Director James Hawes talks about the challenge of bringing an extraordinary – and true – story to the screen in One Life.
This article originally appeared in Film Stories issue 47.
The incredible story of Sir Nicholas Winton - a man who arranged for the safe evacuation of more than 650 children who were otherwise headed to Nazi death camps during World War II - is one that people may be aware of through one of three avenues.
There are the select few who knew what Winton was doing at the time - a small circle of family friends and colleagues involved in arranging the evacuation.
For far more people it took almost 50 years for the wider public to learn what he’d done, courtesy of a segment in the Sunday night BBC One magazine programme That’s Life! This was a hugely popular show that’d go from a dog saying “sausages” one moment to a deathly serious story the next. It was there that host Esther Rantzen explained the heroics of Winton and the people around him.