The BAFTA-winning co-writer of “All Quiet on the Western Front” talks to Shondaland about her storytelling process and how sheer determination and being a triathlete helped her achieve her dream.
A classic novel written by Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front is a view of what it was like in the trenches of World War I through the lens of a young German soldier, replete with the desperation and fear that drive you when fighting on the front lines. This story of sheer determination deeply resonated with Scottish-born L.A. transplant Lesley Paterson, executive producer and co-writer of the exquisitely shot, BAFTA-winning adaptation of All Quiet, which is now nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.
“I read the novel in high school, and it’s so beautifully poetic. What struck me was the thematic essence of that betrayal of a youthful generation,” says Paterson, who first set out to acquire the rights to the project some 16 years ago. “Especially being Scottish and being that underdog, I was brought up in quite a lefty family, so it’s [that idea of] fighting and having no control over what it is that you’re doing. That really struck a chord for me, even at the age of 18.”
All Quiet on the Western Front
Credit: Ballantine Books
Paterson and her All Quiet writing partner, Ian Stokell, rediscovered the book when it was promoted at a Southern California Barnes & Noble. “When I dug into the novel a second time, what struck me was the potency of the fact that it’s told from the side of the enemy. We don’t dig into that; we’re never taught that in our history. I just find the humanity of that so compelling, and it tugged at my heartstrings. I’m a very empathetic person, and I want to put myself in other people’s shoes. World War I in general is an alien landscape that is so beautiful, tragic, and awful all at once. I’ve grown up running around the landscapes of Scotland, England, and France, and every time you come across a village center, there’s a big monument with thousands of names on it of all the men that were killed. What was that like as a mother, a wife, a daughter to have your entire male population wiped out? I can’t even imagine.”
Paterson was surprised there wasn’t a modern cinematic take on the book, which was previously adapted for a 1930 film and then a 1979 TV movie. “It was sort of ripe for investigating,” says Paterson. “Ian started to pursue it, and we couldn’t believe no one had the rights. We just kind of put in a pitch and were like, ‘Give us a chance,’ and they said yes. You’re still faced with an absolute masterpiece, and what are you going to bring to the table that is different and unique and tells it in a way that hasn’t been told before?”
Doing what hasn’t been done before comes naturally to Paterson. A self-proclaimed “sports Billy” — a reference to the popular 1980s German cartoon — and renowned triathlete who earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in theater, drama, and film, Paterson knows how to forge new paths. In fact, the money she made from competing in triathlons helped her hang on to the option for the film. She describes becoming the only female rugby player on Scottish boys’ teams (there were no girls’ teams) as a kid, going to ballet class with muddy knees, and eventually, excelling in triathlons when she aged out of playing rugby with the boys. “I loved doing something that people told me I couldn’t do,” says Paterson, who represented both Scottish and British triathlon teams. “Being Scottish and Calvinistic, and finding meaning and purpose through suffering, created a kind of resilience.” Though she was a fierce competitor in the triathlon, the data-driven U.K. government-funded program deemed she wasn’t — in Paterson’s words — “good enough.” She recalls, “I lost all my passion for it.”
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As for how she found her way to writing, Paterson met her husband, Simon Marshall, a sports psychologist who is now her writing and production partner, at Loughborough University in England. “We met there on the bike. I saw him in Lycra,” Paterson laughs. A professional opportunity for Marshall allowed them to move to Southern California, where Paterson felt free to reinvent herself and focus on filmmaking and acting. Ironically, she got back into tri-athleticism in a different way via XTERRA, or off-road mountain biking and trail running. “It made sense to me emotionally, and if I’m connected to something emotionally, the sky is the limit,” she explains.
The two also started a coaching business to support other athletes, which led to writing a book called The Brave Athlete: Calm the F*ck Down and Rise to the Occasion to help athletes (and anyone, really) who would benefit from getting out of their own way. “We just saw this massive gap where people didn’t understand how their brain works from a neuroscience perspective,” Paterson explains. “Together, we wanted to address issues athletes have, whether it was questions of identity, of confidence, of motivation — all of these things. There was nothing out there that was giving them the practical tools to deal with it. When we went on a book tour, we started to do it for businesses, film directors, actors — you can just take out the word ‘athlete.’ It’s been really cool to see the impacted people who we have helped.” She also found a way to give back to those who aspired toward competing in triathlons. “I put on a camp for underprivileged kids a few years ago at the height of my athletic career. It included a mentorship program to complete a race,” she says. “I got all my sponsors to kick in a free bike for all the kids, free shoes, and free wet shoes.”
