The epic journey of the Second World War drama The Railway Man

Kaleem Aftab speaks to the director Jonathan Teplitzky about his big-screen adaptation of a touching Second World War memoir.

Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman in The Railway Man. Courtesy Thin Man Films

In his 1995 memoir The Railway Man, the British soldier Eric Lomax recounts how he was tortured during the Second World War and eventually, decades later, came to forgive the Japanese interpreter Takashi Nagase, the man that he held responsible for his treatment.

In 1942, while stationed in Singapore, Lomax was captured by Japanese forces and sent to work on the construction of the so-called Death Railway in Thailand. Eric was tortured when it was discovered that he was concealing a radio. His suffering didn’t stop at the end of hostilities – Lomax shut himself off from the world, until decades later he was finally able to face the past.

The director Jonathan Teplitzky’s big-screen adaptation starts with Lomax meeting his future wife Patti on a train. Colin Firth stars as the British soldier and Nicole Kidman plays the woman who helps him come to terms with the atrocities he witnessed and endured.

What little most people know about the building of the railway line between Thailand and Myanmar mostly comes from watching the David Lead classic film The Bridge on the River Kwai. A tale that is completely fictionalised and about a bridge and a river that didn’t exist at the time of war, it says much about the effect of the 1957 film that the Thai authorities would later rename a river beneath the last POW-built bridge to satisfy tourist demand.

Teplitzky also revisited the Alec Guinness-starring movie. “To watch River Kwai again was great, but I always felt that the film I wanted to make was more intimate,” he says.

“We didn’t have the resources to make this huge Second World War epic, although in the scenes we have that take place in 1942, we try to get a feeling of that epic scale and put our resources into those moments, the railway and, of course, Singapore. But the real meat of the story is the relationship between Eric and Patti [Kidman] and that between Eric and Nagase.”

Jeremy Irvine plays the young Lomax. Teplitzky says that Irvine spent a lot of time with Firth so that they could synchronise their work playing the same character in different eras. “They rehearsed together. They did a lot of work building their voice patterns and speech patterns so that there was a similarity,” says the filmmaker. “It was important to show what happened to Eric during the war as part of the story that leads to him forgiving Nagase. But I didn’t want the war scenes to play as flashback. I tried to make both stories run alongside each other.”

The Australian director also discovered during the shoot that train enthusiasts are even more zestful than the paparazzi. “On the third day of production, we shot the scene where Eric and Patti meet on a train. We hired a train for the day, a perfect, period 1980s train that they had to transfer from the Bo’Ness and Kinneil private railway to Perth station, where we shot on a disused platform,” he recalls.

“There were about 200 paparazzi hovering around, trying to get the first pictures of Nicole and Colin working, but more astonishing was the fact that there were 5,000 train­spotters lining the railway, hoping to catch a glimpse of the train. We had to CGI a lot of them out of shot in the edit.”

It was during the edit that the sad news came that Lomax had passed away. He would never see the film made about his life. Teplitzky says: “I don’t think Eric would have watched the film anyway. He was thrilled the film was being made. He came on set a couple of times and saw stills from the shoot. He had an ongoing relationship with Colin. But I think he would have loved to have Patti go home and tell him all about the reception. He didn’t need to watch it.”

• The Railway Man screens at the Madinat Theatre today at 9.30pm. Ticket information can be found at www.diff.ae