Pierre Boulle
Pierre Boulle was a French author born on February 20, 1912, in Avignon, France. Initially trained as an electrical engineer, Boulle's career shifted after he spent time in Malaysia, where he worked as a rubber plantation overseer and served as a soldier during World War II. He participated in the French Resistance and was captured before escaping and serving with British special forces. Boulle is best remembered for his novels "Le Pont sur la rivière Kwai" (The Bridge on the River Kwai) and "La planète des singes" (Planet of the Apes), both of which have been adapted into successful films. His experiences in Southeast Asia heavily influenced "The Bridge on the River Kwai," which explores the complexities of survival and collaboration among prisoners of war. "Planet of the Apes," set in a future world dominated by intelligent apes, presents a thought-provoking critique of human society. His works have left a lasting impact on literature and film, showcasing themes of conflict, identity, and societal structures. Boulle passed away on January 30, 1994, in Paris, but his contributions continue to resonate in popular culture.
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Pierre Boulle
Author
- Born: February 20, 1912
- Birthplace: Avignon, France
- Died: January 30, 1994
- Place of death: Paris, France
Biography
Pierre Boulle was born February 20, 1912, in Avignon, France. He trained as an electrical engineer in Paris. After working as an engineer, in 1938 he went to Malaysia, where he was a planter and soldier. He had been an overseer at a rubber plantation and, at the start of World War II, joined the army in Indochina. During the German occupation of France, he worked in the resistance and was captured by Vichy French loyalists on the Mekong River in 1943. He escaped the following year and served in the British special forces until the war ended. He returned to his plantation work before coming back to France and taking up his writing career. He died January 30, 1994, in Paris. He will mainly be remembered for two novels,Le Pont sur la rivière Kwai (1952; The Bridge on the River Kwai, 1954) and La planète des singes (1963; Planet of the Apes, 1963).
Boulle drew on his experiences of living in Southeast Asia for The Bridge on the River Kwai. Although he had been a prisoner of the Vichy French rather than the Japanese, his book told of Japanese prisoners of war who are forced to build a bridge to help the Japanese war effort. The work contributes to their survival and the prisoners become supportive of their creation even though it is an instrument of their enemies.
Boulle’s first novel was William Conrad (1950). Other works included Le Photographe (1967; The Photographer, 1968), La Baleine des Malouines (1983; The Whale of the Victoria Cross, 1983), and À nous deux, Satan! (1992). Le Jardin de Kanashima in 1964 had a U.S. translation as Garden on the Moon in 1965 and depicted the space race among various nations competing to land the first man on the moon.
The Bridge on the River Kwai became a multiple-Oscar-winning movie in 1957 and altered Boulle’s ending (in which the bridge remains standing) to one in which the structure is destroyed by British forces. Screen credit was given to Boulle for the script, although others wrote the screenplay, but the film and the credit shot him to international prominence.
Planet of the Apes also became a movie, in 1968. Rod Serling, best known for his TV series The Twilight Zone, was one of the screenwriters. The movie’s publicity inspired a series of sequels, a television series, and a remake in 2001. None of those versions followed Boulle’s novel beyond the basic idea or used his ending.
The book is set in the year 2500. A wealthy couple voyaging in space find the equivalent of a manuscript in a bottle. The manuscript is supposed to be written by a French journalist who lands on a world where intelligent apes are the dominant species. Humans, who lack the power of speech, are kept in zoos and are used as laboratory guinea pigs. The switch in the book is that the wealthy space travelers are apes and consider the story incredible; in the movie, astronauts who land on the apes’ planet have unwittingly voyaged through time as well as space and are actually back on a future Earth, where apes rose to dominance after humans obliterated (or destroyed) themselves.