David Lean Returns To Cannes In ‘Maverick’ Documentary, Exploring How Director Overcame Father’s Scorn To Become One Of Cinema’s Greatest

David Lean could shoot a landscape like no one else – in India, in Ceylon, in Jordan – filling the screen with stunning imagery.

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

But he could also capture the landscape of the human face: Peter O’Toole’s crystal blue eyes against an azure sky; the dark eyes and chiseled jawline of Omar Sharif, the dreamy beauty of Julie Christie, even the less glamorous but equally transfixing visages of Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson.

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

“Lean did so much to introduce the grammar of modern filmmaking,” observes Thompson. “His films are so representative of what we think about when we think about the big cinema experience.”

The film tracks Lean’s remarkable progress to the peak of the medium – an extremely unlikely ascent for multiple reasons. As Thompson reveals, Lean grew up Quaker and was forbidden from seeing movies, which were considered wicked. He was dyslexic, a condition not well understood at that time, leading his parents to gravely underestimate his talents and consider him a dunce. Thompson gained access to Lean’s private papers and found a letter Lean’s father wrote to him in his youth, telling his son, “You’re not very good.” It was signed, “Much love, dad.”

With reading a challenge, Lean gravitated towards visual images, first in photography and then as a motion picture editor, including on some of the films of Powell and Pressburger in the early 1940s. He became the UK’s most sought-after film cutter, earning a comfortable living at that métier. It was Noel Coward, the playwright and wit, who urged Lean to take on directing, first in an adaptation of Coward’s Blithe Spirit. Thompson, who directed a 2023 documentary on Coward, explores the pivotal relationship in Lean’s evolution.

Working on Mad About the Boy: The Noel Coward StoryThompson says, “I hadn’t realized how involved they were because they seemed like two such different people in a way.” Thompson was drawn to the unexpected, even contradictory character of their individual trajectories.

“With Noel Coward, I always assumed he came from a good family and probably went to Oxford or Cambridge. The moment you find out actually he came from a poor family and left school when he’s 10 – wow,” the director observes. “And with Lean, it was finding out that he grew up a Quaker and so he wasn’t allowed to go to the movies. And he was a guy who made some of the most romantic films in the world but never found lasting happiness himself. He was married six times. Suddenly, ‘Ooh, that’s interesting.’ And then you start digging deeper. So much of these films is really about the person and about the human. Obviously, there’s the work and all that, which is important. But the thing I think gives the films their kind of heart is if you care about the person and that they’ve got an interesting story.”

Maverick: The Epic Adventures of David Lean includes interviews with a remarkable cast of fellow filmmakers who analyze Lean’s brilliance and seminal role in motion picture history, 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 made an effort to get a cross-section of filmmakers from lots of different ages and backgrounds,” Thompson notes. “I was very heartened in a way that filmmakers like Nia DaCosta, who saw Lawrence of Arabia on video, never seen it on the big screen, was still captured by it… Brady Corbet makes the point — I always think about 70 millimeter being spectacular for huge landscapes — but he’s making the point that it also does something to the human face.”

Lean shot both Lawrence of Arabia and Ryan’s Daughter on 70mm (producers nixed his plan to shoot what became his final film, A Passage to Indiaon that format). Ryan’s Daughtera period piece starring Robert Mitchum and Sarah Miles, proved a watershed for Lean, in the worst possible way. Critics, from the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael to Time’s Richard Schickel, loathed the romantic drama. The harsh critical reception devastated Lean, and he didn’t direct anything for 14 years. Thompson believes the spurning of that film connected with something elemental in Lean.

“He never got over that feeling of inferiority,” he suggests. “And so obviously, classically, when he was given that dressing down by the critics on Ryan’s DaughterI think it was almost like he came away feeling like, ‘My father was right, I am worthless.’ …Now, dyslexia and things like that get recognized, but then it was just like, ‘You’re stupid.’ And I think there’s no doubt that that drove him in lots of different ways all through his life.”

This year marks the 80^th anniversary of Brief Encounter — the Lean film starring Trevor Howard and Celia Howard — screening in Cannes, and the 60^th anniversary of the Lean classic, Dr. Zhivagocoming to the Croisette. Thompson has his own longstanding experience with Cannes.

“I was there with Cate [Blanchett],” he says of the actress, who narrates Maverick: The Epic Adventures of David Lean. “We were there with An Ideal Husband and An Ideal Husband was the closing night film in 1999. Cannes means everything to me. It’s the festival that I think stands for cinema in the biggest way. And so, to be launching the film about the guy who is cinema, in the home of cinema, it couldn’t be more perfect.”