Peter Weir in Krakow; photo - PAP

Director Peter Weir met with journalists in Krakow on Friday to discuss his new movie, The Way Back,  which describes the journey of a Pole exiled to Siberia and is now showing at this year’s  Off Plus Camera Festival.

 

“Coming here, it's with great respect,” Weir affirmed. “It's a Polish story,” he said of the movie.

Thenews.pl's Nicholas Hodge was there to find out more.

 

Asked whether he had considered casting Poles in the lead roles, Weir divulged, however, that the financial backers of the movie had insisted that there was too much money riding on the film “to put in people with no names at all.”

 

The director, who has such varied movies to his credit as Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show and Master and Commander, revealed that the film had been in the pipeline for many years, and that figures such as Burt Lancaster and George Clooney were amongst those who had championed the project in the past.

 

Ed Harris, Colin Farrell and Jim Sturgess ended up taking key roles.

 

Siberian odyssey

 

The Way Back follows the plight of a young Pole named Janusz who is deported to a forced labour camp in Siberia following the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939.

 

“Holding a little piece of your history in my hand, I was very sensitive to get it right,” Weir said.

 

“Poland was the crucible of the most intense suffering of the 2nd World War, and it's not a competition,” he reflected. “You can't trifle with history,” he added.

 

Faced with the appalling conditions, Janusz decides to lead an escape, gathering a cluster of internees for a formidable trek south across the Himalayas to freedom.

 

Weir noted that reading the original book, Slawomir Rawicz's The Long Walk, he was “immediately immersed in the story.”

 

“It was no different to when I was a child on my mother's knee,” he added.

  

The director admitted that he was racked by questions of whether he himself would have had the courage to have escaped.

 

Nevertheless, he noted that it's always “an emotional decision, and not an intellectual one,” when it comes to beginning a new film

 

Controversy

 

Slawomir Rawicz, the late author of the best-selling book The Way Back, was deported to Siberia along with several hundred thousand of his countrymen following the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939.

 

After the war, Rawicz settled in England, as did a large proportion of Poland's veterans.

 

However, a strong case has been made of late that the author did not in fact escape to India, but was released as part of the official amnesty that Stalin was obliged to sign - with British backing - after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.

 

In 2009, another UK-based veteran, Witold Glinski, came forward and declared that it was in fact his experiences that were described in the book.

 

Weir revealed that on discovering the controversy, he decided he could not make the film. However, he says that his team found evidence that the walk had happened.

 

“It's sad that Rawicz is not here to defend himself,” the director said.

 

Nevertheless, Weir stressed that he avoided making a film that was too tied to Rawicz.

 

“It was never to be a biographical film,” he argued, “but something symbolic.”

 

Thousands of Poles struggled across vast tracts of the Soviet Union in 1941 when word broke that an amnesty had been implemented.

 

Over 100,000 found passage to Persia under the aegis of General Anders and the Polish-government-in-exile.

 

Nevertheless, many internees died en route to the Polish evacuation camps. Others perished shortly after arrival, owing to illness and exhaustion.

 

Premiere

 

During the official premiere, which was also attended by a number of gulag survivors, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski decorated Weir with the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Polish Republic.

 

The film-maker had noted earlier that he was pleased that in the wider world, many young people had shown an interest in the movie, admitting that generally speaking, there was “great ignorance” about many of the Soviet crimes connected with the story.

 

Weir also made a nod to Poland's pre-eminent film-maker, with the Australian director revealing that his first knowledge of the Warsaw Uprising came through Andrzej Wajda's classic 1956 film, Kanal.

 

The Way Back (Niepokonani) is now on general release in Poland. (pg)

 

Official trailer: