Irish author John Boyne didn’t write his 2006 Holocaust drama “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” with the silver screen in mind.”You have to be a very naive novelist, or a stupid one, to work in those terms,” Boyne says.
Still, even after he sold the film rights to his young adult novel, he doubted “Pajamas” would ever grace a cineplex marquee.
“Just because it’s moving forward doesn’t mean it’s going to happen,” he says of the often laborious path from book to film.
It wasn’t until actors Vera Farmiga (“The Departed”) and David Thewlis (The “Harry Potter” franchise) signed on that Boyne realized his tale of the ties binding a German boy and a young concentration camp prisoner would be immortalized on film.
“The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” follows an 9-year-old named Bruno (“Son of Rambow’s” Asa Butterfield) whose father (Thewlis) serves in the German army circa 1943. A military reassignment forces Bruno’s family from their cozy Berlin home to a makeshift house next to the concentration camp the father must oversee. Farmiga plays Bruno’s mother.
Bruno befriends a young Jewish prisoner, clad in “striped pajamas,” who sneaks away from the camp each day to pay Bruno a visit.
Some novelists cringe at the movies made from their novels. Boyne entered the project with a greater degree of comfort. He shares the same agency with “Pajamas” director Mark Herman (“Brassed Off,” “Little Voice”), and Herman got a copy of “Pajamas” before it hit bookstores.
“You can’t read the book, and have it blow you away, without thinking in part of your brain, ‘This should make a great movie,’ ” says Herman, who fed Boyne early drafts of the film to further ease any concerns.
Boyne visited the set of “Pajamas” but made sure not to intrude.
“I could show up and complain, but I’d be quickly shown the door,” Boyne says. “I knew what my position was.”
He also understood being diplomatic would best serve his story. “Behave correctly, and if there’s something wrong, there’s much more chance they’ll listen to you,” Boyne says.
The author became fascinated with Holocaust literature at the age of 15. During a seven-year stint as a bookstore employee, he made sure to grab every new Holocaust-themed release.
“I never thought I was going to write a novel set in that time,” he says. “I suppose subconsciously it came to me.”
The film version of “Pajamas,” like the novel, explores extremely delicate material from a child’s point of view. It does so without graphic violence, although younger audiences will have plenty of questions for their parents once the lights go up.
“If children don’t understand what’s happening, they won’t be traumatized by it. There are no scenes where they have to cover their eyes,” Herman says.
Boyne says some critics questioned why Bruno can’t grasp the true nature of his new home, or his father’s ghastly line of work. Others carped that guards wouldn’t permit any Jewish prisoners, even a frail boy, to roam away from the camps.
In the book and movie, Bruno supplies food to his famished friend. Herman says a member of the audience at a recent U.S. screening defended the accuracy of such visits.
The woman told him, “My mother was in Auschwitz, and she got fed by a local farmer,” Herman recalls of the exchange.
Boyne has been chatting up his book to school-age children for the past two years. Students approach Bruno’s story with varying degrees of Holocaust knowledge. One 15- year-old student bluntly asked Boyne what the Holocaust was.
“Those kinds of question are always shocking,” Boyne says.
