User Reviews

This is an hour-long documentary about what the title says the movie is about. It's made by Laurent Bouzereau, the current king of "making of" documentaries made in retrospect. It's a pretty standard affair: he interviews surviving crew, retells stories well-known to those who've read the reprinted program notes in the DVD, and shows conceptual drawings. If that's your king of thing (and I enjoyed watching it), fine. Just don't expect a deeper look at this movie (a la the great book about the making of Lawrence of Arabia) or its restoration.

Clearly, the most difficult thing about making supplemental documentaries about movies that were made as long ago as Bridge on the River Kwai is that there is so little to work with. With DVDs and even home video in the distant future, on set interviews were much more rare than they are today, but Director Laurent Bouzereau displays great skills in matching up interviews of cast or, more often, crew members talking about certain things that happened during the making of the film and then following them up with those particular scenes from the movie. A similar tactic was used to great success in the making of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which at least had interviews with both Paul Newman and Robert Redford, although they were audio only.

This documentary follows the making of the film from the initial translation of the original novel into English (from French) and then into an actual screenplay, which was scrapped and then started over again from scratch, to the screening of the finished film, where some great tricks were pulled on some lazy critics.

I recently saw Hotel Rwanda at a screening in Hollywood and one of the actors from the film was at the screening, and he told a story about the writers of the movie having been trying to find somebody to get interested in their script for something like five or six years, which was astounding to me because Hotel Rwanda is probably one of the two or three most powerful films I've ever seen. There is a similar story in the case of Bridge on the River Kwai, and this documentary goes into detail about the difficulties that the movie had being made. Not only was Alec Guinness near the bottom of the list of preferred actors for the lead role, but he wasn't interested much in the project himself to begin with.

There are some great stories about Sessue Hayakawa, who played Col. Saito in the film. Hayakawa is a well known silent film actor who had been acting for four decades by the time he appeared in this film, but this is by far the role that he is most known for. He made dozens of movies in the 1910s, like Chaplin did, which really makes me want to see some of them.

The documentary also explains the importance of the train wreck to the film as well as the difficulty in planning it. Even for blowing up a bridge and sending a full sized locomotive plummeting into the river it was a surprisingly complex plan, made even more difficult by the fact that no one really knew how powerful the explosion was going to be. Naturally, as is just the case when making movies, not everything goes according to plan, and this documentary has some great stories to tell about how a great story was made into a movie.

This documentary about the making of "Bridge on the River Kwai" is included on a supplementary disc of the feature film. I've seen quite a few of these making of films and I felt very underwhelmed by this one. It isn't bad--it just isn't all that interesting or insightful. Now this can't all be blamed on this being an older film, as in some cases much older movies have superior making of featurettes (such as "Gone With the Wind"). It also didn't help that none of the actors from the film were in the documentary.

So what great insights are there in the film? Well, other than learning that Hayakawa REALLY was crying in the film as well as why, I didn't take all that much from the movie. There also was a very mildly interesting portion about the filming of the final climactic explosion. But for fans of the original film, I just didn't see enough to merit their paying for the two-disc set--the extras just weren't all that extra.

The Physical Training Instuctor at the training camp is Mr Idwal Edwards from the little fishing village of Ferryside, Carmarthenshire, Wales. I believe he was a serving soldier possibly still so at the time of filming. I know this because he was a friend to my late father also of Ferryside. I am sad that Mr Edward's name does not appear in the credits, or have i missed it? He had two sons and a daughter, i went to school with his youngest son also at Ferryside. I feel he played a very important part in the film so again as previously said feel sad that he was not named in the credits. Thank you for allowing me to address this issue.

Like most of the "Making of"-documentaries, this one is so terrible boring, because everyone finds everyone and everything great. These documentaries are no more and no less than PR-clips with standardized camera positions and routine editing. Why not discuss the political meaning of the Geneva Convention rule, that officers and officers only in prisoners camps are not to be forced to manual labour. One could suggest that "The Bridge on the River Kwai" is a snobbish film about the British upper class in wartimes. I prefer to see Alec Guinness as a ladykiller. And I don't need to know how the film was made. It speaks for itself. And whoever suggests that "The Bridge" is one of David Lean's best films doesn't know his early films from "Great Expectations" to "Hobson's Choice". The world has become a victim of Hollywood's measures.