The movie Steven Spielberg called a “major miracle”
Scope and breadth have never been in short supply with Steven Spielberg. The iconic Hollywood director has brought some of the most impressive images to the forefront of his films, whether it’s the terror of a shark attack in Jaws, the mindblowing walk of dinosaurs in Jurrasic Park, or the otherworldly wonder of aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and ET. But for Spielberg, the origins of his style can be traced back to a historical drama rather than anything mythical and magical.
Lawrence of Arabia was an instant classic when it premiered in 1962. The biographical tale of T.E. Lawrence and his struggle between his British identity and the compassion he had for Arab soldiers during the First World War was a major revolution in visual storytelling and cinema. Spielberg would have been on the verge of his 16th birthday when the film originally premiered, and it certainly stuck with him as he began his own dreams of filmmaking.
“Certainly, Lawrence of Arabia was the film that set me on my journey,” Spielberg revealed to the American Film Institute. “I look at that picture as a major miracle. I mean, even the illusions were not done [with] CGI. CGI, I think, stood for something else in those days – it had nothing to do with optical effects.”
“That movie, it just uplifted me,” Spielberg added. “And I think it was little things like camels in a wide shot leaving virgin tracks and wondering, ‘Where was take two? If that was take five, how many days ago was take one?’ Little things like that technically provoked me to want to know more about how movies were made.”
“And also the mirage when Omar Sharif is riding up and that illusion, which I guess today would be created by optical effects, but then was absolutely what they caught on film, with an 800-millimetre telephoto lens,” Spielberg also marvelled.
“And then right down to the small story that Lean was able to tell such small stories,” Spielberg gushed. “Intimate portraits, and he’d make you just as sensitive and close to the life that T.E. Lawrence was living and surviving as he would about giving you spectacle and the attack on Aqaba and everything else that got me excited about making movies someday.”
Watch Spielberg discuss Lawrence of Arabia down below.
