Meeting of Two Masters

By Richard Lacayo

Sir David Lean and Lord Snowdon take aim at A Passage to India

Last winter in Bangalore, India, a pair of Englishmen stood peering through camera lenses. Two more Westerners squinting into viewfinders -- nothing new to India. But these were no tourists out for holiday views of the East. One was Sir David Lean, director of Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, shooting his first film in 14 years, an adaptation of E.M. Forster's A Pas sage to India. A few yards away was Lord Snowdon, the photographer who expelled posture and plumage from celebrity portraits, arching for shots of the cast and crew.

Amid a tumble of elephants, microphones and turbaned extras, Lean channeled the action into a flowing river of film, while Snowdon fished for moments of the witty and sublime.

Sequestered now in a cutting room near London, Lean slices his $17.5 mil lion project to an epic but watchable 2 1/2 hours, set for mid-December release. A few miles away, Snowdon contemplates his shots of those days in India. Lean is often called a craftsman, so who better to capture him at work than Snowdon, a no-nonsense photographer who shuns talk of art, but finds artful inflections in the vernacular of professional picture taking?

"It's so pretentious when people talk about photography," he says. "All that about composition and whatever. Just press the button and get on with it."

A nice modesty, but hardly the whole story for a famously exacting and industrious camera artist. On the set he was up by dawn, boiling a hasty egg in his coffee ("The egg doesn't know whether it's in water or coffee") and hustling to take advantage of the powdery light of early morning. Says he:

"The only reason Turner was a better painter than the others was that he got up earlier."

Snowdon traveled to India at the request of the film's producers, John Brabourne and Richard Goodwin. He had photographed some of their Agatha Christie projects (Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, and Evil Under the Sun), and jumped at the chance to work with Lean. On the set he was free to wander, plucking shots of the 235 crew members and a cast that includes Dame Peggy Ashcroft, James Fox, Judy (My Brilliant Career) Davis, Indian Actor Victor Banerjee and, of course, Sir Alec Guinness. Guinness's career has been entwined with Lean's since the 1940s, when he was featured in the director's memorable adaptations of Dickens' Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. "Alec is a great man," is Snowdon's simple judgment. "The great ones have impeccable manners. They arrive on time; they speak to everyone. It's the other kind who are rude. You find that the crew will quickly sort people out."

Snowdon appreciates that kind of graciousness. "It's agony going on a film set the first time," he says. "You pray you are going to see somebody you know. It's exactly like going back to school for the first day." On the set of Passage he faced an additional hurdle, his daunting regard for the director: "The first two days in Bangalore I didn't want to talk to Lean. I was in such awe I wanted to fade into the background."

That is something Snowdon can never quite manage, although the spotlight attending his 18-year marriage to Britain's Princess Margaret (they were divorced in 1978) has sometimes left in shadow his achievements as a photographer, documentary maker and designer of things ranging from chairmobiles for the handicapped to the London Zoo's Snowdon Aviary. Despite the divorce, his relations with the royal family remain sporting, as demonstrated by his much praised official portrait of the Prince and Princess of Wales with Prince William. Lithe and hale at 54, he lives in London's South Kensington with his second wife, Lucy Lindsay-Hogg, and their daughter Frances.

By comparison, Lean has been less visible lately. His last film, Ryan's Daughter, a 1970 romance set during the Irish uprising of 1916, failed with critics and ticket buyers, and his spectacular career went into abeyance for a while. Even so, his influence was there, in grand-manner biographical dramas like Young Winston and Reds, and exotic-locale adventures like The Wind and the Lion and even Raiders of the Lost Ark. And only two years ago, Sir Richard Attenborough's Gandhi demonstrated that the audience for Lean's brand of film making could be lured back to the box office.

By that time Lean was already at work on Passage. Bringing Forster's 1924 novel to the screen has been his ambition since seeing a London stage production 24 years ago. In Forster's lament for Anglo-Indian relations, the mutual abrasion of colonized and colonizer sparks into hostility when a Muslim physician is accused of attempting the rape of a young Englishwoman. Right there are the elements of Lean's best-known films: the East-West clash of cultures that animated The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia; the background of percolating rebellion that was the setting for Doctor Zhivago and Ryan's Daughter; the intersection of personal dilemma and historical conflict that invigorated In Which We Serve and The Sound Barrier.

Likewise, it was a project that gave Snowdon opportunity for the thoughtful celebrity portraiture that is his forte. He relishes Lean's "powerful, hawklike face" and views even casting with a portraitist's eye. The role of Dr. Aziz, the Muslim physician played by Banerjee, could never have gone to an English actor, he maintains: "It's easier for an older character to be played by an actor of another nationality; the faces are not that different. But the young Aziz had to be played by an Indian."

Snowdon likes to work in peace, away from the set. He disdains taking the same shots that the movie cameras are getting, and the visual clutter is too much for a man who prefers chaste and deliberate backgrounds. (His shot of Guinness before an anatomy chart inspires him to an aphorism:

"A background has to be just this side of being something, and just the other side of being nothing.") But even when he whisks them away, he likes his actor-subjects to stay, if not in character, then in the mood of the characters they play.

Make sure that Guinness brings Professor Godbole's spectacles.

For Judy Davis, a shadow backdrop of hands that suggests Adela's weightless and wavering notion of India. And drape a python around the neck of Dame Peggy because "Mrs. Moore might have done it!"

Mrs. Moore might have, but Dame Peggy did, and why not? Actors are more easily bruised by unflattering light than by coiling reptiles. They find pythons rather less menacing than cameras, and a good photographer approaches with care.

"It helps if you have photographed them before," says Snowdon, who has photographed just about everybody before.

"Then they know you; they know you are not going to show them at a disadvantage.

I don't want to take an unkind picture."

Snowdon has his own reasons to be anxious with this kind of work, and his nerves don't relax with the last click of the shutter. There is still the fear that the film might get lost, ruined by airport X rays, spoiled in the laboratory. Worst of all, there's "the dread of opening the brown envelope when the pictures come back. You know they are not going to be good. The only time you like a picture is before you see it." --By RichardLacayo. Reported by Bonnie Angelo/London

With reporting by Bonnie Angelo