expecting

much from you and you make

a halfway good film.

The critics are very, very happy

to give one a lifting hand.

When one has made a few successes

they begin to be suspicious of you.

This applies also to actors.

I remember saying to Julie Christie after she'd

done "Zhivago", I said, you're cooked.

You're now real professional and

they'll start slapping you down.

And this is what happens with many of us

directors.

The great thing, if you want critical approval

when you read it many, many times is

to make a film on a shoestring, publicize

it, and then have a distributor

turned down the film altogether and showed to

the critics they would all come screaming for

it to be shown.

Now, they're not talking about books, and I'm

not talking, of course, about painting and that

sort of thing where the artist has

a canvas for a blank piece of paper in

front of him.

But with movies, you are

spending a fortune every day

and the just distribution companies

rather glory in taking the biggest ever.

We spend a million dollars on this or the

insurance or some somebodies legs

cost that.

And by the time it comes on the screen, the

critics are generally ready to say,

alright, now show us, we'll crack

down and they do crack down.

I think one of my

great values, I always think

of this when I'm doing the scene.

Is it true?

And that especially applies

nowadays. I think it's always apply, but it's

more and more true today.

Audiences on the whole,

I think have been way ahead

of the film industry as a whole.

The film industry is too often played down to

audiences.

And I think it's quite easy

to make an exciting film,

which is exciting for the moment.

But when the audience go out of the

theater, they instinctively know

that it was really basically a phony.

And I think the audience is pretty damn smart.

Being a director is a terribly lonely

job because very often

people don't quite know what you are aiming at

and in a certain way one doesn't know

oneself, one's got

a smell of what the scene could be.

One imagined one would set up the camera here,

look through it and there would be a shot one

imagined, you looked through the camera and it

isn't at all. Then, the trouble starts.

I generally send people off tea

and wander around rather miserably by myself.

In fact, there was one occasion on "Lawrence"

where I had that awful pressure

which often comes on you.

I had a thousand camels and a thousand

horses all waiting

and wondering what on earth was happening.

I just couldn't get an angle on it and

I finally got it.

But my goodness ther are lonely moments.

I think one of the most difficult

things about a director's job is

that he's got to be a bit of a dreamer.

And dreamers don't generally

go hand in hand with practical people.

And if you're going to be a director, you've

certainly got to be practical.

It's not an airy fairy business at all.

It's a hard job of work like a carpenter.

I'm very old now.

I've had, as it were, a kind of classical

training in films, and

I find it hard even

at my age

to be able to make any great statements about

life and

so I I try to tell

a story about

people, about life, but I

just have to trust that

what pleases me will please an audience

or what excites me will excite an audience.

Of course, I can be terribly, terribly wrong.

But if I start wondering

what this person or that person will think of

it, I am lost.

I can only please myself

and hope to God that you people like

it.

I personally don't feel that I'm capable

of making great statements.

I think there are very few artists who are.

There people who are acclaimed as such.

But all right.

Give me Shakespeare, Beethoven

or somebody like that.

But we haven't produced anybody like that in

the movies.