One Life director on adapting an extraordinary World War 2 story with Anthony Hopkins

"Is there anyone in our audience tonight who owes their life to Nicholas Winton?" Samantha Spiro’s Esther Rantzen asks in the One Life trailer, echoing the words of that powerful BBC clip of That’s Life. You’ll most likely know the one, whether you watched it on television in 1988 or on Youtube where it’s wracked up more than 41 million views since it was uploaded 14 years ago. It sees Winton overwhelmed as the children he helped rescue from Nazi occupation back in 1939 stand up all around him. 

"It doesn't seem to matter how many times you've seen it, it still makes you weep," director James Hawes tells 12DOVE as the trailer for his adaptation of Winton’s life, One Life, is released. His aim, he tells us, is for the film to flesh out the story around that viral clip, with the help of Anthony Hopkins and Johnny Flynn playing as the man at its center.

As introduced in the first trailer, which debuted ahead of the film’s arrival at Toronto International Film Festival, we first follow Winton – or Nicky as he was affectionately known – as he visits Prague in the months before World War II. Under the imminent threat of Nazi invasion, he and his team set about rescuing as many children as they possibly can before war breaks out. Yet, as we meet an older Nicky (played by the indomitable Hopkins) fifty years later, it’s clear he’s a man who’s been keeping his remarkable story a secret. 

Below, we delve into the first trailer with Hawes, covering everything from how involved Nicky’s family were to filming in real-life locations. This conversation was edited for length and clarity.  

12DOVE: A lot of viewers’ familiarity with Nicholas’ story will come from that television moment on That’s Life and how hugely emotional it is. Was it important to you to kind of tell the wider story beyond the now-viral clip?

James Hawes: Very often when you're making a film, one of the most challenging parts of it is, 'How are we going to end this? Is it going to deliver, how is the audience going to feel as they leave the cinema? Are they going to feel satisfied or cheated?' This film comes, as long as we handle it right, with a built-in brilliant, emotional ending. And it's that evergreen clip that people have seen again and again. There's just something about that level of goodness and decency and uncomplicated human emotion. So that's fantastic: on the one hand, I've got an ending to the film, on the other hand, I've got to build towards it. And I think what will make the film special is its ability, and I think the trailer hints at that, to tell you how we get there. 

In terms of what leads to that moment too, something that struck me in the trailer is how Nicholas seems to be grappling with the fact that he couldn't save everybody, and how that haunted him throughout his life. Was this a key part of adapting his story too?

Yes, and the thing is with Nicky, he was such a quiet, understated, humble man. This is not a hero of the Instagram age. This is somebody who did it because it was the right thing to do. And I think what we hint at in the trailer is his rejection of credit and praise for what he'd done. These days, we'd be encouraged to talk about it for all sorts of reasons, and here's a man of his era who bottled things in, underplayed it, and understated it. Part of the role for Anthony was to play this man who was struggling with a sense of guilt, a sense of duty, a sense of not having done enough from his past, and that gives us a great emotional arc for an actor like Anthony Hopkins to play.

Johnny Flynn plays the young version of Nicholas too. How did you ensure narrative continuity between his performance and Anthony's?

By working closely with Johnny, who worked closely with Tony. Tony shot his sequences first so Johnny had the opportunity then to come to set to watch and to take the lead. They discussed some of the traits that they got from footage of Nicky that came out of the script that they were going to build on. Those could be details as simple as his hesitancy sometimes starting a sentence to little habits he had with his glasses when he got nervous and the way he carried himself physically. All those are crafted through and you will see the younger and the older Nicky doing the same thing.

Could you talk me through the involvement of Nicholas' family in bringing this film to the screen? 

Well, obviously there's Barbara's book, which is our principal resource. So there were lots of conversations with Barbara – I should say that a lot of those were the writers before they let an annoying director on the scene. But they've done detailed research and they'd spent a lot of time with the family in person talking about this to get their details accurate. We carried on talking to Barbara's husband and son, Nicky’s grandson, throughout the process; they're still involved. And talking to surviving Kinder [the children Winton helped save], the relatives of others who had helped Nicky, because it wasn't just him. It was a very important thing for him and the family that we don't make it a one-man achievement, that we make it clear that he would have been the first to say, 'This wasn't just me, there was a whole team of us.'

One of those people who was incredibly important in helping Nicholas was his mother, who’s played here by Helena Bonham-Carter. We see her briefly in the trailer, but could introduce her importance to this story?

Babette Winton is hugely important in making Nicky the man who would do this. Her family had escaped Germany after the first war, they changed their name, and they felt the rough edge of xenophobia and persecution for being Jewish, and then for having a German name. So the irony of that and having no place to hide really hit home. They were not observing Jews they. In fact, Nicky was christened, they celebrated Christmas, and they lived, as he says, as an agnostic. But all of that had led to a man very aware of what was going on in Europe and the risks to particularly Jewish children in Prague when he then found them there. 

Some of the filming for One Life took place in Prague, what was it like filming in real locations?

Yes, it's about 50-50. Where we could, we went back to the actual locations. There are some scenes shot on the railway station in Prague from where the kids actually departed. We were literally stepping on the same platform as they acted out the roles of those who've gone before them. Obviously, we filmed at the BBC, we filmed in Willow Road in London. So there was quite a sense of treading alongside rather than on ghosts. 

Did you draw on any major other film influences when directing the story?

There's a film called Quo Vadis, Aida? made by a Balkan director Jasmila Žbanić, which is contemporary about refugees in the Balkans that had that tone. I wanted to have quite a naturalistic tone. There's a film by Sean Ellis called Anthropoid, which tells the true story of the same period in Prague, a very different story, it's about resistance fighters. 

One of the reasons I wanted to become a director was a film from way back called Sophie's Choice with Meryl Streep, and the reason I mention that is because it plays in two timezones and you discover in the now, this woman with all sorts of damage and baggage that she's carrying emotionally, and you flashback to the then to discover what caused it to be so. It's a story again about the war and refugees and the painful legacy that can leave behind. So I was quite interested in that, although it's a much older film and not necessarily as contemporary-feeling.

Your background is mostly in directing television and this marks your feature film debut. Were there any particular challenges you found when making that transition?

I don't think so, and maybe somebody will tell me I'm a fool to think that. The thing is that high-end television has become so high-end. When I directed Helena on Enid, which is a TV movie, that was around the time that movie actors were starting to come across to television in a way that hadn't really happened, that was 2010. So if you think of the shift that's happened with House of Cards and more recently things like Slow Horses where I have a movie-level cast, if you are going to say that. Once you've got Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas, you've got the beginnings of the movie-level cast. So as long as you can meet the challenges and expectations of that level of actor and think big in terms of your story scope, I don't think it's such a big shift anymore because television has become so ambitious.

Finally, is there anything else that you’re hoping audiences will take away from this trailer about this story? 

I hope they'll take away a sense of the emotion or sense of the excitement to it. There's a ticking clock, there's a thriller, it's intense. We’ve tried not to make a run-of-the-mill period movie, it's got a lot more energy to it. Then there’s the scale of the performances, funnily enough, people will laugh at several points during this film. There is really rather wonderful character humor, in which Tony and Jonathan Pyrce and Helena and the like play really beautifully.

One Life arrives in cinemas on January 1, 2024. For more upcoming movies, check out all of the 2023 movie release dates still to come.