I had the second role. It’s a very, very nice role because it’s got very concentrated, long speeches. It’s interesting to work out how to speak those speeches.
My part is an old Arab prince. Old Arabs is what I do know (laughing). When you are young and you are ‘box office’ and you sell tickets, they adjust the parts to fit you or they take you even if you’re not right for them – like I played a German colonel in the film called, “The Night of the Generals.” I played all sorts of incredible things having come off on my camel in “Lawrence of Arabia.” I was then thrust into Russian poets and all sorts of characters. When you get old, if you need an old actor to play an old Italian, you take an old Italian actor. There are lots of wonderful old Italian actors. You don’t need to take an Egyptian to play an Italian actor. When you’re not a box office star, they take you for the thing that you are right for – that they believe you are right for. And so what am I right for now? I don’t know (laughing).
After 50 years in films, what’s your secret to still having sex appeal?
I don’t know what sex appeal is. I don’t think you can have sex appeal knowingly. The people who seduce me personally are the people who seem not to know they’re seductive, and not to know they have sex appeal. They don’t flaunt it or use it – those are the people that I’m attracted to.
I don’t know what women are attracted to. I can’t tell, but certainly I have no notion of having sex appeal or being seductive in any way. I don’t know what people think and it doesn’t really matter. What matters to me are the people I know, what they think of me, and my life is like everybody’s life. I love to be with my son and my grandchildren, like normal people. I have no particular idea of what I represent to other people. It’s very mysterious to me. I don’t understand it.
What do you think about Hollywood remaking classic movies?
I don’t know. “Doctor Zhivago” - I suppose you could remake it because it’s a big novel. For television you’d make it differently. The difference between television and movies is the rhythm, the tempo. When you are sitting in a cinema and you’re sitting in the dark, there’s one focal point that you’re looking at. You’re not in your own home and you’re not in your own chair, so you need the film to go and not to be too slow. You are focused and there’s nothing else to look at. If it drags on, you get bored. It’s the contrary with television. When you are sitting at home, watching a film, you’re comfortably seated, and you’ve got your feet up. If you want to get up, you shouldn’t miss too much. It shouldn’t be so fast that you can’t do these things. I think that that television show should be slower in tempo than in the cinema.
“Doctor Zhivago” is regarded as such a classic now but it got very poor reviews in its time. Were you surprised?
Very poor reviews. No, I’ll tell you what happened. We finished shooting the film on I think it was the 16th of October of 1965. David Lean had promised MGM that he’d get it out before the Oscars. They built him a little editing room on the lot in MGM and he cut it very quickly - he was a great editor – [but] he did it wrong. He realized that when we were at the premiere.
After the opening night we went and had a meal in New York at Club 21 or somewhere. We saw the first notices, the first reviews coming out, and they were terrible. And David Lean was smoking with a cigarette holder and he was thinking, “You know, Omar, I know what I did wrong. I edited it all wrong. I should go back and re-do it.” So he went back to the studio and re-cut the film. “If nothing,” he said, “the music here should have come four frames later or four frames earlier. Here this close-up is slightly too long or slightly too short.” He re-cut the film and he reprinted prints, and set them to the theaters. And as the new prints came, the audience started [growing] tremendously, and it became a huge hit. It didn’t start all that fast, even box office-wise. It took these two or three weeks until he re-edited the film before it became a hit. If the critics had seen it then, with the new cut, they wouldn’t have been so bad.
PAGE 4: David Lean and "Lawrence of Arabia"
