All about the best movie of all time (Engelsk)

This movie was banned in many Arab countries as they felt Arab historical figures and the Arab peoples were misrepresented. Omar Sharif arranged a viewing with President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt to show him that there was nothing wrong with the way they were portrayed. Nasser loved the movie and allowed it to be released in Egypt, where it went on to become a monster hit.

King Hussein of Jordan lent an entire brigade of his Arab Legion as extras for the movie, so most of the film's "soldiers" are played by real soldiers. Hussein frequently visited the sets and became enamored of a young British secretary, Antoinette Gardiner, who became his second wife in 1962. Their eldest son, Abdullah II King Of Jordan, ascended to the throne in 1999.

On his first location scouting trip in Jordan, director Sir David Lean discovered the remains of the Turkish locomotives and railroad tracks T.E. Lawrence had destroyed during the Arab Revolution. After forty years in the sun, they hadn't even rusted.

To film Omar Sharif's entrance through a mirage, Freddie Young used a special 482mm lens from Panavision. Panavision still has this lens, and it is known among cinematographers as the "David Lean lens". It was created specifically for this shot and has not been used since.

This movie took longer to make than it did for the real T.E. Lawrence to go from Lieutenant to Colonel and to see the desert tribes united and thus tip the balance in the Allies' favor against the Turks in World War I.

Sir Alec Guinness was made up to resemble the real Faisal as closely as possible. When they were shooting in Jordan, several people who knew the man mistook him for the real thing.

Almost all movement in the movie goes from left to right. Director Sir David Lean said he did this to emphasize that this movie was a journey.

Costume designer Phyllis Dalton deliberately made Peter O'Toole's Army outfit too small and ill-fitting, to signify T.E. Lawrence's discomfort with the military uniform.

The first time Peter O'Toole tried riding a camel, blood oozed from his jeans. "This is a very delicate Irish arse", he warned his instructor. He finally mastered his camel-riding technique by adding a layer of sponge rubber under the saddle to ease his bruised backside--a practical innovation quickly adopted by the actual Bedouin tribesmen acting as extras during the desert location filming. O'Toole was nicknamed "ab al-'Isfanjah" ("father of the sponge") by the Bedouin.

The scene where T.E. Lawrence is given his first Arab clothes wasn't working as written, so Sir David Lean took Peter O'Toole aside and said, "There's something missing, Peter. What do you think a young man would do alone in the desert if he'd just been given these beautiful robes?" He pointed out to the desert and O'Toole's eyes followed. "There's your theatre, Peter. Do what you like." So, O'Toole improvised Lawrence looking at his reflection in his knife.

In the actual Battle of Aqaba, T.E. Lawrence was nearly killed when his camel threw him after he accidentally shot it in the head. In a notable coincidence, during filming Peter O'Toole was nearly killed: a gun or rocket used to signal "action" in the first Aqaba take fired prematurely and O'Toole was thrown by his panicked camel in front of the charging horses. (Other accounts hold that O'Toole was temporarily blinded by pellets from an effects gun and lost control of his animal or that he was too inebriated to hold on.) Fortunately for O'Toole, the camel--trained for such mishaps--stood over him and prevented his being trampled.

During an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962) in the 1970s, Peter O'Toole was describing just how long the movie took to make. He referred to the scene when T.E. Lawrence and Edmund Allenby, after their meeting, continue talking while walking down a staircase. According to O'Toole, part of the scene had to be re-shot much later "so in the final print, when I get to the bottom of the stairs, I'm a year older than I was when I started walking down them."

This movie missed out on an eleventh Oscar nomination, for Best Costume Design, because someone forgot to submit Phyllis Dalton's name for consideration.

Initially the production used white plastic cups for its drinking water, but the wind would frequently pick them up and blow them into the desert. After having numerous shots ruined due to errant white plastic cups, Sir David Lean had them banned and replaced with ceramic mugs.

Peter O'Toole claimed that he never viewed the completed movie until nearly two decades after its original release, by which time he was highly impressed.

Maurice Jarre was hired to write the dramatic musical score; Aram Khachaturyan was to handle the eastern themed music; and Benjamin Britten was to provide the British imperial music. Neither Khatchaturian nor Britten were able to properly get involved so producer Sam Spiegel hired Richard Rodgers to fill in the musical gaps. When Spiegel and director Sir David Lean heard Rodgers' compositions, they were hugely disappointed so they turned to Jarre to see what he had done. The minute Lean heard Jarre's now-classic theme, he knew they had the right composer. Jarre was given the job of scoring the whole movie in a mere six weeks.

