The Bridge on the River Kwai The Bridge on the River Kwai The Bridge on the River Kwai is a 1957 British-American epic war film directed by David Lean and based on the novel "Le Pont de la Rivière Kwaï" (1952) by Pierre Boulle. The film uses the historical setting of the construction of the Burma Railway in 1942–1943. The cast included William Holden, Jack Hawkins, Alec Guinness, and Sessue Hayakawa. It was initially scripted by screenwriter Carl Foreman, who was later replaced by Michael Wilson. Both writers had to work in secret, as they were on the Hollywood blacklist and had fled to England in
The Bridge over the River Kwai Japanese. Toosey, in fact, delayed building the bridge by obstruction. Whereas Nicholson disapproves of acts of sabotage and other deliberate attempts to delay progress, Toosey encouraged this: termites were collected in large numbers to eat the wooden structures, and the concrete was badly mixed. The bridge described in the book didn't actually cross the River Kwai. Pierre Boulle had never been to the bridge. He knew that the 'death railway' ran parallel to the River Kwai for many miles, and he therefore assumed that it was the Kwai which it crossed just north of Kanchanaburi. This was an incorrect assumption;