Lean, pressburger

When he finally does so, David suggests that they cut their trip short, go to Benares without Leila and prepare a short synopsis so that Pressburger could be home by Christmas.
Which is more or less what happened. Pressburger thinks up a title - WRITTEN IN THE STARS - and he gets some solid work done. This is helpful, because Indira Gandhi asks to see something in writing. He creates the character of an American doctor, and David imagines William Holden in the part. Someone recommends he see Yul Brynner in DeMille's THE TEN COMMANDMENTS and he and Pressburger go to the Odeon, but David doesn't like him. On Pressburger 's birthday - about which he breathes not a word - he sees some of the doctor's character destroyed by David. "I don't mind. It was a red balloon. [I think he means a red herring!] I didn't like it either.”
Pressburger flew back to London and David returned to Venice. After hearing nothing for three months, David wrote him a letter: "I'm mad keen to know how you are getting on. Don't let Sam bulldoze you. He's king at it and one has to grow an extra skin or the work suffers or one has a breakdown!" The treatment of GANDHI was written in the form of a novel. This was standard practice for Pressburger; turning it into a script was a later stage for him. It has a suitably epic, David Lean opening - a parade in Delhi to welcome the Viceroy in 1912, which is shattered by a bomb explosion. Gandhi returns from South Africa, and the treatment intercuts between his activities and those of a sympathetic policeman, John Holdsworth, who eventually marries an Indian girl and as a result finds himself passed over for promotion.
"Pressburger was a fine writer," said David. "He could turn his hand to anything. I was convinced we had an understanding of how the film should go. He eventually produced a treatment which was simply awful. It was so bad I was able to tell him so. I said, 'Emeric, this simply isn't what we talked about. It isn't what we agreed. It's