When Show Business Correspondent Denise Worrell called on this week's cover subject, David Lean, she was struck by two things: "The film maker's utter lack of pretension, and his silver-haired, craggy good looks. He has the kind of face that centuries ago was stamped on coins." That face would not have been out of place in a David Lean movie, say Lawrence of Arabia or Doctor Zhivago. Or, for that matter, this season's hit, A Passage to India. But Worrell soon learned that it would not be easy to get to the man behind the face. "Drawing Lean out was like pulling water from a very deep well," she says. "I was at such a loss to get him to talk about his lifelong travels that I finally brought him a large atlas of the world. He touched it, and a light sparked in his eye. He traced a path with his finger from city to city, continent to continent, and named all the places he had ever seen."

TIME correspondents covered some of the same ground in reporting on Lean's 42-year career. New Delhi Bureau Chief Dean Brelis went to Calcutta to interview Victor Banerjee before the actor flew to Los Angeles to join Lean at Passage's premiere. Says Brelis: "There was a strong sense of old India. The Banerjee home and garden, in the center of the overcrowded city, is in fact extremely private, surrounded by a high wall." In Sydney, TIME'S Tim Dare talked to Actress Judy Davis about Lean's "volatile" directorial style. Reporter John Wright tracked down more than a dozen of Lean's past and present colleagues in England, including Peggy Ashcroft and Alec Guinness. In New York City, Reporter-Researcher Elaine Dutka spoke with Producer Sam Spiegel and Director Michael Powell and landed a rare interview with Katharine Hepburn, whose friendship with Lean dates back to their collaboration in the 1955 movie Summertime.

The planning for this week's cover story began nearly two years ago, when Contributor Jay Cocks learned that Lean was preparing to return to the screen. "I was immediately interested," says Cocks, who first observed Lean at work in 1969 on the set of Ryan's Daughter. "Lean is one of the world's greatest directors, and I was desperate to get a chance to write about him." Last month Cocks flew to London to attend an exclusive screening of the finished movie. He was joined by Senior Editor Martha Duffy, who edited the cover, and Contributor Richard Schickel, who reviewed the film. "I've never written a story for TIME that I've cared more about," says Schickel, a film critic for two decades. "I really wanted to do right by Lean. I found myself almost wanting to write a Valentine to someone whose body of work is as distinguished as any in film today."