How The Way Back turned into an incredible journey for Keith Clarke
A Birmingham-born screenwriter’s dream project has finally seen the light of day after a 13-year battle, writes Alison Jones.
Call it fate, call it destiny but Keith Clarke was probably the ideal person to write a screen play about an epic journey.
His own personal journey has taken this son of a scrap metal merchant from the streets of Birmingham to the sun-kissed heart of the film industry in America, after he set out planning to hitchhike around the world.
And the film project he has been nurturing, based on the book The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom by Slavomir Rawicz, has taken he and his wife Joni Levin on an emotional journey as they struggled for more than a dozen years to bring it to the screen.
In screen form it has been renamed The Way Back and was finally released on Boxing Day.
It stars Colin Farrell, Ed Harris, Jim Sturgess and young Irish actress Saorise Ronan, and is directed by the legendary Peter Weir, the man who helmed Picnic at Hanging Rock, Witness, Dead Poets Society and The Truman Show.
This is Keith’s debut as a screenwriter after having spent years carving out a niche writing, directing and producing documentaries together with Joni.
He has lived and worked in the States for 25 years but grew up in Ladywood, the youngest of 12 children
“That was pretty normal in the 50s and 60s, I knew families that had 20 kids. I have one beautiful daughter and it makes me wonder how you can share that love and connection with so many. My mother did, she was an amazing woman.
His dad was a scrap metal merchant with a horse and cart “just like Steptoe and Son” and a frustrated vaudevillian.
“He loved to sing and entertain in the evening. Nothing pleased him more than going down to the pub and finding a piano.”
At 16 Keith, a former pupil at Follett Osler school, wanted to spread his wings and left home, travelling south where he fell in with a crowd which sparked his interest in the arts and theatre.
“That opened up a world to me. If I had not gone I dread to think what might have happened. That was a real turning point and continues to be.”
His roaming eventually took him to America, but he remains close to siblings in Ladywood, visiting when he can.
“I am very fond of my family, they have been incredibly supportive of what I’ve done over the years.”
The Way Back is the story of a trek that covered almost as great a distance as his own from Birmingham to America.
But while Keith was able to rely on all the comforts and conveniences of modern travel, all 4,000 miles of the long walk was done on foot, in the most gruelling extremes of weather and with pitifully few provisions.
Rawicz’s book was published in 1956 and has been translated into 25 languages.
He was a Polish army veteran, who later settled in Nottingham, and wrote of how, during the Second World War, he escaped from a Siberian Gulag and spent months trudging to freedom in India, following a route that took him and his fellow escapees through the Gobi Desert and the Himalayas. He died in 2004.
Keith came across the account 13 years ago.
“We pitched this story 39 times to studios and production companies and were rejected,” he recalls.
He intended to write the script himself, but when major Hollywood players started taking an interest he was persuaded to place it in the hands of a writer with a proven track record in feature films.
