“I’m drawn to human stories, and this is first and foremost a human tale,” says The Boy in the Striped Pajamas producer David Heyman, who is known for producing the Harry Potter films.

     “When I read the book, I could immediately imagine a film,” says writer-director Mark Herman. “But I could also imagine a film that was going to be very difficult to get off the ground because of the extremely sensitive nature of the subject.”

     Miramax’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is based on the 2006 novel by Irish novelist John Boyne. The novel sold more than 3 million copies and was the best-selling book of the year in Spain in 2007.

     The story revolves around eight year-old Bruno (Asa Butterfield of Son of Rambow), the sheltered son of a Nazi officer (David Threlfall, pictured, right) whose promotion moves the family from their comfortable Berlin home to a desolate area where the boy finds no one to play with. Bruno ignores the warnings of his mother (Vera Farmiga of The Departed) and goes to explore the nearby “farm”. He befriends Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), a boy his own age trapped on the other side of a barbed wire fence in a Nazi concentration camp.

     “We were extremely concerned with authenticity,” says Herman (pictured, below). “When researching the adaptation, I learned that the camp commandants were sworn to secrecy under threat of certain death to keep their activities top secret. They were forbidden to tell anybody, including their own families, what their ‘work’ entailed. This was helpful when writing the script, particularly to explain why the commandant hadn’t told his wife about the extermination program. She thinks it is a labor camp and only accidentally discovers the truth.”

     “The Holocaust…the scale of the barbarity, the number of the dead and displaced and exponentially, of the lives destroyed, makes it impossible to get the measure of because the figures are frankly inconceivable,” says Heyman. “If you’re trying to introduce a child to that not-so-distant period in time, those numbers are extremely distancing. I think John Boyne found an exceptionally emotive and effective way to address that by focusing his story on two boys and one family.”

     “Mark also added a Nazi propaganda film which emerged from our research, a repellent 14-minute short purporting to show life in the camps: recreational activities, convivial dining, smiling faces,” says co-producer Rosie Alison of Heyday Films who coordinated the historical research for the film. “Mark decided to shoot a version for the film so that Bruno has a few glimpses of it and thinks he knows what the camp is like.”

     “While it’s a Holocaust story set in 1940s Germany, for me, it’s timeless,” says Heyman. “With all the conflicts going on today, whether in Rwanda, Somalia, Palestine, Israel, Darfur, Zimbabwe or Iraq, this story seems to me to be as relevant today as at any time in history. It’s one that resonates with me and has touched thousands of readers around the world, that children have the potential and the ability to overcome differences in culture and identity.”

     “I believe that, as the decades go on, it’s up to artists to find new ways of telling this story, of reminding the world of those who died,” says novelist John Boyne. “If you approach the subject in a non-exploitative way, trying not to trivialize it but to tell the story another way to reach a new audience, you are accomplishing your goal.”

     “This is the story of an ordinary family, ordinary people who through ignorance, innocence or unquestioning obedience to authority, no matter how appalling the demands of that authority, recognizably embody Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’,” says Heyman. “I hope that young people and other audiences will be moved by The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and come away with a greater understanding of the personal cost of such tragedy.”

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Distributor: Miramax

Length: 93 minutes

Rated PG-13 for some mature thematic material involving the Holocaust

Release Date: November 7, 2008 (Limited)