Peter O'Toole claimed that he learned more about acting from his few days of filming with José Ferrer than he did in all of his years at drama school.

Producer Sam Spiegel wanted director Sir David Lean to consider the cost-saving benefits of shooting in Southern California or the less volatile political climate of Israel. Lean, however, was determined to film the story where it had happened--in a Middle Eastern country. One obvious problem for Spiegel was his religion: given the political situation in the Middle East, a good chance existed that a Jewish producer wouldn't even be allowed into Jordan. The production's British Advisor--Anthony Nutting, who had been England's Minister of State for Foreign Affairs at the start of the Suez crisis (1956)--got around that problem by getting Spiegel a visa that listed his religion as Anglican. When the forthrightly Jewish producer protested, Nutting said, "Sam, just shut up! Here's your bloody visa."

T.E. Lawrence's brother, A.W. Lawrence, who was also executor of his will, wasn't keen on the movie's representation of his brother, so he didn't allow the use of his sibling's autobiography title "Seven Pillars of Wisdom".

Although 3 hours and 36 minutes long, this movie has no women in speaking roles. It is reportedly the longest movie not to have any dialogue spoken by a woman.

When Omar Sharif screentested to play Sherif Ali, Sir David Lean wanted to give the character facial hair to contrast with the fair, clean-shaven Peter O'Toole. He tried Sharif with a beard, but didn't like it. Then he fitted the actor with a mustache, which is how Sharif played the role. Sharif had become a star in his native Egypt without facial hair. The impact that the mustachioed Sharif made in the movie was so strong that he kept the mustache for the rest of his career.

Director Sir David Lean didn't see his first royalty check for this movie until 1978.

The 35mm master interpositive produced by Technicolor in 1966 had reel 2A flipped. So left and right became reversed on-screen for about ten minutes in all prints, including initial video releases and television broadcasts. With no writing on the screen during these ten minutes, it was nearly impossible to spot this error. During the restoration by Robert A. Harris, Sir David Lean pointed out the error, and it was corrected. This reversal also led to an urban myth about this movie: that Lawrence had switched his watch from his left wrist to his right wrist. Due to the reversed imagery in reel 2A, he indeed had appeared to do this in early released versions of the film.

Peter O'Toole won his career-making (and legendary) part as T.E. Lawrence after it was turned down by superstar Marlon Brando and a then-unknown Albert Finney. Director Sir David Lean and producer Sam Spiegel wanted Brando. Spiegel had produced On the Waterfront (1954), the movie for which Brando and Spiegel had won their first Oscars. But Brando turned the role down, allegedly saying he didn't want to spend two years of his life riding on a camel. Their second choice Finney was put through extensive screen tests costing 100-thousand pounds sterling, but he refused to sign a 7-year contract demanded by Spiegel. O'Toole signed the 7-year contract and got the part.

The town of Aqaba was re-created in a dried river bed in southern Spain and consisted of over three hundred buildings.

Omar Sharif was already a big star in his native Egypt when he got the call to meet producer Sam Spiegel in a hotel in Cairo. When he agreed to make a screentest, Spiegel flew him to Jordan. In his autobiography, Sharif would marvel that a Jew from Hollywood had gotten something from the Egyptian government the native-born Sharif had been trying to get for years, an exit visa.

Sir David Lean watched John Ford's The Searchers (1956) time after time for inspiration.

When filming in Jordan, every drop of water for the production was brought in by truck from the nearest well, 150 miles (242 kilometers) away.

While filming, Peter O'Toole bonded with co-star Omar Sharif. Recalls Sharif, "Peter and I were like brothers immediately. He said to me, 'Your name is not Omar Sharif - no one is called Omar Sharif. Your real name is probably Freddy something!' And for the rest of the film and the rest of our lives, he's never called me Omar. He calls me Freddy."

This movie spent two years in pre-production before fourteen months of shooting in locations like Jordan, Spain, and Morocco.

Costume designer Phyllis Dalton devised a subtle way to indicate T.E. Lawrence's failing grip. As the movie progresses, his robes become thinner and thinner until they are virtually translucent.

