As a child, on Saturday afternoon TV I first saw Dr Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia and Oliver Twist, and then I was shown Brief Encounter by my favourite surrogate grandmother, the first person I knew to have a VHS machine. I felt Lean was there for me with these magical, glamorous, beautiful worlds populated with poetic men and dreamy women and great heroic gestures. Through my teens I was more into Lynch and Scorsese, but as I became more interested in the art of film-making Lean came back.

In my mid-twenties I read Kevin Brownlow’s biography of Lean and became obsessed. I took it on holiday with me to Goa, and my girlfriend said she hadn’t realised she was coming on holiday with me and Lean. In the end, I just stayed in the hotel room and read it, and one day she came in to find me weeping my eyes out. I told her: “David Lean’s just died!”

I never studied film – I’m dyslexic, as was Lean – so I couldn’t learn from books. Instead I sat down and watched his films, and they taught me film grammar.

Lean was, as Andrei Tarkovsky put it, a “sculptor of time”. He totally understood the use of time in relation to image and drama and sound. The moment that stands out is in Lawrence of Arabia when the match is blown out against the rising sun. It is a classic lesson in the dramatic potential of cutting from something very close up, to something extremely wide – juxtaposing the macro and the micro to tell a story. Now when I make films, I think to myself: “How would Lean have done this shot?”

As part of the process of making Atonement, I had Keira Knightley and James McAvoy watch In Which We Serve, Lean’s first film, which he co-directed with Noël Coward, and Brief Encounter. Celia Johnson’s performance in both those films is one of the high points of British cinema acting, and I wanted them to watch the style and the accents.

I find that his art still inspires me in every film I make, but his life is also a cautionary tale. It seems he had nothing else in his life but his film-making, and I’m not sure if that eventually made him very happy. I think his sense of longing for something more beautiful than the drudgery of life comes from a deep and probably quite painful place. He is a very personal film-maker.

People talk about this grand, epic quality in 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.

David Lean’s The Passionate Friends is released in cinemas tomorrow; the complete retrospective, Rediscover David Lean, plays at BFI Southbank through June and July (www.bfi.org.uk/lean)

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