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Sir David Lean arguably may never have become a film director if he hadn't been schooled in Reading.

Born in Croydon he attended Leighton Park School, a Quaker foundation situated near the University of Reading's Whiteknights campus, from 1922 to 1926.

Tom Webber, producer on David Lean in Close-Up With Jonathan Ross, says: "He came from a Quaker family in South London, and so his upbringing was a world where self-indulgence was frowned upon.

Lawrence of Arabia: Peter O' Toole and Omar Sharif

"Simplicity was very much to the fore, so his family didn't really approve of the cinema, and also possibly they thought it was a little bit common."

However, the school exercised a liberal Quaker regime, with some of the teachers turning a blind eye to a teenage David's illicit visits to local cinemas.

It was in Reading where David saw his first film.

His Music Appreciation teacher Scott Goddard Lean introduced him to music and the arts, leading Lean to say later: "I don't think I'd be half the chap I am today but for Scott Goddard."

These visits to the cinema "really changed his life", says Tom, who also produces Film 2009 with Jonathan Ross.

Alec Guinness in Bridge On The River Kwai

Though despite life-changing, his films and editing techniques can be seen to draw on the traditional Quaker values a young David was brought up with.

Tom says of Lean's films: "They're very often about people repressing their emotions rather than expressing them."

He adds: "Perhaps there's another aspect in which his arguably slightly austere background and disciplined upbringing can be seen - and that's in his editing.

"He really made his name in the film industry as a brilliant editor, and carried that through to his career as a director.

"Actors we spoke to would say that they'll be getting up out of a chair and he would say 'cut' because he knew exactly where he was going to cut and edit the shots together.

"So although his films were enormous undertakings he didn't waste anything."

Lean fan Steven Spielberg

His films, including Lawrence Of Arabia, Bridge On The River Kwai, Dr Zhivago and A Passage To India are masterworks of powerful stories and, for the time, revolutionary editing.

Lean was a huge influence on generations of film directors. A man who continues to be inspired by him is Steven Spielberg.

"From the very first shot I was riveted," he says of Lawrence Of Arabia.

"I think that's the music that changed my life and made me start to look at my amateur 8mm movie-making as something that I might be doing for the rest of my life and not just something that I had been doing as a hobby.

Lawrence of Arabia: Lean directing a young actor

He adds: "The impact was just audacious, he put me in these desert sequences and he parched my lips and he put me in direct contact with my mortality and at the same time he made me understand a character like I had never understood a character in the movies before."

Infamously a rigid and relentless perfectionist, Lean would for example instruct the repainting of the train station in A Passage To India as it was the same colour as actress Judy Davis's hair.

Tom says: "They were enormously lavish productions and he would famously wait forever to get exactly the right conditions.

"What he'd seen in his mind eye had to be on the screen."