ABC News
[ Source: ABC ]
When Richard Flanagan won the Booker Prize for the Narrow Road to the Deep North in 2014, his “good mate” Justin Kurzel was in London to celebrate with him.
So when it came to adapting the acclaimed novel for the screen, Flanagan wanted Kurzel — the award-winning director of Snowtown (2011), The True History of the Kelly Gang (2018) and Nitram (2021) — at the helm.
“He asked me at his shack on Bruny Island — where he actually wrote the book — over lunch,” Kurzel tells ABC Radio National’s The Screen Show.
“He said something beautiful to me, which was, ‘You have to make it your own and … find your own cinematic lens on it, which is going to be different from the book.”
Based on Flanagan’s father’s experience as a POW, the novel is told in flashbacks as Dorrigo Evans — a famous war hero and celebrated surgeon — recalls episodes from his past: his childhood in rural Tasmania, a torrid love affair in his 20s and his time as a POW on the Thai-Burma Railway in World War II.
Flanagan’s only request to Kurzel was to retain the book’s non-linear structure, a wish the filmmaker and his longtime collaborator, screenwriter Shaun Grant, honoured.
In the screen adaptation — starring Australian actor Jacob Elordi as the young Dorrigo Evans — the action shifts between the early 1940s before Dorrigo is deployed, the POW camp and the 1980s, when he is in his 70s (played by Irish actor Ciarán Hinds).
As a young man, Dorrigo embarks on two love affairs: one with Ella (Olivia de Jonge), who becomes his wife, and another clandestine romance with Amy (Odessa Young), who is married to his uncle, Keith (Simon Baker).
Stream the best of Fiji on VITI+. Anytime. Anywhere.
