by Jenny Nelson
From the grand opening timpani to the percussive crashes and brass fanfare, followed by those strings, the scale, romance and pure hummability of the ‘Overture’ instantly transport the audience to the heat of the desert. Maurice Jarre was keen to include a range of instruments to capture the spirit of the location, including a rather eerie-sounding type of electric keyboard called an ondes martenot. Now synonymous with the sweltering desert heat, it’s hard to listen to the score without picturing the landscape or the famous scene in which Lawrence blows out a match and then the audience feasts on a sunrise filling the screen. The composer, who described the visual imagery in this editing cut as poetry, accentuated this glorious moment with his music, but it’s interesting to note he exercised restraint in other key scenes. When Sherif Ali, played by Omar Sharif, is introduced emerging from the mirage on the far horizon, riding a camel, there is no music. He is a dot on the landscape, gradually becoming bigger as he approaches Lawrence and his guide, Tafas, but the only sound we hear are the camel’s footsteps on the sand, allowing the audience’s curiosity about this new character to build.
Finally, Lawrence of Arabia was complete in time for the London premiere. The film came to 222 minutes and was shown with an intermission, but later it was cut by twenty minutes, at Spiegel’s request. Another fifteen minutes were later deleted on reissues, but a director’s cut was released in 1989, with some additional musical cues – ‘First Entrance to the Desert’, ‘Night and Star’, ‘Lawrence and Tafas’ – that beautifully demonstrate further experimentation with the famous theme. Later, in 2000, it was restored for a special DVD release, and directors Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese were involved in the project because it had been so influential to them. Spielberg has said this was the first film he saw that made him want to become a film-maker.
Lawrence of Arabia received ten Academy Award nominations and won seven, including Best Original Score, Best Picture, Best Director, Best Film Editing and Best Cinematography for Freddie Young, another regular Lean collaborator. The director said in the early 1980s that the making of this film had been one of the best experiences of his life. Lean had a reputation for being demanding with his close crew members and somewhat dismissive of actors – Omar Sharif once said he found it easy to hate him because he treated people on set like objects – but a clear bond had formed between director and composer.
David Lean and Maurice Jarre in 1963, when they were working on Lawrence of Arabia.
Although an exacting director, David Lean was loyal and willing to take a stand to ensure he had the best people on his team, and he insisted that Maurice Jarre worked on his next project, Doctor Zhivago (1965), an adaptation of Boris Pasternak’s Nobel Prize-winning novel. The MGM music department acknowledged the composer’s skill at scoring for the desert landscapes, but thought they could get someone better for the snowy Russian setting of this film. Lean did not agree. The studio, who were looking for a hit after a series of financial failures, yielded to him, and he recruited many other Lawrence of Arabia collaborators, including screenwriter Robert Bolt, costume designer Phyllis Dalton and production designer John Box.
The director wanted to make a more romance-driven film, and the love story between Lara and Yuri set during the Russian Revolution seemed just right. The book was banned in the Soviet Union, so Lean had to turn elsewhere for filming and, following his experiences shooting scenes for Lawrence of Arabia, decided on Spain. Some of the winter scenes were filmed in Finland but for the most part the task was to turn Spain into Russia, which was all the more challenging during an unseasonably warm winter. Thousands of tonnes of crushed white marble dust were used to create a snow effect in a forest as they brought Moscow to the outskirts of Madrid.
Doctor Zhivago is another visual triumph, packed full of memorable scenes, and was promoted as MGM’s successor to Gone with the Wind. Keen to make the most of this incipient hit, the studio wanted to release the film in time to be eligible for the Academy Awards, as well as opening in cinemas before Christmas to attract audiences during the holidays. Filming finished on 7 October 1965, so Lean had just over two months to do the editing, an enormous pressure considering he usually took around six months to complete that complex task. For the composer, however, this was a luxury compared with the deadline pressure of Lawrence of Arabia. Perhaps he would be able to sleep for a whole hour at a time!
