Where to watch Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Trivia & production notes

• David Lean originally pursued a Gandhi biopic with Alec Guinness attached to star and Emeric Pressburger writing, including location scouting in India and a meeting with Jawaharlal Nehru, before abandoning the project to focus on Lawrence of Arabia.
• Robert Bolt rewrote the screenplay to shift it from Michael Wilson's focus on historical and political aspects into a character study, and Bolt wrote virtually all of the dialogue in the finished film.
• Producer Sam Spiegel had to convince a reluctant A. W. Lawrence to sell the rights to Seven Pillars of Wisdom for £22,500.
• David Lean drew inspiration from John Ford's 1956 film The Searchers while developing his visual approach, with several scenes directly recalling Ford's work.
• The Aqaba attack sequence was reconstructed in a Spanish dried riverbed with more than 300 buildings meticulously based on the town's 1917 appearance.
• Peter O'Toole improvised a solution to camel saddle discomfort by adding foam rubber purchased at a market, which extras then copied, creating visible foam sheets on many saddles.
• Bedouin crew members nicknamed Peter O'Toole Abu-'Isfanj, meaning 'Father of the Sponge', after his foam rubber modification to his saddle.
• During filming of the Aqaba scene, O'Toole nearly died when he fell from his camel, but the animal stood over him and prevented the extras' horses from trampling him.
• The production relocated from Jordan to Spain due to production costs and illness outbreaks among cast and crew, preventing filming at Aqaba and Petra as originally planned.
• David Lean intentionally wrote the relationship between Lawrence and Ali as a gay romance, describing the film as pervasively homoerotic throughout.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Lawrence of Arabia (film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.