"Wartime Lies" Adapted For Cinema

KD/LK/MS, 16 November 2016
The famous British director Stanley Kubrick planned to film Louis Begley’s “Wartime Lies” – a semiautobiographical book about hiding in Poland during the Nazi occupation – in the beginning of the 1990s. He suspended the project after the premiere of Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” in 1993. He did not return to the movie before his death in 1999. Presently, John Wells Productions announced taking over the project. Shooting according to the screenplay by William Monahan, an Oscar winner, may begin in just a year. The premiere is to take place in 2011.


According to Kubrick’s co-workers, he really wanted to make a movie about the Holocaust. After reading Begley’s novel in 1991, he immediately decided to film it. The working title was “The Aryan Papers” because the protagonist – a 9-year-old Jewish boy Maciek – and his aunt Tania manage to survive the II World War pretending to be Catholics and using faked documents - “aryan papers”. The already planned shooting was, however, put on hold due to concern about receiving of the movie after the great success of the “Schindler’s List”.

Louis Begley (born in 1933 in Stryj) – a famous New York lawyer and writer made his debut with a novel “Wartime Lies” at the age of 58. To a large extent, he described there his and his mother’s experiences. They hid first in Lvov and then in Warsaw, where they survived the Warsaw Uprising. Later they moved to Cracow. Begley’s father – who was recruited earlier to the Soviet army as a doctor – joined them there. In 1946 they left Poland.
The first Polish edition of “Wartime Lies”, translated by Ewa Kulik-Bielińska – was published in 1995 by the “Da Capo” publishing house, and the second edition was prepared by “Cyklady” in 2008.