Adaptation offers a ‘worm’s eye view’ of the horrors of war

The play and eventual film of Michael Morpurgo’s novel Private Peaceful came nine years ago via writer Simon Reade’s ‘Eureka!’ moment.

It was October 2003. Reade was in the bath listening to the Today programme on the radio when he heard Morpurgo reading from his soon-to-be-published book about boy soldiers on the Somme in World War One. Reade liked it enough to abandon his ablutions and phone Morpurgo’s agent to buy the rights.

Almost a decade later and, like War Horse, following a successful run in the theatre, Private Peaceful hits the screens.

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Another tale of life in pastoral England, it is also markedly different to War Horse, the other Morpurgo opus that evolved into a mighty Hollywood epic.

Recalls Reade: “We were developing it as a big Hollywood blockbuster but that was before War Horse had been done in the West End and Spielberg had come along and done the movie. It was getting nowhere.

“Two or three years ago I got in touch with my old friend Guy de Beaujeu and said ‘This film will never happen as a big Hollywood studio movie. Why don’t we make it ourselves as a low budget independent British feature film?’ It all happened from there.”

In the theatre Tommo Peaceful recalls his life via one actor who plays all 45 characters that he meets. Film demanded that the story be expanded into a much larger tapestry. Reade describes the process as “very liberating”.

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“You approach everything totally differently and you wear different writing heads when you’re adapting something for the screen,” he reveals. “It also means you can ditch half the dialogue and make up all sorts of stuff that doesn’t even happen in the book.

“There’s a whole screen history of war movies and films with children in as well. You pay homage to that but you don’t want to go down that sentimental route. I wanted to make this a hell of a lot more political and a hell of a lot more angry than Michael had allowed himself to get in his novel.”

Adapting the book for the screen allowed Reade to connect with his own conscience. Acutely aware that much of the mood that enveloped “the war to end all wars” is now attached to the UK’s role in Afghanistan, he injected into it a very definite message.

“Sadly the thing about any war stuff is that it’s never going to go out of fashion because wars keep going on. Michael tells these stories from the point of view of an ordinary private.

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“He’s not an officer; he’s not Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen. It’s told from the rock face. It’s a worm’s eye view of it.

“There are still, every day, all over the world, boy soldiers getting shot and dying and we as adults are never responsible enough to say ‘Stop sending these kids to get killed’. That drives you when you’re writing a screenplay like this because if it might just excite a particular generation of people who may grow up to be the leaders of the future and say ‘I’m not going to go and fight. I will be like Muhammad Ali. I will not go to Vietnam’. The more of that the better from my point of view.”

Private Peaceful is on general release from today.

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