Since Jarre’s Oscar win, he had scored more international films, such as The Longest Day (1963) and Behold a Pale Horse (1964) and he made his first trip to Hollywood in 1965 to work on The Collector. He recalled the director briefing him thoroughly for Doctor Zhivago, in keeping with his meticulous approach to all aspects of the film-making process. Lean once revealed, ‘I think a composer must be told what to do. Very often the music supplies half the emotional and dramatic effect. Seeing a film before the music is added, an observer might think, “Well, that shot’s completely unnecessary.” But with the music he will see the reason for it. I think that to have the composer on the set before the film is finished is generally a waste of time. With Maurice Jarre I wait until I get a rough cut. Then I show it to him and discuss, very broadly, where music is probably to be used, and what it should do.’
Lean couldn’t read or write a word of music, but over the decades as a director, he grew in confidence when it came to telling a composer exactly what he wanted. He was always rigidly loyal to the script – so much so that he would often dictate the intonation to the actors, much to their annoyance. Whenever words failed him, he would invite actors to look through the camera so they could understand his point of view. When it came to the music, he could not be specific in his instructions, and could say only, ‘Well, Maurice, I think you can do better’, which was precisely his reaction to Jarre’s first attempt at a love theme for Doctor Zhivago. Three of the composer’s themes were rejected by the director. Sensing Jarre’s disappointment, Lean had a brainwave: take a break.
The director told the composer to spend the weekend with his girlfriend in the mountains of Los Angeles, with the hope that he would find inspiration. Lean reminded Jarre that the theme did not need to be specifically Russian in tone, but rather a universal theme of love, and it’s said the composer had such a good weekend that he sat down at his piano on the Monday morning and wrote ‘Lara’s Theme’ in one hour. On the film’s release, some critics felt it was over-used in the film, but Lean and producer Carlo Ponti were so taken with the theme that they couldn’t resist using it at every opportunity, and the director attributed the success of Doctor Zhivago in part to this piece of music. With the addition of lyrics by Paul Francis Webster, it was transformed into ‘Somewhere My Love’ and was a huge hit in the singles charts, pleasing the studio no end by bringing awareness of the film to a wider audience.
Jarre had been inspired by the great Russian composers, such as Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, for this score. The scale of the film required a big sound and the composer worked with a 110-piece orchestra, a 40-member chorus and a group of balalaika players. He incorporated the recently invented Moog synthesiser into the score but the balalaika, a Russian stringed instrument with a triangular body, produces an idiosyncratic, vibrant sound. It stands out, not least because of its significance in the story. Lieutenant General Yevgraf Andreyevich Zhivago believes a young woman called Tanya may be the child of Lara and his half-brother Yuri, and when he learns that she is self-taught on the very instrument that Lara played so well, he responds knowingly, ‘Ah, then it’s a gift.’ No one in the MGM studio orchestra could play the balalaika, but that didn’t deter the composer, who went to a Russian Orthodox church in downtown Los Angeles to recruit a group of people who could. Jarre later revealed that they were unable to read music, so he taught them sixteen bars which they learned by heart.
The score for Doctor Zhivago serves as an aural description of some of the scenes in the film, such as the burial of Yuri’s mother, with the music accompanying the dirt hitting the coffin in ‘Funeral Song’. The
composer reinforced the sound effect with zither, tubular bells and kettledrums to enhance the impact, and make it feel more shocking to the viewer. While Jarre was working on these detailed elements, Lean was busy in the cutting room. He was still putting the finishing touches to the edit when Jarre finished recording the score with the MGM orchestra on 14 December 1965, just eight days before the premiere.
At over three hours, Doctor Zhivago was another long slice of Lean and not all the critics were favourably disposed towards it, owing to its romanticised representation of the Russian Revolution. The director didn’t always have the best of relationships with critics, but what did that matter? The audiences loved Doctor Zhivago. The film was Lean’s greatest box-office success and remains one of the highest-grossing films of all time, when the figures are adjusted for inflation. Winning five Oscars from a total of ten nominations, it was lauded for its screenplay, costume design, art direction, cinematography and, of course, its score.
