{"id":590212,"date":"2026-05-18T08:00:18","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T08:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/590212\/"},"modified":"2026-05-18T08:00:18","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T08:00:18","slug":"meet-the-real-david-lean-classic-films-hundreds-of-lovers-and-actors-who-couldnt-stand-him","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/590212\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet the real David Lean: Classic films, hundreds of lovers, and actors who couldn\u2019t stand him"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Cannes Film Festival in the south of France is a springboard for new work and a showcase for fresh talent<\/a>, but it keeps one foot in the past and tends to the graves of its dead. Golden-age stars peer from the posters around town, while the schedule is peppered with restorations and retrospectives. Bygone filmmakers slap their names on the festival\u2019s main theatres (the Lumiere, the Bunuel, the Agnes Varda by the beach), where the evening screenings are referred to as seances. Cannes is noisy and lively. It is also chock-full of ghosts.<\/p>\n

Sunday\u2019s big seance, inside the Bunuel, saw the premiere of Maverick: The Epic Adventures of David Lean, an impassioned new documentary about English cinema\u2019s old lion, who took his final breath in 1991. It\u2019s hard to think of a more reliably dead great director than the creator of Brief Encounter<\/a> (1945) and Doctor Zhivago (1965). Every movie he made now carries the metaphorical waft of mothballs. He\u2019s been garlanded and embalmed, revered and entombed, and yet producer-director Barnaby Thompson comes at his subject with a spring in his step and finds intriguing fresh routes through familiar terrain. Maverick turns Lean into a live issue again: a blast from the past with a message for the present.<\/p>\n

Does this make the filmmaker sound like a wise old prophet? On the contrary, it seems that the man was a mess. Thompson\u2019s documentary covers a life of fumbled marriages (six) and frantic hook-ups (as many as a thousand, according to one friend). It reveals a director who was constantly chasing perfection and constantly feeling let down; a man forever harried by the terror of failure \u2013 professional, romantic, sexual, you name it. <\/p>\n

His actors, by and large, hated working with him. \u201cHe\u2019s monomaniacal and nothing else,\u201d said Robert Mitchum. \u201cHe\u2019s a hard man, a selfish man,\u201d remarked Omar Sharif. Shooting Ryan\u2019s Daughter (1970) on a storm-wracked Irish beach, Lean told the veteran actor Leo McKern to raise his right arm when the sea got too fierce \u2013 only to merrily ignore him when he did. McKern was dashed on the rocks, nearly drowned in the surf and had his glass eye knocked out. Kubrick could be brutal<\/a>; Lean took it to the next level. He was, says fellow filmmaker Paul Greengrass, \u201cone of the arsiest directors of all time\u201d.<\/p>\n

So what if colleagues bridled and his lovers bolted? Lean was also cinema\u2019s consummate craftsman, shrewd and exacting with a phenomenal strike-rate, at least in the moment. He vaulted from high-toned Charles Dickens adaptations \u2013 Great Expectations (1946); Oliver Twist (1948) – to the international spectaculars of The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962). He won two Oscars, six Baftas and the top prize at Cannes, but his reputation has faded in the decades since his death. In 1999, a BFI Sight and Sound poll of the best British films featured no fewer than three Lean pictures in the top five (Brief Encounter, Lawrence of Arabia and Great Expectations). In 2022, though, the same magazine\u2019s poll of the world\u2019s 100 greatest movies didn\u2019t find room for a single one. Lean\u2019s greatness, it seemed, had always gone without saying to the point where it wasn\u2019t being mentioned at all.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll admit that I\u2019d largely written him off. Lean was someone to admire but not necessarily to love, an establishment old master you could either respect or reject. He was less subversive and seductive than his near-contemporary Alfred Hitchcock; less wild and wanton than his onetime mentor Michael Powell<\/a>. So I\u2019m grateful to Maverick for forcibly setting me straight. Aided by an A-list of talking heads that includes Wes Anderson, Greta Gerwig and Steven Spielberg, this makes the case for Lean as an innovator, a trailblazer and a logistical genius. The Bridge on the River Kwai, his Sri Lankan-based war epic, is described by Spielberg as \u201cthe perfect picture\u201d, while Lawrence of Arabia set the standard for large-scale location filming. \u201cLawrence of Arabia is to cinema what the pyramids are to architecture,\u201d says the director Denis Villeneuve, who would use the film as a touchstone for Dune (2021).<\/p>\n

\"\u2018He\u2019s\u2018He\u2019s monomaniacal and nothing else\u2019: David Lean in 1953 (Getty Images)<\/p>\n

No doubt he\u2019s the father of the modern blockbuster, in that he loved the big canvas, the cast of thousands and the emotional wallop of a popular story. Francis Ford Coppola recalls how he, Spielberg and George Lucas<\/a> watched Lawrence of Arabia together at the Pacific Dome theatre in LA. They took the mantle and ran with it, right at the point when Lean was being put out to pasture; dismissed as a \u201csuper-technician\u201d by the New Yorker\u2019s Pauline Kael and \u201cmore an accountant than a poet\u201d by fellow critic David Thomson. Except that those judgements now feel harsh and wrong, because they ignore his grace notes and miraculous little details. <\/p>\n

Everyone remembers the extraordinary hard cut from the burning match to the dunes in the majestic Lawrence of Arabia (Lean stole the technique from the French New Wave). But I\u2019d forgotten the immense weight of the hand on the shoulder at the end of Brief Encounter and the brilliant distraction during Oliver Twist\u2019s murder scene as Bill Sikes\u2019 dog, Bullseye, scratches at the door to escape. Lean\u2019s sense of restraint tends to be held against him, but it was a precision-tooled instrument, like a rapier or a scalpel, and there\u2019s not a director who\u2019s used it to better effect.<\/p>\n

\"LeanLean directs Peter O\u2019Toole on the set of \u2018Lawrence of Arabia\u2019 in 1962 (Shutterstock)<\/p>\n

Maybe Lean is still big, and it\u2019s only the pictures that got small. It\u2019s no surprise that Maverick has been given pride of place at Cannes, a defiantly analogue festival that has no time for streamers and iPhones and demands a theatrical release for every new film it unveils. Lean, Coppola tells us, represents \u201cwhat cinema was supposed to be\u201d. Lean, says The Brutalist director Brady Corbet<\/a>, \u201cis a reminder of what we used to go to the movies for\u201d. He was the king of the widescreen, the master of maximalism who steered a thousand camels through the desert and constructed an entire Irish village from scratch. He proved it was possible to tell complex human stories on a gargantuan scale; to fully immerse a mainstream audience; to combine Oscar success with blockbuster receipts. <\/p>\n

Tastes change and the industry shifts, although recent evidence suggests that it may be starting to swing back, thanks to an uptick in Gen-Z cinemagoers. Lean was an outsider, then an insider. He was an establishment overlord and then a musty old antique. His work was conservative. It now looks weirdly radical. His filmmaking looked fussy; it now feels wild and free. Here in Cannes, if nowhere else, the man is back in his natural habitat. He\u2019s commanding the screen inside a 400-seat cinema: the once and future king, a movie maverick once again.<\/p>\n

\u2018Maverick: The Epic Adventures of David Lean\u2019 is screening at the Cannes Film Festival<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Cannes Film Festival in the south of France is a springboard for new work and a showcase…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":590213,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-590212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=590212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590212\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/590213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=590212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=590212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=590212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}