A CLASSIC tale of British wartime doggedness and derring-do is returning to the big screen: the Oscar-winning director Peter Jackson is producing a remake of The Dam Busters.

The £21 million film will be shot in Britain as well as in Jackson’s native New Zealand next year.

The 1954 epic, starring Michael Redgrave and directed by Michael Anderson, immortalised one of the most daring RAF missions of the Second World War. RAF Squadron 617, who became known as the Dambusters, used the revolutionary “bouncing bombs” to target the dams of the Ruhr Valley in May 1943. The film was adapted from a 1951 book by Paul Brickhill — and the rights for the book were bought by Sir David Frost last year.

Jackson said that his version, for which he hopes to use a British screenwriter, would use details of the mission that were classified when the original was made. He told ScreenDaily.com: “So much of it was still secret. They weren’t allowed to show the bomb itself and had to create a fictionalised bomb.

“We also want to include a lot more about the development of the bomb. Barnes Wallis [who invented the bouncing bomb] had to overcome incredible bureaucratic hurdles to get the bomb taken seriously.

“It was seen as a crackpot, vaguely nutty idea. The RAF, as were all defence departments, was always being approached by eccentrics claiming they had the weapon to end the war. But he persevered.” In the 1950s, the film “had to be polite, but in reality he was up against a lot more stringent opposition than was shown”.

Jackson also said that his remake would preserve “that wonderful mentality of the British during the war — that heads-down keep-on-plugging-away mentality” captured by the film.

Christian Rivers, a long-time colleague of Jackson who won an Oscar as animation director on his King Kong, will make his directorial debut on the project, renamed Dambusters. Universal Pictures and StudioCanal are co-financing the new film.

Jackson, 44, has yearned for years to make the film, having seen it on the big screen as a child and read Brickhill’s book as a teenager.

Mel Gibson had been due to write and direct the remake but the plan collapsed. The star is in the Hollywood doghouse after admitting a drink problem and making anti-Semitic remarks.

THE ORIGINAL (1954)

Budget £5 million
Box office 8.4m tickets
Special effects Models by Army photographic reconnaissance unit. Bouncing bombs from archive test shots painted over frame-by-frame
Music Eric Coates’s march
Name of Guy Gibson’s dog Nigger



THE REMAKE (2007)
Budget £21 million
Box office £50 million predicted with DVD sales
Special effects Bombs from King Kong animator
Music Coates plus Oscar-winner Howard Shore
Name of dog Trigger

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