This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Privacy Overview
Strictly Necessary Cookies
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
3rd Party Cookies
This website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.
Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.
Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!
Director's Statement
When I read Javier Cercas' novel "Soldiers of Salamina", I did not think of making a film out of it. Cercas and I had met each other a couple of years before and he sent me his book when it had just come off the press. I started to read it one morning and then cancelled all my appointments for that day one by one as I progressed through the pages. I read it in one sitting, not leaving the house, not seeing anyone, without any interruptions. I finished it with tears in my eyes, like so many of its readers. But I never considered making a film out of it.
Days later I found that I could not keep my mind off the meeting of those two men in the forest, the intense look that they exchange, and the young soldier's decision. Days went by and I could still see their expressions and feel the effects of the mood that fills the book.
I do not believe that novels can be made into films. What you turn into a film is the novel's story, its emotions, its events. But not the novel. The novel will always be something else, untouchable by any adaptation. The novel always remains the same, and the film neither ruins nor improves it. lt was there before and it will be there afterwards. Perhaps that is why adaptations only work if they provide a different perspective, if they manage to be as independent as the original work. The film presents a personal reading of the novel, but above all it is a film, nothing more.