While the team behind the restoration of this movie in 1989 found all of the surviving footage cut after its premiere, they learned that the soundtrack to said footage had been lost. Thus, the team recruited the then-surviving members of the cast to re-record their lines for the scenes. Sir David Lean complimented Peter O'Toole for his effort, telling him that he did a better job than in the original movie. O'Toole replied: "After twenty-five years, I think I have learned enough to play the scene properly."

For the 1989 reconstruction and restoration, many scenes of dialogue were missing. As a result, Peter O'Toole and several living principals returned and re-recorded dialogue from more than twenty years previously. For principals who had died in the intervening years, sound-alike actors were employed (for instance such as Charles Gray for Jack Hawkins).

Soldiers from the Moroccan Army were employed as extras without pay, which they understandably resented. During off-hours, they actually took potshots at cast and crew, Sir David Lean included. Others deserted between takes and never came back.

The famous cut from T.E. Lawrence blowing out a match to the desert sunrise was originally just going to be a dissolve. But editor Anne V. Coates suggested to Sir David Lean that he use the cut in the fashion of the then current French New Wave. In addition, there is a play on words involved in using a cut instead of a dissolve. The cut links two related images - the burning match that Lawrence blows out, and the burning desert sun seen immediately afterwards. A film cut that links two such images is known as a "match cut."

Sir Alec Guinness admired Peter O'Toole's talent and charm but, as he watched him drink to excess on-location, his appreciation cooled. One day, the two of them were invited to dinner at a local dignitary's house. O'Toole got drunk, quarrelled with his host, and threw a glass of champagne in his face. Guinness wrote to a friend, "O'Toole could have been killed, shot or strangled, and I'm beginning to think it's a pity he wasn't."

Peter O'Toole was often injured during filming. He received third-degree burns, sprained both ankles, tore ligaments in both his hip and thigh, broke his thumb, dislocated his spine, fractured his skull, was bitten by a camel, sprained his neck, tore a groin muscle, and was concussed twice. He also seriously injured his hand during filming by punching through the window of a caravan while drunk. A brace or bandage can be seen on his left thumb during the first train attack scene, presumably due to this incident.

Sir Alec Guinness had a life-long interest in T.E. Lawrence, and had played him on stage in a production of Terence Rattigan's play "Ross". Guinness wanted very much to play Lawrence, but director Sir David Lean and producer Sam Spiegel both told him he was too old. Sir Laurence Olivier was the original choice for Prince Feisal, and Guinness was shifted to that role when Olivier turned it down.

Sir David Lean personally supervised the first cuts that brought the movie down to three hours, as he wanted it to enjoy more showings per day. During the 1989 restoration, he passed blame for the cuts onto the then deceased Sam Spiegel.

While shooting Peter O'Toole and I.S. Johar riding together on a single camel, Sir David Lean saw that they had trouble staying on the animal. On closer inspection, a large block of hashish was discovered. Both actors were completely stoned. Shooting was abandoned for the day.

T.E. Lawrence's rescue of the lost Gasim actually happened, as recounted in his book "Seven Pillars of Wisdom". Though in the movie Lawrence is hailed for the heroism, he was in fact ridiculed and chided for what was seen as a dubious achievement.

The moment when T.E. Lawrence, freshly adorned in his new flowing white robes, raises his dagger to look at his reflection was an improvisation by Peter O'Toole. The moment was repeated at the end of the movie in a completely different context when a battered Lawrence looks at his bloodied dagger after the battle for Damascus.

Steven Spielberg estimated that to make this movie today would cost in the region of $285 million. In 1962, the production cost of this movie was $15 million. Its box office receipts were $70 million.

The character of Jackson Bentley is based on the real-life journalist and travel expert Lowell Thomas, whose writings first brought T.E. Lawrence to public attention.

When film conservationists Robert A. Harris and Jim Painten got permission from Columbia Pictures to restore Sir David Lean's movie, four tons of extraneous footage was delivered to their door. It took them nearly a year to get through all the material.

Because filming was not possible in the complete darkness of night, the night scenes were filmed during the day with light filters on the lenses. This is also the reason there are shadows from the camels during the night scenes.

When Omar Sharif signed on with producer Sam Spiegel to do this movie, it was a seven-picture deal at $15,000 per movie. The others were Behold a Pale Horse (1964), Doctor Zhivago (1965), Genghis Khan (1965), The Night of the Generals (1967), Funny Girl (1968), and Mackenna's Gold (1969).

