The restored version, presented at Cannes Classics, was made from the Director’s Cut in 1989, when the film was rere­leased in cinemas. It includes 21 minutes Lawrence of Arabia of unreleased footage, bringing the total running time to 3 hours 42 minutes. Over the years the film was heavily cut, but in 1988 a reconstruction of the film was undertaken, produced by Robert A. Harris and Jim Painten. David Lean and original editor Anne V. Coates then worked on the film to create Lean’s Director’s Cut. In spite of the span of time being only two years we have an enormously long film. It will be at least three hours, perhaps nearer four. We have had to use a lot of a dramatic economy. Consequently we have short-cir­cuited certain incidents, and run six char­acters into one. There were many military men concerned in the Lawrence story. It would be impossible to include them all in a screenplay so we have one (played by An­thony Quayle) who represents them as ‘an English military character’, complimentary to the role Jack Hawkins has as General Al­lenby. It is, I believe, the best performance Hawkins has ever given. […] In treating Lawrence as a character we have not been able to avoid, or indeed wanted to avoid, the controversial aspects of his private life. Our treatment for instance shows him to be masochistic. We have not implied that Lawrence was homosexual, though it de­pends on what you call homosexual. […] We have not avoided stating the facts of the political climate of the time, the British-Arab relationship; but the political arena was not our main concern. Mostly I hope we have created a very exceptional hero. This is one of the things I am longing to find out when the film is seen by an au­dience. I don’t know how an audience will take Lawrence as we have shown him: be­cause in certain ways he is full-blown tradi­tional hero figure and he does some heroic things, but he also does things which will shock an audience. I think audiences are unaccustomed to this kind of shock. […] The film has been shot on 65mm stock in the Panavision process. All the material we shot in Jordan we could not see until we returned in Britain. […] I supervise the editing myself, particularly the tricky action sequences. As I was an editor, it is hard to keep my hand off the celluloid. Nobody can prophesy at the script stage how a thing is going to be cut; but I try to shoot with a plan of the cutting in mind. I try to get the shots that I know will be wanted, moving the artists from here to there and not repeating the action all over again from another set-up. Sometimes one slips up and I curse my­self for not having taken a long-shot which later I find was really necessary.
(David Lean, Out of the Wilderness, “Films and Filming”, n. 100, January 1963)