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Has there ever been a more ambitious filmmaker than David Lean? Even Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve, both lionised today as makers of jaw-dropping epics, would bow to this giant of British cinema, a man who recreated the Arab Revolt in pretty much 1-to-1 scale in Lawrence of Arabia in locations few westerners had even been to. And all at a time when ‘visual effects’ meant waiting weeks to send cast and crew into the teeth of an Atlantic storm, as he did on Ryan Daughter.
Villeneuve is one of the formidable talking heads looking back at Lean’s life in this enthralling, stylish doc. (Nolan is absent, presumably busy creating his own crackers epic in The Odyssey.) Paul Greengrass, Nia DaCosta, Joe Wright and Celine Song are a few of the other modern-day luminaries who share insights and adulation. Cate Blanchett provides husky narration and Spielberg shares stories of Lawrence of Arabia’s vice-like grip on his own consciousness.
Like Kevin Brownlow’s definitive 1997 biography of Lean, Maverick follows the great man from a painful Surrey childhood to a lifetime of adventure and epics, via a ground-up filmmaking education as first a tea boy and later master editor at Gaumont-British Studios. No one has travelled further from Croydon than the man who made The Bridge on the River Kwai, Doctor Zhivago and A Passage to India.
And maybe no one has had as much reason to. The ghost of Lean’s frosty, adulterous father is summoned in letters narrated by Kenneth Branagh that belittled David and downplayed his gifts. The flintily handsome Lean would share his dad’s desires, and tales of his own failed marriages show a man who found solace and excitement in women that would inevitably fade. Travelling the world with his Rolls-Royce, a permanent tax exile, there’s sadness and solitude in this portrait of a man who could explore the nature of heroism on screen but rarely emulate it in his own life.
There’s sadness and solitude in this portrait
Director Barnaby Thompson does a lovely job of tying the two identities – the filmmaker and the man – together. Maverick offers a trove of clips and behind the scenes footage; like a grumpy Alec Guinness suffering through a performance as Kwai’s martinet Colonel Nicholson that would win him an Oscar, or Zhivago’s Julie Christie discussing a director who could be cold yet brilliant with his actors.
For all his successes, Lean found how fickle film trends are when his 1910s romance Ryan’s Daughter flopped in 1970. ‘An awe-inspiringly tedious lump of soggy romanticism’ was Time Out’s verdict. Others were even harsher. In one of the doc’s many smartly chosen archive interviews, a bruised Lean recounts an infamous lunch-stroke-interrogation with top US critics, in which Time critic Richard Schickel demanded to know how the director of Brief Encounter could have made ‘a piece of bullshit’ like Ryan's Daughter. The memories of his father ripping him apart must have been vivid. ‘It had an awful effect on me for several years,’ he says. ‘In fact, I didn’t want to do a film again.’
Thompson, whose own mercurial career features producer credits on the Wayne’s World movies and co-director on the St Trinian’s ones, has paid rich tribute to a filmmaking titan and a complex human.
It’s a cinephile-delighting reminder that, trends be damned, Lean’s work is timeless.
In UK and Ireland cinemas Fri Dec 4.