Peter O' Toole revisits Lawrence of Arabia shoot

my friends who will walk on water with me [Music] you are looking for a figure who will draw your country towards war yes orange is your man i was playing in uh the merchants of venice of stratford or navy i was one of the youngest ever leading men there i was what about 27 8 and convinced that you know i was going to be the the shakespearean actor and i got a phone call out of the blue from david lean would it be possible for me to come to london and if it were possible could we have a little meeting and i had a few days off and i went down and everybody in the world was to play lawrence of arabia except me and david he had in those days an indian wife lila and she traveled around with a guru the guru had gone to see a little black and white movie called the day they robbed the bank of england in which i play a young english army officer and he'd gone to david and said i've just seen the man who must play lawrence of arabia so david went to see the picture i've been seeing the picture that's when he telephoned me so we sat together david me a in a restaurant and we talked generally about one thing and another and he wanted to do a camera test so there was a mound of sand in the studio and i sat in front of the pile of sand wearing the the frock and this funny hat and then took it off and then put on an army uniform and um the following morning david said look i want you to play longs of arabia and the producer is sam spiegel so i said david lean you're in for a lot of trouble because he doesn't like me he's why i said well i i pulled a stunt on him about a year ago and um he doesn't like me at all but david when he stuck his heels down and were determined nothing would deter him so reluctantly spiegel agreed and i said to david well i'm prepared to do it with the greatest of pleasure but i need to read a script because that's what i do i make words flesh that's my job i mean i can't just say i am lawrence of arabia he said look all right i went to an office in london and he gave me the script but i wasn't allowed to leave the room i had to read it in the room and then i met david later on in the afternoon and he said what did you think i said it is the most beautiful adventure story and david said that bad but he then said look um who are the young playwrights around and i said robert bolt see he also they teach his history and robert and i were friendly the next thing i knew robert had taken over and he was doing the last version of the script i flew out to jordan to amman and i was introduced to his majesty the late king hussein and he said why would come out so early i said well i've got to learn to ride a camel i've got to learn how to wear the robes and in fact just to get used to the idea of being in this and the climate to get acclimatized because you know when you get into the middle of that bloody desert i mean it's a frying pan and there are days when the heat hurts and king was saying said well i can introduce you to my desert patrol and my instructor was a grandson of aoura abu tai who was played in the film by anthony quinn so i was taught to ride a camel by i woulda's grandson which was something but the camel was like riding a dragon this huge great thing and it's not like being on a horse you can't post or you just bump and nobody can ride a camel nobody not even the greatest bedouin riders nobody can ride a camel you just sit on top of the damn thing and hope to god it doesn't fling you off it is the most uncomfortable strange feeling and the saddles are made of wood you can imagine my bottom was in pieces so i had a few days off and i used to go regularly to beirut and i bought about a couple of yards of sponge rubber and i shoved it on my saddle within a month every bedouin wanted some sponge rubber so i was requisitioning yards and yards of sponge rubber so my contribution to atom civilization is the introduction of sponge rubber for bedouin to write on saddles and i was with these bedrooms for nine months they gave me several names but the first name the bedouin gave me was abus vince because of thin english they could get to sponge and finally they call me fahati which i was very proud of it means young lion and every day was interesting every day with them and imagine working with those actors truly for some men nothing is written unless they write it he introduced himself as omar sharif and i said no one can be called omar sharif that's impossible so i call him cairo fred it was shortened by everybody else to fred and we became known to david as the two fred's los dos freds [Laughter] remarkable intellect and humor and he's a graceful and a beautiful man we just became immediately friendly and it was like living with a young version of my father because my father was a professional gambler and homage you know he's a superb gambler and we just got on we still do we you know we're easy friends the english have a great hunger for desolate places i fear they hunger for arabia then you must deny it to them now they could have known david since he was an editor and they'd gone on for years and years and years and he did oliver twist together when he played uh