Based on Eric Lomax's best-selling memoir, and a series of meetings over many years with Lomax and his wife Patti, the story takes us back to 1942, when tens of thousands of brave young soldiers become prisoners of war when Japanese forces overran Singapore. Eric Lomax, a 21-year-old signals engineer and railway enthusiast, was one of the surrendered soldiers who was sent to work on the construction of the notorious Death Railway in Thailand, where he witnessed unimaginable suffering: men forced to hack through rock and jungle with their bare hands, beaten, starved and falling prey to tropical diseases.
He built a secret radio to bring hope. As he whispered news of Hitler's defeats or American advances in the Pacific, a thousand backs straightened and exhausted, desperate men resolved to survive another day. When the radio was discovered, Lomax faced beatings, interrogation and worse. Barely surviving the war he returned home, like so many others, to a country unable to imagine what he and his colleagues had been through. Haunted by the face of one young Japanese officer, he shut himself off from the world.
Churchill calls it "the greatest disaster ever to have befallen the British Empire".
For screenwriters Frank Cottrell Boyce and Andy Paterson, finding the right way to tell the story was the first and most difficult task. Characters that can't or won't communicate aren't easy to put on screen. Lomax had written that "the ordinary former Far East POW has probably never talked to anyone about his experiences. The victim of torture most certainly does not talk".
Their first meetings with Lomax were only two years after the book was published. "We realised later that we'd come into a story that was still unfolding. Suddenly, a man who had blocked out the world for decades was a public figure, expected to share his most intimate secrets."
"Most survivors of the notorious Thai/Burma 'Death Railway' kept quiet about what happened to them in the war," says Frank Cottrell Boyce. "At least, they were quiet in the daytime. Their nights were filled with rages and nightmares. Decades on, Eric Lomax broke his silence. Soldier that he was, he turned and faced his demons - both psychological and real. With the help of a remarkable woman, Lomax sought out and confronted Takashi Nagase, the officer who had presided at his interrogation and torture. He told the story in The Railway Man - an astonishing memoir that twists around one horrible irony: as a boy, Eric had been enthralled by the great steam trains that piled in and out of Edinburgh's Waverley Station. As a young soldier he saw his comrades worked to death, and was himself tortured on the Death Railway.
"Initially, we had expected to tell the whole story, exactly as it happened in the book. But when, for example, Eric talked about the aftermath of the meeting with Nagase, how somehow 'all the pain just went away', we realised even he didn't yet fully understand how that had happened."
Producer Bill Curbishley believes: "The book has quite rightly been called a classic of autobiography, but Patti is barely mentioned. We suspected that was hurtful to her, but she would never say it. She's a wonderful, loyal, no-nonsense lady, not given to self-pity. For a long time she refused to accept that her story mattered at all. How could her suffering compare to what those men went through on the railway? Yet, as Colin Firth put it much later, there is no story without Patti. She was the miracle in Eric's life."
There was no doubt that Lomax spent decades "nursing himself to sleep" with thoughts of revenge. Jonathan Teplitzky recalls sitting, later, with Lomax and Colin Firth. "Colin asked him if he would have killed Nagase and Lomax immediately said: 'Yes'. He had clearly thought it through many times." The filmmakers needed to understand how Lomax could have made the journey from wanting "to cage, to beat, to drown" his former tormentor to a place of relative peace.
Crucial insights would come from Helen Bamber, who had been a key figure in Lomax' rehabilitation. Bamber had entered the Belsen concentration camp at the age of 19 and stayed there for two-and-a-half years. After working with Amnesty, she founded the Medical Foundation for Victims of Torture.
Lomax says his first meeting with her was "like walking through a door into an unexplored world of caring and special understanding. She learned as a girl in Belsen the importance of allowing people to tell what had been done to them; the power of listening to their testimony and of giving people the recognition that their experience deserves".
Colin Firth, who plays Lomax in the film, had known a man who'd been on the Death Railway. "He was actually our local Labour parliamentary candidate and it was often told how this is something he carried with him and that he'd actually had some sort of experience of reconciliation. It all connected."
"In an awful lot of screenwriting you get a generic hero of one sort of another. There was nothing generic here - the character jumped off the page. Lomax felt completely unique to the story; his passion for railway timetables and trains, his extraordinarily intense, soldierly qualities: loyalty and a commitment to a sense of honour, all combined to make a very dynamic personality. There's also this very dark side, which was to do with the degree to which he'd suffered and that was also very powerful to read. So you have a man who's delightful, but there's a mystery to him."
Jeremy Irvine had actually read the book a few years before being sent the screenplay and arrived at his first casting meeting with 50 pages of notes. "This was a story with real integrity, real emotion and also something that needed to be told because it's truly extraordinary - and I don't use that word lightly."
Did Irvine find it intimidating to find himself playing the young Colin Firth?
"Suddenly I was working with one of the greatest actors of a generation. Colin was so open about his process and so helpful and kind and understanding, and really did want us to work together so it was just wonderful. I could phone him up and say: 'Do you think this will work?' and he'd say: 'Well I don't know let's play with it,' and we'd workshop together and that's something that most 21-year-old actors only get to dream of, doing this sort of master class with an actor like Colin."
For Australian director Jonathan Teplitzky, the time the two spent together was the best kind of rehearsal. "Because it's a split experience, where Colin has to deal with the emotional consequences of what Jeremy physically and emotionally goes through, there needed to be a trading of what those experiences mean for each of them."
Nicole Kidman, who plays Lomax' wife, read the script and responded immediately.
"I'd never had the chance to play a woman who gets to stand by her partner, her lover, her husband through very difficult times and it's something I feel very strongly about and have done in my own personal life. I do believe there's a way in which love can heal, by just gently, slowly, encouraging someone to confront things, and I wanted to do that on screen. That's the thread Patti and I share, obviously in very different situations, but I connected to her. I've always believed that people fuse through pain. People don't fall in love, or really find deep love when everything is good. When you really find it is when you have to go through pain together. And if you choose to stay together you really find something much deeper."
During the editing of the film 93-year-old Lomax passed away and those who worked on the film were heartbroken because they were just a few of weeks short of getting the film into a state where he could see it.
Frank Cottrell Boyce concludes: "We'd promised Eric he'd see that film one day. Had we broken our promise? Thinking about it now, it was probably a mercy. Eric Lomax's great achievement was to have survived the darkest place and to have left it behind. Why would he want to revisit that in Dolby stereo and Technicolor? What could we add to what he already knew? His greatest victory was that he was able to shake off the dark shadows that had haunted him and to die with heart full on friendship and cake, love and steam trains."
Read more about The Railway Man and other films opening this week at www.writingstudio.co.za.
