Jeremy Irvine: War and Peace

The scene is nostalgic, pastoral, beautifully English. On a trundling train in Northern England, Eric Lomax (Colin Firth), a kindly middle-aged man, finds himself sitting opposite the politely inviting Patti (Nicole Kidman). However improbably, Eric finds himself chatting her up. "If you think Warrington's exciting,” he says. “Wait ’til we get to Preston."

It’s a scene consciously reminiscent of David Lean’s Brief Encounter. Eric reaches his destination. His and Patti's eyes linger before parting. Later we find him sitting in a working men’s club with his fellow veterans of the Second World War, staring out of the window. Then he jumps up, rushes back to the train station, and eventually intercepts his future wife at Edinburgh’s Waverley Station.

Director Jonathan Teplitzky provides a deceptively reassuring opening to a true story of pain, suffering and, finally, redemption, because Eric and Patti’s romance precipitates the most difficult chapter in their adult lives – Eric must come to terms with “a life of bitterness and hatred.” He was held in captivity by the Japanese as a prisoner of the war, starved and tortured to the point of no return. Nightmares haunt him every night, while his waking days are hamstrung by fantasies of revenge and intense depression.

As Patti confronts her new husband, forcing him to talk about his experiences for the first time, the film spools back. We meet the younger Lomax, played insightfully by War Horse actor Jeremy Irvine, trying to acclimatise to his new existence as a prisoner of war.

The Railway Man is based on Lomax’s own memoir of an almost forgotten chapter of Britain’s war. Lomax, who died last year at the age of 93, was born in Edinburgh in 1919, left school at 16 and joined the Post Office as a telegraphist. At 19, with war inevitable, Lomax joined the Royal Corps of Signals, becoming a Royal Signals officer for the Royal Artillery. In 1942 he was captured by the Japanese following the surrender of Singapore. As a prisoner of war in Kanchanaburi, Thailand, he became one of the thousands of men forced to build “the death railway” over the River Kwai in Burma.

‘We were surviving, but that was not enough,’ Lomax wrote in his memoirs, first published in 1995. ‘We were rebellious and eager to know what was happening in the war.’

Lomax was part of a small group of prisoners who secretly built a radio, bartering stolen tools for parts with local traders. They would tune in to Allied bulletins from India, or just to listen to music from back in Blighty.

But the radio was discovered, and Lomax was held in Changi jail and tortured within an inch of his life as the Japanese tried to force a fictional confession of sabotage.

As his interrogator said to him on arrival at the prison: "Lomax, you will be killed shortly, whatever happens. But it will be to your advantage in the time remaining to tell the whole truth. You know now how we can deal with people when we wish to be unpleasant."

“I’ve never had the sort of emotional connection [to a character I've played that] I had to Eric Lomax,” Irvine tells The Skinny when we meet in London. “I got to meet him and his wife, so I spent a lot of time thinking about the responsibility that comes with telling his story. How could I relate to someone who has been forced into a situation so horrific? I was going to have to do everything to get an occasional glimpse of what his life was like as a prisoner of war.”

Irvine lost 30 pounds for the role, and spent time in Lomax’s home in Berwick-upon-Tweed, trying to learn as much as he could about the conditions he endured. “He was still suffering 60 years on, and I was asking him to hand the most difficult parts of his life over to me,” Irvine says of the experience. “He was an incredibly funny and sharp and generous man, who gave me so much. But there was a line where I couldn’t go. He’d just go silent, but I could see him reliving it on his face.”

---

“I’ve never had the sort of emotional connection to a character I've played that I had to Eric Lomax” – Jeremy Irvine

---

When it came to the waterboarding sequences, Irvine told Teplitzky he wanted to film the scenes as realistically as possible.

“I thought to myself, bit of wet cloth and a hose, it can’t be that bad,” Irvine says. “I’ve heard people describe waterboarding as drowning on dry land, but it’s so much worse. You can have your head held under water, no worries. But water forced into your lungs, into your stomach, up your nose, eyes, ears – you can’t breathe in, exhale. You’re so totally helpless. We did a lot of takes, but not for very long. I managed to deal with it for seven or eight seconds, and I could stop when I wanted. Eric had it day after day.”

But waterboarding was only the tip of the suffering Lomax was about to experience. He would endure much worse. “They’d waterboard him until his stomach visibly swelled with water, and then they’d stamp on his stomach,” Irvine reveals. “We couldn’t put what Eric went through in the movie, because no-one would watch it.”

In the film’s third act, a now ageing Eric realises that the man that tortured him, the interpreter Takashi Nagase of Kurashiki, Japan, has resurfaced. The film shows Nagase working as a tour guide at the prison in which Eric was tortured, now a museum open to tourists. Firth’s Lomax travels alone to Burma to confront Takashi with the express purpose of murdering him, but instead finds in himself a capacity to forgive, to reconcile the past with the damaged men they are now. Extraordinarily, the two found in the other an element of mutual understanding and, over time, became friends.

The film, it must be said, takes liberties here in the interests of dramatic unity. Lomax discovered Takashi after Takashi wrote his own book, Crosses and Tigers, about his own experiences during and after the war. After Patti made contact with Takashi, Lomax met him again on the bridge over the River Kwai with a camera crew in tow; it became the documentary Enemy, My Friend? directed by Mike Finlason.

Yet this remains a reverent, powerful film – a true tribute to the quiet men who sacrificed themselves, in death and in living, so we could live free and without fear. “He wrote the book and kept it in a cupboard for 30 years,” Irvine says. “He felt shamed by himself, but Eric Lomax was a hero, not just as a young man at war, but throughout his life. I have no idea how he forgave like he did. I could never do that.” But Lomax captures his life in the final sentence of his memoir: ‘Some time the hating has to stop.’