He was elegance, walking arm in arm with a lie

torrilla:

Tom Hiddleston on Lawrence of Arabia | Harper’s Bazaar October 2013

The first time I saw Lawrence of Arabia was on VHS with my father in 1995. I was 14 or 15 years old. My parents were divorced, so watching films became a father-son bonding experience and we had to watch this because ‘it was one of the greats’. The first thing that struck me was the score by Maurice Jarre. It is the very definition of epic. I have since come to realise that Lawrence informed the tastes of all the directors who have inspired me. A film like The English Patient, which I deeply love, couldn’t have existed without Lawrence of Arabia and its romantic view of the desert wilderness; how the sun and sand can addle your brain and make you dream in wilder ways. Peter O’Toole is magnificent in this film. He has an otherworldly grace on-screen, but what is most interesting for me is what’s going on behind his blue eyes – that piercing intelligence and almost messianic wildness. 

The more work I’ve done, the more admiration I have for Lawrence because each set-up takes military precision. War Horse is probably the closest I’ve come to making a film like Lawrence. When I rode in the cavalry charge with Benedict Cumberbatch and Patrick Kennedy, there were no visual effects except for the machine-gun fire. The Lawrence director David Lean was working when there were no computer-generated images. If you watch the camel charge in Lawrence’s Battle of Aqaba (O’Toole braved the ride by drinking brandy) there is something so honest about it; the magic depends upon so many people succeeding at the same time. I still marvel at that scene.