After the Desert: On Lawrence, Lean and The Drive

Earlier this year, we went looking for adventure in the Western Sahara.

We travelled there in old Jeeps, following tracks through mountains, across great open plains as well as along the Atlantic coast. Much of the inspiration for that journey came from the men who had travelled through those landscapes before us, particularly those whose experiences in North Africa during the first half of the twentieth century had become intertwined with exploration, machinery and adventure.

When we came home, covered in dust and with the Jeeps carrying rather more of the Sahara than perhaps they ought to have, it would have been easy to consider that particular adventure finished.

Instead, it left us wanting to go again.

Not necessarily back to the desert, nor somewhere particularly far away. What stayed with us was the feeling of being on the move, of travelling because we could and allowing the journey itself to become the reason for going.

In many ways, The Drive began there.

It is a continuation of the story we started in the desert, but this time the landscape is much closer to home.

There are no endless Saharan horizons or great expanses of empty coastline. Instead, there are English roads, old cars and the simple pleasure of setting off without needing to arrive anywhere particularly quickly.

The scale is smaller. The sentiment is much the same.

 

 

Coming Home From The Desert

There was one historical figure in particular whose story seemed to bridge these two worlds rather neatly.

T. E. Lawrence will forever be Lawrence of Arabia.

His name immediately conjures images of the desert, the Arab Revolt and the extraordinary events that made him one of the most famous men of his generation. It is a story that has been told so often that the image of Lawrence in Arabia has almost eclipsed the man who came home afterwards.

It is that part of his life which became particularly interesting to us.

After Arabia came England.

After the extraordinary came something altogether more ordinary.

Lawrence returned from the Middle East to a country in which his reputation had begun to take on a life of its own. He had become a public figure, something he grew increasingly uncomfortable with, and in the years that followed he made repeated attempts to retreat from the attention surrounding him.

In 1922 he joined the Royal Air Force under the assumed name John Hume Ross. His identity was eventually discovered and he was discharged, but after a period serving in the Tank Corps he managed to return to the RAF under another name, T. E. Shaw.

One of the places this new life took him was RAF Cranwell in Lincolnshire.

The contrast is fascinating.

The man remembered for riding through Arabia was now living within the routines of an RAF station in rural England. The desert was behind him, but the appetite for movement and machinery certainly wasn't.

Lawrence became famously devoted to his Brough Superior motorcycles, owning a succession of them and covering considerable distances across Britain. He was interested not simply in possessing these machines but in using them, understanding them and experiencing the speed and freedom they offered.

There is something wonderfully modern about that desire and, at the same time, something we seem to be gradually losing.

The ability to go somewhere simply for the pleasure of going.

The Drive

That became the starting point for our new short film.

The Drive is not intended as a film about Lawrence, nor is it an attempt to recreate a particular episode from his life. His story provided an idea rather than a script, but there is a connection between him and this landscape that made it particularly difficult to ignore.

Stanley Biggs is based in the very part of England where Lawrence found some measure of peace and escape after Arabia.

These were roads he knew.

Almost a century before we arrived with our cameras and old motor cars, Lawrence had ridden along many of them on his Brough Superior, travelling through the Lincolnshire countryside around Cranwell and beyond. We know that some of the very roads on which The Drive was filmed were roads Lawrence himself had travelled.

There was something rather wonderful about that.

Earlier in the year we had travelled thousands of miles to the Sahara, following a fascination with the people, machines and stories associated with those landscapes. We came home looking for the next chapter and discovered that, in a sense, part of it had been here all along.

What interested us was the thread connecting the desert adventurer with the man who returned home and continued to find freedom through machinery and movement.

Because adventure does not necessarily require an expedition.

It doesn't need a border crossing, a shipping manifest or months spent preparing two old Jeeps.

Sometimes it can begin at the end of your own drive.

There is a particular pleasure in travelling in an old motor car that is difficult to replicate in something modern. You are much more involved in proceedings. You hear the engine working, feel the road beneath you and notice the temperature changing through an open window. Journeys take longer and occasionally things go wrong, but the inconvenience becomes part of what makes them memorable.

After the Sahara, that idea seemed more pertinent than ever.

We had spent weeks travelling through a landscape where one hundred miles could feel like remarkably little. We had learnt to stop worrying quite so much about how quickly we were getting somewhere and to pay more attention to what was happening along the way.

Back in England, the distances changed but the principle didn't have to.

There was something particularly fitting about making that discovery on roads Lawrence had known himself. His great desert adventure was behind him by then, but the desire to escape, to move and simply to go somewhere had evidently remained.

Perhaps there was still adventure to be found here too.

You simply had to go looking for it.

Letting The Story Take Its Time

There was another influence on The Drive, and one that became particularly important when we began thinking about how the film itself should feel.

