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Staggering Honesty. To encompass the whole, Bolt calculated, would take a film that lasted about 45 hours. Then, too, Zhivago in the book is more a passive observer, a spokesman for Pasternak's own vision and soaring humanism than a Hotspur to action. In portraying an age of revolution, the novelist relied heavily on coincidence for his plot, skimped on motivation in his characters. For film purposes, Bolt had to cope with the fact that Pasternak "jumps absolutely obligatory material." There is, for instance, not a single kiss between Zhivago and his mistress Lara in the novel, and the reader is never told how their monumental affair was consummated. "It simply took place between chapters," says Bolt.
It was the character of Lara, whom Pasternak modeled in part on his own mistress and charged "with all the femininity in the world," who fascinated Lean with her "staggering honesty and devotion." And with that, the decision was made. "The Russian Revolution itself was a towering historical event," Lean has since stated. "However, this is not the story of the Revolution. The drama, the horror and the turbulence of the Revolution simply provide the canvas against which is told a moving and highly personal love story."
Ultimatum to Succeed. To make his settings authentic, Lean in the past has labored in the jungles of Ceylon and ice-cooled film in the 130° heat of the Jordanian desert. For Zhivago, Lean was invited to Russia, but he never went: "I knew they would only try to talk me out of making the film." After all, the book is still banned by the Soviets. Instead, he set out on a 10,000-mile trek in his Rolls-Royce with Production Designer John Box, traveling all the way to the border of Finland and the U.S.S.R. They were on the lookout for extras, equipment, and what Box calls "eyefuls"—vast stretches of snowy forest for Pasternak's partisan bands, Siberia-like wastelands, and steppe-like fields of waving grain. For the main set, they settled on Spain.
With his canvas in mind, Lean next began to people it. Producer Carlo Ponti, who had bought the screen rights, says that preliminary talk about including his wife Sophia Loren in the cast went by the boards because Lean "wanted an author's, not a star's, film." Lean did buy Ponti's suggestion that they try an unknown, Geraldine Chaplin, now 21, as Zhivago's wife Tonya. Given an ultimatum by her father Charlie Chaplin, "Either you succeed in three pictures or you renounce," Geraldine, with her fresh, almost innocent portrayal, may well have succeeded in Zhivago.