Another David Lean film, another evocative setting; this time the west coast of Ireland, although here the director’s successful streak came to a halt. Ryan’s Daughter (1970) is a retelling of Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. Described on promotional material as ‘a story of love’, it concerns a young, married Irish woman who has an affair with a British soldier in a remote village after the Easter Rising of 1916. This was Jarre’s favourite among Lean’s films, and his preferred score from their collaboration. The director specifically asked the composer not to write typically Irish music, and while some folk music and jigs are incorporated, the overall effect is tender and wistful, a contrast to the sweeping scale of their earlier projects. Both Lean and Jarre felt that big orchestrations were not fitting for this tale, and ‘Rosy’s Theme’, starting with a simple flute melody, feels lighter in comparison to the music for Lara and Lawrence.
In keeping with their previous collaborations – and in contrast to most of the other partnerships in this book – the composer was not involved at the start of the film or invited to visit the set. During a radio interview in 1970 to promote Ryan’s Daughter, Lean explained how the score was created after Jarre had watched the early cut of the film: ‘He will write some main themes. He doesn’t attempt to fit it to the picture at all. He just plays it on the piano. And it’s frightfully difficult to tell, because he’ll say, “Well, bum-bum-bum . . . this will be the violins; this will be the drums; and then there’ll be a very sad solo horn, I hope, coming in here.” And so on and so forth. And then when one’s got the picture finally cut and you’re not going to make any more alterations, you decide exactly where the music’s going.’ Lean would then provide Jarre with precise duration requirements for the cues, and the composer would work watching the scenes on a small movie projector called a moviola, playing the piano along to what he saw, sometimes recording what he played onto a tape-recorder so he could then assess how, and whether, it fitted with the picture.
After the initial, detailed briefing discussions between the director and the composer, and the early themes played on the piano, Lean would leave Jarre to compose and orchestrate the full score, but would return to provide more input during the recording session which, in a pre-digital age with no tools at their disposal to create mock-ups of scenes or the score, he described as an ‘absolute nightmare’: ‘There are anything up to a hundred musicians sitting there – and you literally hear the thing as it’s meant to be for the first time. And every now and again I’ll ask him to do a slight adjustment. I’ll say, “This has an overall gay feeling to it. Can you put in a touch of sadness somewhere?” Or, “Can you make it a little more exciting there?” It’s very hard to describe.’
Jarre’s one big bold moment in his comparatively muted score comes during the crucial storm scene, the reason the production took twelve months instead of the expected six, because the director was waiting for (literally) the perfect storm. The composer throws in big percussion, brass and woodwind to accompany the characters as they are bashed about by the elements as they try to recover a shipment of arms from the sea, and the unleashed instrumentation adds to the drama. For a director who was so skilled at editing, and piecing the film together, the placement of music was a crucial consideration. As Lean explained during the making of A Passage to India, ‘I get a tremendous kick out of seeing a sequence cut, I’m in the middle of it now, putting music to a film, getting the dialogue balance right, I find it immensely exciting.’
One of the highest-grossing films of 1970, Ryan’s Daughter received four Academy Award nominations, winning for Best Cinematography and Best Supporting Actor. Not a real failure by any means, but it pales in comparison with the other runaway successes of the Jarre–Lean collaboration. Later praised for its depiction of the Irish coastline and the claustrophobia of rural village life, at the time of release the critics had their knives out. David Lean met up with the National Society of Film Critics in New York to discuss their unfavourable reviews, and was shocked at the vehemently negative reaction. After spending hours being told everything that was wrong with Ryan’s Daughter, he decided to take a break from directing.
At the time, he was so shaken he claimed he would never make another film, though he did direct a documentary for New Zealand television about the salvaging of an anchor from one of Captain Cook’s ships. He also planned an epic two-part dramatisation of the Bounty mutiny story with his regular collaborator Robert Bolt, but Lean left the project after Bolt had a stroke and could no longer complete the screenplay because he felt the writer’s inclusion was vital to the film’s success. It was fourteen years before Lean directed another feature-length film, and it would be his last.
