Perhaps the defining paradox of visionary British film director David Lean’s life is the discordance between his professional career, shepherding monumentally scaled productions, often in far-flung locations with zero infrastructure, and his messy personal affairs, hopscotching from one marriage or relationship to the next in a futile search for lasting happiness. “I’m able to live through a film as I can’t in everyday life,” says the subject in one of many archival interviews excerpted in Maverick: The Epic Adventures of David Lean.

Barnaby Thompson’s exhaustively researched film is made with the full cooperation of Lean’s estate. But even when it levitates into awestruck paroxysms about the unprecedented grandeur of classics like The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia, it avoids banal hagiography. While the talking heads assembled include many of the world’s great contemporary directors — all eager to acknowledge Lean’s profound influence on their work and cinema in general — there’s no attempt to gloss over the tyrannical perfectionist he could be during arduous shoots.

Robert Mitchum describes him as “monomaniacal” after working with Lean on the critical failure that threw the director’s career into limbo, Ryan’s Daughter. On that same film he insisted the cameras keep rolling while veteran actor Leo McKern came close to drowning, tossed about near the rocky shores of Ireland’s Western coast during a fierce once-a-year Atlantic storm.

Then there’s Omar Sharif’s frank assessment of Lean after making Doctor Zhivago, the 1965 epic that found massive commercial success despite being widely dismissed for crushing the spirit of Boris Pasternak’s novel, trivializing the Russian Revolution and reducing the complex story to soppy romance.

Sharif describes Lean as a difficult, selfish man to work with, driving people too hard in pursuit of what he wanted from a scene. “He had no pity for anyone, including himself,” says the actor, whose fame grew considerably thanks to his work with Lean on Doctor Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia.

Coming back from 14 years “in the wilderness” after the debacle of Ryan’s Daughter had shaken his confidence, Lean made his final film, A Passage to India, in 1984, on which his dogmatic approach caused open rebellion among the cast. Narrator Cate Blanchett recounts that Judy Davis was the most strident of them, hurling invective at the director and telling him point-blank that he had no idea what he was doing. (Davis received an Oscar nomination for best actress, while her co-star, British acting royalty Peggy Ashcroft, won for supporting.)

Lean comments on the unpleasantness of coping with “these personal hates” from mistrusting actors. But his own words appear to validate the frequent charge that he cared more about visuals than performances. Musing on the role of actors on a shoot, he says, “They are — and I say this in the best possible way — puppets.” Is there really a “best possible way” to suggest that actors are props operated by pulling their strings?

While there’s no evidence that he subjected his cast to the kind of psychological torture for which fellow uncompromising contemporaries Hitchcock and Kubrick were known, he could clearly be moody and impatient. Nigel Havers good-humoredly recalls telling Lean he had been unable to sleep the night before shooting began on A Passage to India. “Neither did I, I was so nervous,” Lean reportedly told the actor, who adds: “He took about a couple of hours before he got back in the groove, shouting at people.”

Despite these impressions of Lean being a spiky character, this is by no means a reductive portrait of the great director as an insensitive despot, and Thompson has gathered an impressive lineup of accomplished directors to acknowledge the many ways in which Lean built the model for the modern blockbuster. Revisiting the breathtaking location footage from his most ambitious projects makes you realize how much movie fakery we have now come to accept.

Steven Spielberg reveals that he rewatches The Bridge on the River Kwai every time he’s about to start shooting an action-adventure. Francis Ford Coppola and Denis Villeneuve talk about how Lean’s fearless sense of scale, never at the expense of story or character, informed their work. Paul Greengrass credits him as being one of a handful of directors who invented the language of film craft. Steven Soderbergh recounts how Lean, who started out as an editor, would habitually shape a first cut without dialogue or sound, letting the images alone tell the story — an approach Soderbergh stole and still uses to this day.

Weaving together an opulence of archival material and smart clip choices, Thompson and his editor Paul Van Dyck proceed chronologically through Lean’s professional and private life, starting with his childhood in the drab South London borough of Croyden with a strict Quaker family. He was dyslexic and a failure at school, prompting his emotionally cold accountant father to regard him as a dullard who would never amount to much. 

His father abandoned the family when Lean was 15, and while they remained in contact, the casual cruelty of his father’s letters and his complete dissinterest in his son’s work speak volumes about the admiration, even respect, David Lean spent his entire life fruitlessly seeking. He sent an official invitation to attend the royal premiere of Lawrence of Arabia to his father, who replied that it was too far to come. He is believed to have died without seeing a single one of his son’s films.

Maverick outlines Lean’s entrée into the British film industry in briskly entertaining fashion. Having taken up photography as a hobby, he knew movies were where he wanted to be. He took an entry-level “teaboy” job at Gaumont Studios and within three years had moved up through the ranks to the editing room. He springboarded from cutting newsreels to features, most notably Powell and Pressburger’s 49th Parallel and One of Our Aircraft is Missing. Alfonso Cuarón observes that this was when he started absorbing the importance of scale and spectacle in movies.

