David Lean Documentary Set to Premiere at Cannes Film Festival

David Lean could shoot places that no one had seen before – India, Ceylon, Jordan – filling the screen with an amazing image.

“I like spectacle,” he once told an interviewer.

But he also knew how to capture the landscape of a human face: Peter O’Toole’s blue eyes against a blue sky; the dark eyes and gleaming jawline of Omar Sharif, the dreamy beauty of Julie Christie, and even the small but equally captivating faces of Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson.

Lean’s superior cinematic gifts, expressed on a large and intimate scale, focus on the documentary. Maverick: The Epic Adventures of David Leandirected by Barnaby Thompson. It premieres on Sunday, May 17 at the Cannes Film Festival in the official Cannes Classics section.

“Lean did a lot to introduce the modern grammar of filmmaking,” notes Thompson. “His films are very representative of what we think of when we think of the great cinematic experience.”

The film traces Lean’s incredible progress to the top of the medium – a very unlikely top for many reasons. As Thompson points out, Lean grew up Quaker and was forbidden to watch movies, which were considered bad. He was dyslexic, a condition that was not well understood at the time, leading his parents to underestimate his talents and view him as a dunce. Thompson was able to access Lean’s private papers and found a letter Lean’s father wrote when he was young, telling his son, “You’re not very good.” It was signed, “Lots of love, dad.”

Sensing a challenge, Lean gravitated toward visual imagery, first in photography and later as a motion picture editor, including on some of Powell’s and Pressburger’s films in the early 1940s. He became the most sought-after film editor in the UK, making a comfortable living from that métier. It was Noel Coward, the playwright and intellectual, who urged Lean to take on directing, Coward’s first adaptation. The Blind Spirit. Thompson, who directed the 2023 documentary on Coward, explores key relationships in Lean’s evolution.

It works Crazy About a Boy: The Story of Noel CowardThompson says, “I didn’t realize how involved they were because they seemed like two different people in some ways.” Thompson was drawn to the unexpected, or contradictory character of their individual ways.

“With Noel Coward, I always thought he came from a good family and maybe went to Oxford or Cambridge. When you find out he came from a poor family and dropped out of school at 10 – wow,” commented the director. “And with Lean, you found out he grew up a Quaker so he wasn’t allowed to go to the movies. And he was a guy who made some of the most romantic movies in the world but he didn’t find lasting happiness himself. He was married six times. All of a sudden, ‘Ooh, that’s interesting.’ Then start digging deeper. Most of these films are about a person and about a person. Obviously, there is work and all that, which is important. But the thing that I think gives films their kind of heart is when you care about someone and that they have an interesting story.”

Maverick: The Epic Adventures of David Lean includes interviews with a great cast of other filmmakers who analyze the genius and the important role of Lean in the history of motion pictures, among them Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Wes Anderson, Celine Song (Past Lives), Brady Corbet (The Brutalist), Steven Soderbergh, Denis Villeneuve, Joe Wright, Alfonso Cuarón, and Nia DaCosta (Hedda).

“I make an effort to find a variety of filmmakers from many different ages and backgrounds,” notes Thompson. “I’m very happy with the way filmmakers like Nia DaCosta see them Lawrence of Arabia on video, I’ve never seen it on the big screen, it’s still being filmed by it… Brady Corbet makes a point — I always think 70mm looks amazing on big surfaces — but he makes the point that it does something on the human face as well.”

Lean shot both of them Lawrence of Arabia again Ryan’s daughter in 70mm (the producers put together his plan to shoot what was to be his last film, The road to Indiain that format). Ryan’s daughterthe period piece starring Robert Mitchum and Sarah Miles, proved River Lean, in the worst possible way. Critics, from Pauline Kael of the New Yorker to Richard Schickel of Time, hated the romantic drama. The harsh critical reception hurt Lean, and he did not direct anything for 14 years. Thompson believes the scrapping of that film has something to do with Lean.

“He never got over that feeling of inferiority,” he suggests. “And obviously, traditionally, when he was given that dressing down by critics Ryan’s daughterI think it was as if he came with the feeling that, ‘Dad was right, I’m nothing.’ …Now, dyslexia and things like that are recognized, but then it was like, ‘You’re stupid.’ And I think there’s no doubt that that drove him in many different ways throughout his life.”

This year we include 80^th commemoration of A Brief Encounter – the film Lean starring Trevor Howard and Celia Howard – shown at Cannes, and 60^th a reminder of the Lean classic, Dr. Zhivagocoming to the Croisette. Thompson has long experience with Cannes.

“I was there with Cate [Blanchett],” he says about the actress, recounting Maverick: The Epic Adventures of David Lean. “We were there A Good Husband again A Good Husband was the closing night film of 1999. Cannes means everything to me. It’s a festival that I think represents cinema in a very big way. And so, to present a film about a boy is something cinema, home cinema, it wouldn’t be very good.”