fagin so they know each other very well indeed and he always called him the boy david and there was a wonderful moment i remember when alec was out in the desert for a little while sweating horrible and when this airplane fly over and alex waving his scimitar and tony quail was we were all just hot and horrible and tony look turned around and said oh the glamour of it all sipping champagne all day and dressing with the actresses the actor's life the turks pay me a golden treasure yet i am poor because i am a river to my people [Applause] tony and i were friendly before he made the picture we remain friendly and quinn's makeup was astonishing and so it was alex as you can see superb only two kinds of creatures get fun in the desert bedouins and gods and you're neither take it from me for ordinary men it's a burning fiery furnace oh beautiful claude how are you this morning claude i don't know what's the weather like i didn't look and small i had to do quite a lot of telescopic acting i had to shrink a little bit because we were doing the 70 millimeter it's different framing so if claude's body was in my head was out and if my head was in claude's body would come so we had to do strange things i have been in dura now for three and a half years if they posted me to the dark side of the moon i could not be more isolated joe was one of the reasons i became an actor when i saw cyrano de bergerac i mean i learned most of joe's species from i should do them all for auditions i'll give you an idea so when we met it was lovely was such a fine actor what do you mean by coming here dressed like that amateur theatricals oh yes entirely let me see that uh thing or whatever it is people ask me who i miss the most and i miss jack there never was a man who was so much on top of his material on top of of himself and yet his sense of humor was just so rich he was a shakespeare you know jack i have a record of him doing the [Music] fella freddie run was superb and not only did he uh light the thing beautifully and extraordinary he knew all the bits and pieces and everything i'll give you an example of freddie and his commitment um we needed shots of uh camel's footprints going over a dune well you can't say to a camera would you please go over that and do some nice footprints so freddie should do them he used to put big duster things around his feet and measured exactly a camel stripe and freddie would do the camel's footsteps so he could light the depth of it and the shadows wonderful and in the middle of the desert there would be david on a deck chair with his cigarette holder and he's puffing away and thinking and i would say vacant or in pensive mood day brother vacant vacant vacant or pensive pensive pencils you'd be thinking of dreaming but david led from the front in every single thing we did the thing that struck me almost immediately when we began filming was his admiration for good acting he loved it he was a connoisseur of good acting he expected the best if you gave him the best you had the best friend in the world and the moment he began to trust me we'd hardly ever spoke other than just to say um where are you gonna what are you gonna do and um on came the scene where he's given the white robes by his bedouin friends david came up to me in the morning and he said pete there's a hole i said there's a hole he said yes there's a hole i said where there's the hole in the script between putting the robes on and meeting our abu tai tell me pete what do you think a young man would do when he wore white robes for the first time in his life these extraordinary beautiful silk things he said will you think about him i think he won't respect him well i want a bit of mine as it were what would the young man do if you thought he was alone in the middle of the desert so i was deeply honored that he trusted me and david had picked this little semi-circle of flattened desert and behind it this sand dune which was against this matchless unsaturated blue of a desert sky he said to me there you go pete there's your stage you put a couple cameras on it and he said i need a minute so i did all my bits and bobs and the one thing and this happened when i was doing the take the one thing i thought that a young man would do would want to see himself well there aren't too many mirrors in the desert or even pools of water nothing and i was just going past the camera and it dawned on me that i had this big knife which is quite wide and i pulled out the knife and i could see myself in the knife and i just did that and i heard from behind the camera clever boy and it became a feature of the film because in the later battle scene david asked me to take the knife out again and look at this bloodied figure that has become from this touch of wedding touch of first communion a touch of frisky boy a touch of all sorts of things the innocence of it is ruined by the killing and the the death the innocence of it has gone and he realized what he's doing and you know this is human life that he's playing with like a ball it's a profound effect on what was a scholarly intellectual archaeologist do understand he was a young man t lawrence he was a young man in 1916 1917 his father