For T.E. Lawrence's death scene, Peter O'Toole sat on a bike that was strapped to a trailer and pulled along behind the camera car. During filming, the bar connecting the trailer to the camera truck snapped and the only thing preventing O'Toole hurtling out of control into the road was a flimsy piece of rope. The trailer abruptly stopped, and the crew breathed a heavy sigh of relief to see O'Toole still in one piece. "I think it was only Lawrence up there teasing", he said.

The charge on Aqaba employed 450 horses and 150 camels.

General Murray's (Donald Wolfit's) line about the Arab revolt being "a sideshow of a sideshow" was actually written in real life by T.E. Lawrence, several years after the war, in his book, "Seven Pillars of Wisdom".

José Ferrer was initially very unsatisfied about the small part he was offered. He only accepted on condition that he be paid $25,000, more than Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif combined, plus a factory-made Porsche. Ironically, Ferrer once said about his tiny role that he considered it to be the finest acting of his career.

Sir David Lean hoped to film in the real Aqaba and the archaeological site at Petra. Much to his regret, however, the production had to be moved to Spain because of cost overruns and outbreaks of illness amongst the cast and crew before these scenes could be shot.

José Ferrer had to be talked into taking the role of the sadistic Bey, dubious about it being such a small part. Sir David Lean convinced him that the Bey was a pivotal character in T.E. Lawrence's history.

Peter O'Toole was considerably taller and better-looking than the real T.E. Lawrence (6'2" to Lawrence's real life height of 5'5"). Sir Noël Coward is rumored to have said, on seeing the premiere, "If he'd been any prettier, they'd have had to call it Florence of Arabia."

Peter O'Toole spent three months learning how to live as an Arab before a frame of film was shot. He traveled across the desert with the Bedouin camel patrol, and he often slept rough under the stars amidst utter silence, just as T.E. Lawrence had done as a child.

At one point, when filming was progressing far too slowly for his liking, producer Sam Spiegel invited William Wyler to visit the set. He wanted Wyler to encourage Sir David Lean to rely more on his second units for filming additional scenes, as he had done on Ben-Hur (1959). The visit was to no avail, however, as Lean was too much of a perfectionist to relinquish control.

Many who had known T.E. Lawrence and other real figures featured in the movie were horrified by the movie. Lawrence biographer Basil Liddell Hart wrote to warn many of the man's friends that they would be shocked by the depiction of the hero struggling with sadistic impulses. Lady Allenby, widow of Edmund Allenby, wrote to The London Times: "Is there any way in which a film company can be stopped from portraying a character so inaccurately as that of the late Field Marshal Allenby in Lawrence of Arabia? What can one do? What is the remedy? Or is there one?"

The production schedule was so long that producer Sam Spiegel insisted on a two-month break. This afforded him the chance to find a filming location that was less arduous than Jordan, ultimately settling on Spain. Anthony Quinn, Sir Anthony Quayle, Sir Alec Guinness, and Omar Sharif all took advantage of the break to work on other movies. Quayle starred in Damn the Defiant! (1962), while Quinn starred in Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962).

When first telecast by ABC, this movie was shown in two parts on two successive nights because of its four-hour length. Even so, it was edited so that T.E. Lawrence's torture by the Turks was even less explicit (and less comprehensible) than in the original movie.

This movie's military advisor, an Army officer, went mad with sunstroke, wandering out of his tent in the dark of night and shooting at anything that moved across the landscape with live ammunition. He had to be carted away.

Screenwriter Robert Bolt's original writing contract with producer Sam Spiegel was for three months, as he was needed to work on another play. But due his immersion on material, he ended up working for fourteen months on the script and totally forgot his work on the play.

Throughout shooting, producer Sam Spiegel continued to feign heart attacks whenever he wasn't happy with the way things were going. At one point, he had himself strapped to a stretcher and flown by a Red Cross helicopter to the desert location. Attendants carried him to Sir David Lean, to whom he said, "Don't worry about anything, David, n

ot the budget, not the schedule, not my health. The picture, the picture is all that counts!" Then he was flown back out.