Noël Coward, already a huge name in England, chose Lean to direct his first feature, the 1942 war drama In Which We Serve — though Lean insisted they share co-director credit. It was nominated for a best picture Oscar, the first of many for Lean’s films. Coward (the subject of Thompson’s 2023 feature, Mad About the Boy) then offered Lean his choice of scripts to direct, which led to one of the most beloved classics of British cinema, Brief Encounter. Even out of context, the first meeting at the train station of Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard is ineffably moving, a model of restrained desire.

Admirers of Lean’s superb 1940s Dickens adaptations, Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, might wish Thompson had lingered longer over them. But he correctly pinpoints the pivotal moment in the director’s career as 1955’s Summertime, the Katharine Hepburn vehicle that was the first British film shot entirely in an international location and one of the all-time great screen portraits of Venice. 

That experience confirmed Lean’s boredom with studio shoots and his hunger to work outside in inspiring locations. He found a powerful producer to help facilitate that shift in Sam Spiegel, a collaboration that yielded the first of the quintessential Lean epics, The Bridge on the River Kwai, shot entirely in the jungles of Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon. The detailed analysis of the climactic scene in which the bridge is blown up as various plot strands come together is thrilling. The film won seven Oscars, including best picture and best director.

Lean stuck with Spiegel for his next undertaking, Lawrence of Arabia, shot predominantly in the deserts of Jordan. When the original writer walked off, Spiegel connected Lean with playwright Robert Bolt, an important collaborator who, like the director, was the product of a puritanical childhood, during which he was considered the dunce of the family.

It’s fun to hear major-name directors geeking out over the sheer majesty of the movie, recalling how it opened their eyes to the boundless possibilities of cinema. There’s also much breathless appreciation of the fact that everything in the movie (like Summertime and Kwai) was real, giving the films an immersive quality that’s seldom equaled in the digital age.

The sprawling life and conflicted loyalties of the film’s subject, British Army officer T.E. Lawrence, had long been considered impossible to adapt for the screen. But Bolt and Lean found a key to it that evolved into one of film history’s undisputed milestones. It bagged another seven Oscars, including best picture and a second best director honor for Lean.

Joe Wright — also written off as a lost cause early on because of his dyslexia — expresses an affinity for Lean while also identifying the ways in which Lean saw himself in Lawrence. “I think the relationship beween pain and pleasure, and the invention of self, the loneliness I think are all things Lean felt and expressed through Lawrence.” It’s a sharp observation that underlines how the movie was simultaneously epic and intimately personal.

Anyone interested in the physical side of pre-CG large-scale filmmaking will be fascinated by close-up glimpses of movie magic, like the transformation of the Spanish landscape into snowbound Russia for Doctor Zhivago or the construction of an entire Irish coastal village for Ryan’s Daughter.

The latter film and its brutal reviews feed into an episode that shows Lean at his most vulnerable. He recalls being summoned to a meeting of the National Society of Film Critics at New York’s Algonquin Hotel, where critics like Richard Schickel and Pauline Kael dragged him over the coals for two hours, asking how the man who made Brief Encounter could produce such garbage. Lean says the experience had an awful effect on him, filling him with shame and a reluctance to direct again.

As a counterweight to the headmasterly arrogance of the NSFC, Thompson makes a fair point with a fabulous split-screen montage showing how the radical new wave of independent filmmaking coming out of America in 1970 made Ryan’s Daughter seem hopelessly antiquated. 

Throughout this dense and always engrossing survey of Lean’s career in film, Thompson threads the vicissitudes of the director’s personal life, spanning six wives and various other relationships and flings. It’s a sad irony that he mirrored his father’s history by walking out on his first wife, Isabel Lean, and his only son, Peter, with whom he subsequently had minimal involvement. 

While many of his films were fundamentally about love or its elusiveness — Summertime, Brief Encounter, Doctor Zhivago, Ryan’s Daughter — Lean comes across in archival interviews as a contemplative man whose own belief in love was stymied by the constant certainty of something better around the next corner. There are echoes of his father’s severity in his thoughts on the end of a relationship: “Anything that’s finished is finished. You must just pretend the people aren’t there. Once you’ve made your decision, you’ve got to cut them out of your life.”

That ruthless lack of sentiment, strangely, is part of what makes Maverick so satisfying. With stirring orchestral underscoring from Rael Jones and elegant contributions from Kenneth Branagh reading Lean’s letters, Thompson crafts a layered portrait of a man driven to conjure grace and magnificence and soaring emotions in his art but prone to walking through life leaving wreckage behind him.