Amateurs plan to make film

Press, 2 August 1983, Page 17

Amateurs plan to make film

NZPA staff correspondent Sydney The 1950 s worldacclaimed book, “The Naked Island,” is to be made into a film — with a script by a man who has never written one before and by a company that knows nothing about film-making. The actors have not been cast, and there is as yet neither a director nor a producer. But Russell Braddon, the author of the book on the Japanese in the Second World War, said in Sydney that all the lack of experience appealed to him. He told a press conference that the book was being made into a film by a Sydney consultancy firm

and the script was being written by the firm’s executive director — a former theatre restaurant proprietor. “They haven’t a clue how to make a film but they will give it a go,” he said. The expatriate Australian, who now lives in Britain, was captured by the Japanese on his twenty-first birthday, and spent three years in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore’s Changi jail and on building the Siam railway.

Braddon said he wrote the book to explain what the Japanese did during the war and what they might do again, and also in the hope that it might influence Australian policy in the East.