T.E. Lawrence was riding from the Bovington Army Camp to his cottage in Cloud Hill when his fatal accident occurred. The scene where he was tortured and assaulted by the Turks was from the book "Seven Pillars of Wisdom", published in shortened form as "Revolt in the Desert". Lawrence refused to publish "Seven Pillars of Wisdom", his life's work, but did print it exclusively for one hundred twenty people only. The one hundred twenty people who read the book were delighted with it, and it was published after Lawrence died.

In an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (1992), Peter O'Toole confessed quite proudly that, out of fear of falling off during a big camel riding scene, he and Omar Sharif decided to get absolutely hammered and then tied themselves down on the camels before shooting. By his own admission, he was so drunk that he had no idea where he was or what he was doing for the entire scene (attack on Aqaba).

Sir Alec Guinness said in interviews that he developed his Arab accent from a conversation he had with Omar Sharif.

Sir Anthony Quayle thought the character of Colonel Brighton was an idiot, but Sir David Lean told him Brighton was the only honorable character in the movie.

The Sherif Ali character is a combination of numerous Arab leaders--particularly Sharif Nassir, Faisal's cousin, who led the Harith forces involved in the attack on Aqaba. The character was created largely because T.E. Lawrence did not serve with any one Arab leader (aside from Auda) throughout the majority of the war. This character was, however, almost certainly named after Sharif Ali ibn Hussein, a leader in the Harith tribe, who played a part in the Revolt and who is mentioned and pictured in Lawrence's memoir "Seven Pillars of Wisdom".

Peter O'Toole and Jack Hawkins became close friends on-set, much to Sir David Lean's consternation. Lean thought Hawkins should maintain a fatherly distance from O'Toole to help with the part, but Hawkins "didn't see the point" of Lean's advice. The two frequently went drinking after shooting concluded, including one instance in a Seville restaurant (where Sir Alec Guinness was also present) where a drunken O'Toole threatened a waiter, backing down when the waiter produced a knife. O'Toole and Hawkins would also frequently improvise humorous dialogue on-set (often during takes), which infuriated Lean.

During filming, Peter O'Toole visited Bethlehem. He was unmoved by the experience, calling it "Christ commercialized."

Producer Sam Spiegel and director Sir David Lean's already testy relationship soon reached the breaking point. Spiegel rarely visited the set, and he constantly complained long-distance about Lean's "wasting" money and about alleged poor footage. Lean eventually got back at Spiegel by sneaking into the dailies a shot of him "flipping off" Spiegel in 70mm.

Anthony Nutting convinced King Hussein of Jordan that this movie would boost tourism, thus bringing more money into the then cash-starved nation. He also appealed to the King's sense of family. The King's great-grandfather, Sherif of Mecca, had launched the Arab Revolt with T.E. Lawrence in 1916. Hussein quickly gave this movie his blessing. Nutting even managed to negotiate the fee for the Jordanian Army's cooperation down from 1-million pounds sterling to 165,000 pounds.

Sir David Lean originally wanted Albert Finney for the title role. Katharine Hepburn urged producer Sam Spiegel to cast Peter O'Toole instead.

While working on the 1989 restoration of the film, those involved had a hard time locating actor Arthur Kennedy (Jackson Bentley) for voice-over work. They had heard he was living in Savannah Georgia and phoned every Kennedy in the Savannah phonebook. The actor finally returned their call, and he re-recorded his dialogue on a 3/4-inch tape at a local television station.

The first Spanish location was in Seville, where the company got to stay in hotels. The production took advantage of the city's Moorish architecture to re-create early twentieth century Damascus, Cairo, and Jerusalem, which had become too modernized for use in this movie. Two thousand local extras turned out to film General Allenby's entry into Damascus in front of Seville's Archeological Museum.

The night before the Los Angeles premiere, Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif attended a performance by controversial comedian Lenny Bruce. Afterwards, they had a few drinks with him, then accompanied him home, where he proceeded to shoot heroin. At that moment, the police broke in and arrested all three on drug charges. Sharif called Sam Spiegel in the middle of the night, and the producer used his influence to get the two actors released. But O'Toole refused to go unless Bruce was released too. So Spiegel and his lawyers had to also get the comedian's drug charges dropped.

The Allenby family lodged a formal complaint against Columbia Pictures about the portrayal of their ancestor. The descendants of Auda abu Tayi and the real Sharif went even further and actively sued the studio. The case dragged on for ten years before being dropped.

