"I’m a big fan of David Lean. Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and Dr. Zhivago take up three of my favorites. This can go for all three of Lean’s films, because they’re all very similar. They all have very strong characters, very developed characters. He has a unique visual style; it’s very important for the way the movie looks. There are stories about how he’d sit in the desert for half a day, just waiting for the clouds to be right before he’d start filming. You can imagine what a producer would be doing during this. [Smiles] So I love films that have strong visual styles, and all of those films have very unique styles."

"I’m a big fan of David Lean. Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and Dr. Zhivago take up three of my favorites. This can go for all three of Lean’s films, because they’re all very similar. They all have very strong characters, very developed characters. He has a unique visual style; it’s very important for the way the movie looks. There are stories about how he’d sit in the desert for half a day, just waiting for the clouds to be right before he’d start filming. You can imagine what a producer would be doing during this. [Smiles] So I love films that have strong visual styles, and all of those films have very unique styles."

"I’m a big fan of David Lean. Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and Dr. Zhivago take up three of my favorites. This can go for all three of Lean’s films, because they’re all very similar. They all have very strong characters, very developed characters. He has a unique visual style; it’s very important for the way the movie looks. There are stories about how he’d sit in the desert for half a day, just waiting for the clouds to be right before he’d start filming. You can imagine what a producer would be doing during this. [Smiles] So I love films that have strong visual styles, and all of those films have very unique styles."

"It [was] unlike almost anything else before it. I think so often movies try to do too much, especially when you try to adapt a big, sprawling novel into a film, and you try to compress hundreds of years or generations. It can work, certainly, if you’re Kurosawa or David Lean or somebody. But a lot of times, the best movies are not novels, they’re poems. That movie is just this beautiful tone poem. I don’t know how many pages of a script that is. It’s probably a very short script, but she used the medium so well. And when we saw that, we thought, “Wow.” We kept thinking about that movie, too, when we were writing, although we ended up writing something much more verbose."

"As in the Max Ophuls film, Lean also deals with romantic love outside of marriage and intelligently understands that these relationships were sad and not meant to be. But with the end of marriage as anything more than a foolish, outdated formality that no one takes seriously anymore, the romantic film has logically disappeared, and there have been no great romantic leading roles for women ever since. The vulnerable, sympathetic character Katharine Hepburn so beautifully plays would be now considered some kind of neurotic nutcase, but I think it’s her best performance and it’s David Lean’s best film. He specialized in this genre of marital infidelity in films such as Brief Encounter and Passionate Friends, and when he gave it up for his outdoor spectacles, I don’t think he was ever as good again."

"This is just maddeningly brilliant. At once sweeping and epic, and yet searingly personal, thanks to the incredible work of Peter O’Toole. It’s such a long film, which I love, and yet there’s not a moment in it that seems like it’s played too long. Everything from the rich orchestral score, to the extraordinary photography of F.A Young, and David Lean at the peak of his powers make this a timeless film, and one that remains, sadly, as relevant today as when it was shot. It’s about political and financial power and about the subjugation of a people, the fight for freedom and the power of the individual to make a stand against the imperial. All the performances are fantastic, from Sir Alec Guinness to Omar Sharif and on. Again, this feels like a perfect piece of cinema to me."