David Lean’s sixteenth film, A Passage to India (1984), was an adaptation of the popular E. M. Forster novel, set against the backdrop of the British Raj. Lean had been interested in making the film after seeing the theatrical version in 1960, but the author did not grant him permission. When Forster died in 1970, the governing board of fellows at King’s College Cambridge inherited the rights to his books, and these became available to film-makers a decade later when a professor who was a film enthusiast became the chief executor. Lord Brabourne, who had produced Franco Zeffirelli’s acclaimed Romeo and Juliet, bought the film rights with the intention of producing it, and was keen for Lean to direct, as a great admirer of his work. The contract for the rights stipulated that Santha Rama Rau, who had adapted the book for the theatre, would write the screenplay, but her initial efforts were rejected by the director and producer, so Lean worked on the script himself. Back to his usual ways of working, the film was shot entirely on location, and the fictional town of Chandrapore was rebuilt in the grounds of a maharaja’s palace in Bangalore.
Jarre described the director as being rejuvenated by this project, indicating that the hiatus in film-making had been a difficult time for Lean, as well it might for someone who lived and breathed cinema. Everything had been visualised by him in the script, including the use of music and where it should start and stop. In an interview in 1989, two years before his death, he describes a more collaborative way of working with the composer, despite his customary clear orders: ‘I always participate in the writing of the screenplay, and I always give directions for the music. When it should begin, when it stops, what it should express. When the composer starts getting involved – you’d think I was married to Maurice Jarre – I show him the script. I talk with him, I tell him the mood of the movie, and very often I’ll call upon him to rescue me because I’ve messed it all up.’ An interesting admission from someone who had such a clear vision for the film, and a touching insight of the trust between director and composer. Lean continues, ‘He’ll ask why, and then I tell him, “Here we need to have a dramatic feeling and it’s simply not there. You can do it with the music.” People always think that doing a movie is like writing a book. All it takes is to sit down in front of a blank page and that you have all the time in the world. As a director, my problem is that I constantly hear the sound of dollar bills fly
ing off. You have to work very, very quickly, and you can make huge mistakes. Or you might forget things. Music helps fix those lapses.’
Jarre, who once described Lean as ‘very demanding’ but clearly respected the director’s film-making vision, was undoubtedly bolstered by Lean’s continued trust in his abilities. The composer may well have relished yet another musical challenge that would allow him to experiment with more instruments, including the sitar and theremin alongside the trusted ondes martenot. The title music starts eerily before settling into an assured, jolly rhythm, but Lean instructed Jarre to compose more romantic, sensual cues for the scenes of Adela Quested’s self-discovery, such as the bicycle ride that leads her to a garden of erotic statues. The music was required to portray the emotions that the repressed British woman would not be able to articulate, and these were vital for the story, in which she would accuse a young Indian doctor of assaulting her. Jarre’s score helps to underline the cultural differences, by hinting at what is not spoken.
Considered as one of the greatest ever film adaptations, A Passage to India was a critical success. Time magazine devoted a cover story to Lean’s new movie with the headline ‘An Old Master’s New Triumph’, and the film was nominated for eleven Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Lean, who received his knighthood in the year of the film’s release, was nominated for three of them, Best Director, Best Editing and Best Adapted Screenplay, although A Passage to India was victorious only for Peggy Ashcroft for Best Supporting Actress and, yet again for Jarre, Best Original Score. Clearly, the collaboration between the composer and director produced magical alchemy, and Jarre credited Lean with setting the bar so high that he delivered a score that matched the quality of the film: ‘David Lean once said to me, “Maurice, you are the doctor of the film.” It is true that music can help a scene run more smoothly, but it has to be a good film for the music to have its best effect. Music can cure a minor sickness but it cannot help the terminally ill!’