died his favorite brother was killed in france he was emotionally uh wrecked i mean he adored his father he adored his brother the effect it had on him was was intense and here he was with no brief at all from the british government uh liaising with kings wearing arab clothes i mean nothing had ever been done like this before well i can't make out whether you're a bloody bad man or just half-witted i have the same problem sir shut up he never fitted into the oxford academy didn't he never fitted into the archaeological world he tried he never fitted into the military world and he used to forget to put his uniform on and turn up in a jacket hopelessly uncomfortable in an army uniform hopelessly uncomfortable the one thing he did do and tried to do above anything was to unite you know this impossible dream so he pushed himself to extremes to amazing extremes you tried very hard to give us damascus it's what i came for t lawrence was killed just after writing and publishing seven pillars of wisdom i read seven pillars of wisdom as a duty when i began to do the film but 15 years back i read it again and it is literature of the highest order angus wilson in the column the other day just said that when he reads seven pill he calls it the lawrence music i mean that man was writing beautiful beautiful english he would have been england herman melville he would have written a moby dick he would so we lost not just one of the most eccentric generals and arab leaders but a writer of true distinction i had the motorcycle scene to do and that's all i had left to do but the last shot of the film was practically the last shot of tear launch in the desert well sir going out it was my friend brian pringle who was the driver we were sitting in there hot wearing uniform tops but with nothing underneath we had our feet in buckets of ice and a drop of champagne at the side because it was the last shot and i had nothing to say except step through the window and um david did it over and over and over and over again he wanted it to be perfect irritating at the time but not now but the first thing he'd said to me on the first day of shooting was off we go pete on a great adventure and that stayed with me every time i was feeling a bit down or whatever as one does even you know without having to be in a film in the desert uh i would think of that but we were in a great adventure and it was and he just said well pete we've done the adventure we've finished our adventure and i was very moved actually but i could see david was lost you know he'd been his life for years but i was so delighted to get out of the desert that i got hold of the jeep i drove the bloody thing back to this little hotel we're in the waz azat i got my passport as much money as i had and a shirt and a pair of trousers and a jet and i drove across the atlas mountains to marrakech where i filled that with petrol and i drove myself in this jeep with my foot down on the pedal to um casablanca because i knew omar would finish the day before was in the nightclub called the aber aberdevoir we used to call it the abattoir and i wanted to get there before it closed and i did i wanted to celebrate david lean was completely open about his methods have a look through here pete and i would look through the lens ah and i'd get the picture when he was editing and he did it on the old sewing machine days with his gloves and his scissors he would ring me up from time to time to show me things he was doing i want to show you love cutting he said to me once love cutting he said well as you step from the armored car down to the ground you're a little bit clumsy and i don't want it i want to be completely graceful so watch i step off the armored car cut to anthony quail's face and then by the time he comes back the cloudiness is gone and it's just a graceful descent love cutting so he'd show me all sorts of things so i was watching the film being built and then came the first night in leicester square and that's the first time i saw it [Music] i'm a bookie's son and the first thing i do is look at the odds and i was about third favorite no no no no no there was a strong favorite i remember very strong favored indeed but i wasn't there i was working and i was disappointed certainly not to win but i wasn't surprised for i knew what the odds were if david had been in the military if david had been an archaeologist if david had been an explorer he'd have been in the front he was a leader and there was a great bond between david and me and i was with him when he was dying i sat with him and i i taught my took my young son to meet him we just sat and we held hands talked to first loves yes great filmmaker and an astonishing man there are times when i'm just completely absorbed in the picture and i see it for what it is other times people ask me if i'm fed up no it was one of the most beautiful experiences of my entire life i loved the history of the place i could do that i knew that my bible history my crusader history but i'm never fed up i never fed up i was fortunate and i felt chosen [Music] you

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Length: 21min 8sec (1268 seconds)

Published: Thu May 27 2021