In many ways, the discipline of athleticism — “You put your miles in: You get your 10-mile run in, you get your 100-mile bike ride, whatever it is, and you get your nice tick in the box” — prepared her for the persistence required to build a film career; she first fell in love with storytelling after watching E.T. as a kid. Yet, the volatility of her 16-year journey in getting All Quiet on the Western Front made was a little different. “Sixteen years ago, the landscape was really different,” Paterson says. “You couldn’t do a foreign film and raise this kind of budget. World War I wasn’t popular then — everything was WWII; it was American-centric — so we said we’re going to pitch this as an English-speaking language film with German accents. We were going to go after German directors, but no one wanted to touch it; they were too nervous. As an outsider — and that’s what people don’t really understand when they’ve never had issues like this or they’ve always been on the in — is that people don’t pick up your calls. They’re not going to read your material because who the hell are you? You have to be dynamic and think outside the box about how to move it forward, even if it’s one step. A perfect example of that was we tended to go through U.K. agencies rather than the U.S. ones. No one at CAA is going to return your call, whereas someone in the U.K. probably will.”
Initially, they got “brutal” feedback on the early drafts. “It was one of my mates, who was a reader for one of the studios,” she says. “He just calls me up and says, ‘I’m going to be honest with you; this is total s--t.’ You either take it and see it as a gift, or you get defensive, and that’s not going to help you.” She enlisted the help of her husband for the rewrite, circled the wagons, and went back to square one until that honest mate, upon another read, said it was good and gave them the go-ahead to send it out. Then came struggles with packaging the film. “Everyone was saying no, or if they got people on board, it didn’t work. At one point, we had a producer on board who ended up going to prison because he embezzled Belgian money tax incentives. We almost lost the option because he was taking it with him, but we found a clause that got us out,” Paterson recalls incredulously. “You can’t believe this s--t, honestly!”
Simon Marshall and Lesley Paterson at the BAFTA Film Awards 2023 Nominees Party.
Rowben Lantion//Getty Images
Time wasn’t the only investment Paterson made in the development of All Quiet — she and Marshall sunk $200,000 of their own cash into it. Finally, “someone, through someone, through someone,” got the script to Malte Grunert, the film’s co-producer, who passed it on to director Edward Berger, who proposed doing the film in German.
Paterson credits her “why” — her sense of purpose — for keeping her going when the chips were down; she felt strongly that this story needed to be told, and she was determined to be the one to tell it. “My passion has not always been about the outcome. If you’re focused on the outcome, you’re f--ked,” Paterson explains. “You have to be focused on the craft, every excellence, and every single moment that you’re doing. In sport, there are so many days when you feel s--t. I’ve dealt with chronic pain, Lyme disease, injuries, anxiety, depression, blah, blah, blah. But if you’re focused on trying to be the best you can be with the circumstances that you can have, and if your effort and attitude are 100 percent, then you can’t feel bad. There’s so much joy in that kind of pursuit even when the chips are down because you know you’ve committed in that moment as best you could.”
It’s clear Paterson is completely committed to the process of filmmaking. “For me, research is the foundation of everything I do in a script. Even if I’m not doing a historical piece, just researching around areas that interest me sparks ideas.” As of now, she has eight different projects in development under the production company she formed with her husband, including a psychological thriller set in the highlands of Scotland; a true “African Braveheart” story called Our Soul to Keep set in 1900s Ghana; and yet another story set in the Roma community in Ireland that she describes as “a father-daughter unconditional love story in the wild world.”
However Oscar night goes, though, Paterson is looking forward to what’s next. “Know your ‘why,’ and write it down,” she advises. “In your deepest, darkest moments, that’s what you have to come back to.”