When the movie was finally put together and shown to T.E. Lawrence's brother, Professor A.W. Lawrence, he was horrified at what he considered liberties taken with history. He called it "an unholy marriage between a Western [film] and a psychological horror [film]", and he refused to let the title "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" be used. He ended up donating to charity most of the money he had been paid for the rights to the book.

During the desert location shoot, after each rehearsal and take, 300 Bedouins wearing sandals muffled in wool were charged with smoothing out the desert sands with palm fronds so that no extraneous footprints would be visible in the sand.

This is Steven Spielberg's all-time favorite movie.

Sir David Lean happened to catch a B-movie called The Day They Robbed the Bank of England (1960), which featured a young Peter O'Toole. He was immediately taken by the striking-looking young actor.

Albert Finney's screentests in Arab costume as T.E. Lawrence are the most requested viewing item in Britain's National Film Archive.

This movie depicts the seizing of the port of Aqaba by the Arabs as a stirring sneak-attack that caught the Turks unaware. Actually, most of the fighting for Aqaba involved the capture (and loss and recapture) of a small fort at Abu-al-Lasan, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) well inland. From there, T.E. Lawrence and Sheikh Auda marched unopposed into Aqaba a few days later after British warships shelled the port into submission.

(At around 40 minutes) When T.E. Lawrence and Colonel Brighton first sit with King Faisal in Faisal's tent, Brighton stretches out his legs while Lawrence keeps his folded meekly behind. In Arab culture the blatant exposing of the soles of one's shoes is considered a gross insult, and Lawrence (already something of a scholar on Araby) would have certainly avoided the misstep. Brighton, on the other hand--an archetype here of the typical British officer in that theater of war--either doesn't know or doesn't care.

As the departure for location shooting neared, director Sir David Lean still didn't have a final script. He had decided he didn't care for Michael Wilson's treatment, and he insisted that someone else be found to re-write it. Then he saw Robert Bolt's historical drama "A Man for All Seasons" in London and realized he'd found his writer. At first, the playwright was asked to rewrite the dialogue: Bolt refused. Then producer Sam Spiegel offered a large fee for a complete re-write, but only if Bolt could finish it in seven weeks. Bolt tried reading several books about T.E. Lawrence but, finding them too contradictory, finally focused on Lawrence's own "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" as his primary source.

Some of the desert scenes for this movie were shot at Merthyr Mawr Sand Dunes, near Bridgend, South Wales, U.K. The sand dunes there are vast and the second highest in Europe. A few miles further west along the coast is Margam Sands, at Port Talbot, which was the location for Ealing Studio's World War II desert movie Nine Men (1943).

Sir David Lean never saw any dailies while filming. He only missed one day of work, though the production endured many illnesses.

Peter O'Toole's performance as T.E. Lawrence is the #1 ranked performance of all time in "Premiere Magazine's 100 Greatest Performances of All Time."

It took impeccable planning to prepare the railroad attack. The filmmakers could only film the sequence once. After careful testing, they determined that it would take ten pounds of guncotton to cut the rails and another ten to send the train cars careening off the track. To control the trains motion through the desert sand, they had to plant steel plates under the sand. The engineer set the locomotive at full throttle, then jumped off before the tracks exploded.

Sir David Lean had less than two months to prepare the movie for its premiere after completing second unit work. As a result, the version shown at the premiere was a few minutes longer than he might have liked. He had hoped to go back and cut a few frames from some shots he thought ran too long. But after the premiere, distributor Columbia Pictures asked him to cut 20 minutes from it so that exhibitors could squeeze in an extra showing each day. So instead of his original intent of trimming a few shots, he had to cut whole scenes. For a 1971 re-issue, another 15 minutes were cut from the film. Many critics have complained that this later 1971 version renders the action incoherent, particularly in the second half, which sustained the largest cuts.

In 1995, the Writers Guild decided that Michael Wilson had written enough material for this movie to merit a screen credit. All versions of the movie since then, including the DVD and Blu-ray, credit the script to Robert Bolt and Wilson.

Anthony Nutting had to negotiate hiring the Bedouin tribesmen, who wanted £1 million. When Nutting asked how they could ask for so much money, he learned what the Bedouin's representative, Sherif Nasser, had learned: that producer Sam Spiegel had taken out a secret £1-million loan from the Arab Bank there. The bank director, as it turned out, was Sherif Nasser's uncle. Spiegel ultimately got the price down by pulling a ploy his associates were familiar with. He claimed he had had a heart attack, which so threatened the production's future that the Bedouin lowered their price.

