The film won seven Oscars, including Best Adapted Screenplay by Boulle himself, despite the fact he hadn’t written it (its true authors had been blacklisted as a result of the so-called witch hunt against communism). Working as an engineer on a rubber plantation in Malaysia during World War II, the Nazi occupation of his country induced him to join the Free France Mission in Singapore, operating as a secret agent with a false British passport until he was captured and subjected to forced labour for two years.Īfter reinventing himself as a writer after the war-always writing by hand-that experience would inspire the first of his two best-known works from among his 42 novels: The Bridge over the River Kwai (1952), an international bestseller that David Lean would take to the big screen five years later. An engineer first before becoming a writer, between the two occupations he surreptitiously sneaked in a third job very suitable for a quiet man: a spy. Pierre Boulle (Febru– January 30, 1994) was a man who “didn’t like to talk,” recounts his son-in-law Jean Loriot-Boulle, the widower of Françoise-Caroline, the niece and almost adoptive daughter of the writer.

Pierre Boulle was engineer, writer and spy. Of course, in reality, Heston never knelt before a half-ruined Statue of Liberty… But let’s start at the beginning. A great work transcends its author, taking on a life of its own, and his universe of apes did so starting from that ending, which, ironically, was not included in his book. And this is despite the fact that Pierre Boulle, who died 25 years ago this month, disliked that his novel was classified as science fiction.

So powerful was the impact of that clash between primates that the idea has been revisited many times, extending the legacy of the French writer to whose pen we owe this science fiction classic. Schaffner, 1968), one of the most memorable endings in the history of cinema. It’s needless to clarify that this is the culminating sequence of the first version of The Planet of the Apes (Franklin J. Charlton Heston, kneeling on the beach with his fists pounding the sand, cursing humanity before a half-ruined Statue of Liberty.

De Apenplaneet by Pierre Boulle