As a New Zealand-born Australian, Russell Crowe’s inspiration to make Gallipoli war film The Water Diviner seems obvious.
The failed attempt to knock Turkey out of the war in April 1915 led to a bloody eight-month campaign and the deaths of 57,000 allied troops.
Many of them were ANZACs, the name given to the combined Australian and New Zealand force.
While visiting a high school in Istanbul, Russell clearly recalls the moment he wanted his directorial debut to be about more than just the sacrifice of his countrymen.
“I was in Turkey to scout locations and on a visit to this school I noticed in the foyer that all the clocks had stopped and they were telling the same time,” Russell told The Sunday Post ahead of the film’s UK premiere this week.
“I asked our guide if they were broken and he said they had been that way since 1915.
“He went on to explain that on a particular day following the invasion, mums and dads had dropped their kids off at school as normal and halfway through the day the military arrived and took away all the senior kids and made them into soldiers.
“There’s a big difference between people who voluntarily got on board a boat, to a nation being invaded, which is losing men at such a rapid rate that they had to empty the schools of the eldest children and send them to the Front.”
Based on a true incident and released to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the landings, Russell takes the lead role in the film as a father of three boys who are killed on the same day of the campaign.
The Water Diviner is at cinemas from April 3.
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