After signing for the movie, Peter O'Toole was flown to New York City to meet the Columbia Pictures executives backing the movie, an experience he didn't care for. One said to him, "When I look at you, I see six million dollars." O'Toole replied, "How'd you like a punch up the throat?" He later said, "I hate all that stuff, it made me feel like a prize bull."

The Arabs frequently refer to T.E. Lawrence as "Awrence" and later "El Awrence." In Arabic, "El" or "Al" is the definite article, equivalent to "the" in English. Many European names that begin with L or an El or Al sound are therefore abridged of this in Arabic. For example, Iskederun is named for Alexander the Great.

This movie was largely based on T.E. Lawrence's autobiography "Seven Pillars of Wisdom", which a 1955 revisionist biography by Richard Adlington claimed was highly exaggerated.

Despite this movie's success, many people disliked it due to its fictional elements (fictional characters such as Sherif Ali, Colonel Brighton, Jackson Bentley, Mr. Dryden et cetera). Another reason why others disliked it has to do with the death of T.E. Lawrence in this movie. Many people believed Lawrence was murdered. One of the principal witnesses of the accident was an Army Corporal named Catchpole who testified about a black van heading toward Lawrence. After the crash, the black van raced off down the road and the Corporal ran over to Lawrence who lay on the road with his face covered in blood. The Corporal was instructed not to mention the van as being involved in the accident, and the suspicions increased when it was reported that Catchpole killed himself shortly after testifying about the black van. Right before his death, Lawrence had been planning to see his friend Henry Williamson, who was facilitating a meeting between Lawrence and Adolf Hitler for making peace between England and Germany. Lawrence abhorred the idea of yet another war in Europe.

In his autobiography and in a letter to George Bernard Shaw's wife, there are indications that T.E. Lawrence was forced to perform homosexual acts for the Turkish Governor of Deraa, something over which this movie skimmed. However, friends and enemies of the Governor alike vehemently dismissed T.E. Lawrence's claims as fantasies and insisted the Governor was not a homosexual.

After the tremendous success of The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), producer Sam Spiegel and director Sir David Lean were keen to work together on a similarly worthy topic. Initially the pair considered making a movie of the life of Mohandas K. Gandhi, but they soon gave up on that.

Anthony Quinn applied his own make-up and would often arrive in real Arab clothes. At one point, Sir David Lean mistook him for a native on the studio lot, and he sent his assistant to tell Quinn that he had been replaced by this new arrival.

As production wound down in Jordan, Omar Sharif and Peter O'Toole wanted to prepare themselves for their return to civilization. Having read about the sudden popularity of the "Twist" dance craze in one of the magazines shipped to the company's desert compound, they flew in a teacher from Paris to give them lessons in the evening after the day's filming was completed. The production dragged on for so long, however, that by the time they were back in England, the "Twist" had fallen out of fashion.

Throughout his career, Peter O'Toole was notorious for fluffing his lines by breaking into fits of laughter. This film, his first major starring role, was no exception. It first became evident in the key scene where he first meets Prince Faisal, played by Alec Guinness, who had a formidable reputation not only for his acting ability, but his total professionalism on stage and set. Time and again, O'Toole made his grand entrance into the Bedouin tent to act out the dramatic scene with Guinness, and time and again he burst into laughter, ruining the takes. Finally, with Guinness getting totally ticked and David Lean getting exasperated at the waste of time and footage, the famed director turned to O'Toole and told him to take a long walk and compose himself. O'Toole did so, and, mortified at his own behavior, thoroughly chastised himself during the break and returned to the set with a steely resolve to get through the scene in a professional manner. With the cameras rolling once more and everyone expecting another outburst of laughter from O'Toole, he entered the tent, approached Alec Guinness, and finally managed to get the first line out with a straight face. Alec Guinness, with his own nerves on edge in expectation of another ruined take from O'Toole, promptly burst out laughing.

Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif would often go drinking and gambling together in Beirut on their days off.

Anthony Perkins was considered for the lead role. But when he scored a hit with Sir Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), producer Sam Spiegel and director Sir David

 Lean dropped the idea for fear their film would be labelled "Psycho of Arabia."