Director Mimi Leder learned her craft on t’ telly before graduating to the big screen with a bang thanks to the likes of The Peacemaker and Deep Impact. Since then, things have been a little quieter following Pay it Forward and her last cinematic effort, Thick as Thieves, which bypassed theatres and went straight to DVD. But she hasn’t been sitting around – she’s switched back to TV for some meaty assignments, including the US version of Shameless, and has now picked an ambitious project to try her movie luck again, signing on to craft a new adaptation of World War One novel All Quiet on the Western Front.
We use the term ambitious because the first attempt to translate Enrique Remarque’s book to the screen resulted in 1930’s eponymous film, which won the Best Picture Oscar and a gong for director Lewis Milestone. No pressure, then…
"Even though the original film was made in 1930 at the advent of the talkies, I was moved by its depiction of the terrible senseless brutality of war," Leder says in a statement picked up by Deadline. "With this version, most of it takes place in the last 24 hours of the war. WWI fighting was brutal, hand-to-hand and ugly, and it practically wiped out a generation of young men. What is so compelling is the catastrophic levels of violence, this mind-numbing savagery, and what happens to a boy who in the journey to becoming a man has to become an animal. War destroys the humanity of this young man, stripping away his ability to feel, and making him act like a beast.
“Taken with the emotionality of how this young boy joined the war out of nationalism as many of our boys do to keep America safe, there is a message here about what happens to them and the politicians who are making war. It's alarming how little this has changed. There is an opportunity to make a great film about war, but it is also an anti-war film, an un-romanticized version of war and its consequences."
Ian Stokell and Lesley Patterson have written the script and are hard at work scaring up some financing. The current plan is to get the movie shot next year…