David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia is remarkable for many reasons, but one of the things we kept returning to was its extraordinary confidence in allowing a scene to take its time.

Lean doesn't always cut away when a modern audience might expect him to. He lets you wait.

The opening sequence is a wonderful example. We watch Lawrence prepare his Brough Superior before setting off. The motorcycle is not simply there waiting for him so that the story can begin. We see the process. The machine is started, Lawrence prepares himself and eventually he leaves.

Only then does the journey begin.

Nothing is hurried for the viewer's convenience.

It is deliberate, and because Lean gives the sequence that time, you begin to notice the details. The exciting soundtrack. Lawrence's movements, walking into and out of frame. The Brough motorcycle. The markings of the tarmac. The gradual anticipation of departure.

Time itself becomes part of the scene.

That idea became an important reference for The Drive.

We wanted the opening of our film to have something of the same patience. Rather than rushing to the motor car and getting the characters onto the road as quickly as possible, we allow the sequence to unfold.

You see the preparations.

You see the clothes being put on, the things being gathered and the small rituals that come before leaving. The car does not immediately roar into life and disappear down the road simply because that would move the story along more quickly.

We wanted the viewer to settle into it.

To become conscious, perhaps, that the scene is taking its time.

That slowness is deliberate.

There is a temptation in modern filmmaking, particularly in advertising, to remove anything that does not immediately advance the story. Attention must be captured within seconds. Cuts become quicker. Scenes become shorter. Everything is designed to keep the viewer moving forwards.

For The Drive, we wanted to resist some of that.

If the film is about the pleasure of travelling without rushing, then the film itself cannot be in a hurry.

Lean understood that the smallest details can become important when you give an audience enough time to notice them. He could make a distant figure crossing an enormous landscape feel significant simply by refusing to cut away. The audience waits. The anticipation grows. Eventually, when something happens, it matters because you have been allowed to experience the time leading up to it.

We could never recreate the scale of Lawrence of Arabia, nor were we trying to.

But we could borrow something of its patience.

So we slowed things down.

We let preparations happen in real time. We allowed shots to linger beyond the point at which convention might suggest cutting away. We tried to show details when we wanted them to be noticed rather than simply filling the screen with them.

It felt particularly appropriate because the story itself had already taken us back to Lawrence.

Our journey through the Sahara had introduced one side of that world: The distance, exploration and the extraordinary scale of the desert.

The Drive brought us home.

And there, waiting at the beginning of Lean's film, was Lawrence once again. No longer riding through Arabia, but preparing a motorcycle on an English morning before setting off down the road.

That seemed a rather fitting place for our next adventure to begin.

The Cranwell

The connection with Lawrence also provided the name for a new piece of knitwear appearing in The Drive.

The Cranwell takes its name from RAF Cranwell and that quieter, lesser-known period of Lawrence's life after Arabia.

We liked the idea that the name did not refer to the Lawrence everybody immediately recognises. Instead, it belonged to what came next.

That felt particularly appropriate for this film.

The Cranwell is a simple wool jumper, and deliberately so. Its character comes from the sort of practical knitwear that belonged naturally to wardrobes of the period, when a good wool jumper was not considered specialist clothing but simply something useful to own.

That distinction matters.

During our time in the Sahara, we were reminded repeatedly of just how capable traditional natural fibres remain. We had gone expecting relentless heat and found ourselves reaching for wool far more often than anticipated. Cold mornings, strong Atlantic winds and long hours travelling in open vehicles made good knitwear genuinely useful.

The experience reinforced something we have believed for a long time at Stanley Biggs. The reason so many traditional garments have endured is not simply because they look good, nor because we have become nostalgic about the past.

They endured because they worked.

Wool regulates temperature remarkably well. Cotton is comfortable, hard-wearing and easy to live in. Good trousers, shirts and knitwear can move between situations without requiring an entire wardrobe designed for individual purposes.

For The Drive, we wanted the clothing to feel that way.

Not costume.

Not something carefully arranged for the camera.

Clothes that could be worn, creased, thrown into the back of a car and pulled on when the evening became cooler.

The sort of clothes you might choose if you didn't know precisely where the road was going to take you.

What Came Next

Perhaps that is ultimately what connects The Raid and The Drive.

One takes place thousands of miles from home in a landscape that makes you feel extraordinarily small. The other begins somewhere much more familiar.

But both came from the same thought.

There is value in going.

Our time in the Western Sahara reminded us how quickly the unnecessary parts of modern life fall away when the world becomes larger. There were vehicles to keep running, routes to find, weather to watch and hundreds of miles ahead of us. Everything else could wait.

Coming home did not mean that feeling had to disappear entirely.

You don't have to cross the Sahara to find it.

You don't even have to know where you're going.

Sometimes it is enough to put a few things in the car, choose the longer road and see where it takes you.

The Drive is what happened next.