I've noticed that when people remember “Lawrence of Arabia,” they don't talk about the details of the plot. They get a certain look in their eye, as if they are remembering the whole experience, and have never quite been able to put it into words. Although it seems to be a traditional narrative film--like “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” which Lean made just before it, or "Doctor Zhivago," which he made just after--it actually has more in common with such essentially visual epics as Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," or Eisenstein's “Alexander Nevsky.” It is spectacle and experience, and its ideas are about things you can see or feel, not things you can say. Much of its appeal is based on the fact that it does not contain a complex story with a lot of dialogue; we remember the quiet, empty passages, the sun rising across the desert, the intricate lines traced by the wind in the sand.

Although it won the Academy Award as the year's best picture in 1962, “Lawrence of Arabia” might have been lost if it hadn't been for the film restorers Robert A. Harris and Jim Painten. They discovered the original negative in Columbia's vaults, inside crushed and rusting film cans, and also about 35 minutes of footage that had been trimmed by distributors from Lean's final cut. They put it together again, sometimes by one crumbling frame at a time (Harris sent me one of the smashed cans as a demonstration of Hollywood's carelessness with its heritage).

To see it in a movie theater is to appreciate the subtlety of F.A. (Freddie) Young's desert cinematography--achieved despite blinding heat, and the blowing sand, which worked its way into every camera. “Lawrence of Arabia” was one of the last films to actually be photographed in 70mm (as opposed to being blown up to 70 from a 35mm negative). There was a hunger within filmmakers like Lean (and Kubrick, Coppola, Tarkovsky, Kurosawa and Stone) to break through the boundaries, to dare a big idea and have the effrontery to impose it on timid studio executives. The word “epic” in recent years has become synonymous with “big budget B picture.” What you realize watching “Lawrence of Arabia” is that the word “epic” refers not to the cost or the elaborate production, but to the size of the ideas and vision. Werner Herzog's “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” didn't cost as much as the catering in “Pearl Harbor,” but it is an epic, and “Pearl Harbor” is not.