Word: leaning
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...There were times when I felt like killing David," Julie Christie confesses. But she also admits that, as an actress disciplined in underplaying roles, she was taught to soar by Lean. "David would say to me, 'None of that timid sort of stuff.' So I let myself go. I went over the top. It was exciting...
...Lean's feeling was that nothing could defeat him but an inability to match Bolt's script and measure up somehow to the looming background figure of Pasternak. For although Bolt and Lean had simplified the novel to bring the love story into bright focus, Lean still had to cope with the evocation of revolutionary Russia and the land itself. "I don't think this is so much a novel," says Bolt, "as an enormous disguised poem...
Frozen Instant. To evoke Pasternak's poetic imagery, Lean led a camera unit almost to the Arctic Circle, hired Lapland nomads to portray Siberian refugees. To record the long train trip from Moscow to the Urals that is the central odyssey of the novel, Lean went into below-zero temperatures in the northern Finnish lumber town of Joensuu, photographed the "refugees" trekking across Lake Pyhaselka, over which, during the 1940 Russian invasion of Finland, the Soviets had actually laid a winter railway...
...Lean got what he went for, including the most tantalizing shot in the script. It calls for a frosted pane of glass, through which Zhivago is gazing, to dissolve into a field vibrant with daffodils. Lean found the perfect pane in a ski shack, hauled it into the open for the cameras. Then back the camera crew went to Spain, where 4,000 potted daffodils were put in place to complete the scene. On film, the sequence takes only an instant to show the change of seasons, but for Lean the effect is essential...
Sound of Snow. When the shooting in Madrid finally ended last Oct. 9, Sharif reports, "The cast wept." Even Lean, readying the last scene, said, "I don't want it to end." In fact, for Lean it was really only beginning. Back he flew to Hollywood with 31 hours' worth of color footage to be cut down to the final 3 hrs. 17 mins. To Lean, who made his reputation in the mid-'30s as a film editor, cutting is the ultimate art and his all-engrossing love. He moved into the stucco cottage on Metro...