“People talk about this grand, epic quality in [David] Lean‘s films, but I love them because they are pure. Clean, simple — even minimalist. He never uses anything he doesn’t need, and, like the match and the sunrise, it encapsulates more than a million words.

“No one else comes close, but it gives me something to aspire to.” — Atonement director Joe Wright writing yesterday (6.5) in the Times Online on the occasion of a British Film Institute tribute.