Oscars 2024: Iain Softley On Building Tension with an Honorable Tribute for Disney+’s Live Action Short Entry ‘The Shepherd’

If you were flying a plane solo on Christmas Eve, do you think you would have the mental wherewithal to keep your cool if something went wrong? In Iain Softley’s meticulously made drama, The Shepherd, one young pilot’s eagerness to get home for the holidays is dashed when his plane begins to experience mechanical failure. Instead of just making ticking time bomb of a film, though, Softley surprises us by making a film that pays tribute to the generation who valiantly gave their lives in the second World War.

Based on Frederick Forsyth’s novella of the same name, The Shepherd follows Freddie, a young British pilot who snags an opportunity to surprise his family on Christmas when another pilot injures himself and cannot fly. Softley’s film is sneakily emotional–it starts as a thriller and, before you know it, you’d placed yourself in this young man’s shoes. The original source material latched itself onto the director as well.

“It came up on me by surprise–the hold it had on me,” Softley admits. “That was a response to reading the book that a lot of the crew members had as well. The cinematographer and the first AD told me that they weren’t expecting the story to get under their skin. I was sent the script by one of the producers who was talking to Bill Kenwright before he passed, and they were alerted to the book by John Travolta’s agent. John had been anxious to make it, and he originally wanted to play the pilot way back when.

I thought the book was beautifully written and in a short amount of time, I was completely engaged with the pilot and this journey that he was about to undertake. He was thrilled to roar into the sky, and he was probably the only person in the sky at the time. Just think about that. There probably wasn’t a person around for thousands of miles. This isolation in the universe was a beautiful image. When he loses his instruments the fog comes in, it changes gear to become something very vulnerable before becoming something mysterious. It touched a nerve really strongly, and it’s one of most familiar stories–the idea of coming home. That goes all the way back from The Iliad and Odysseus’ journey. Coming back to your loved ones, particularly in a time of year like Christmas or other religious festivals…there’s a poignancy about that.”

Audiences can sometimes forget what it takes to build genuine tension, and Softley had the daunting restraints of having only one actor on screen in a tiny, cramped space. He sprinkles in moments of Freddie’s interior thoughts to break up the tautness, and that aids in us becoming invested in his lead character’s well-being.

“It was a challenge in a number ways, but it was essential,” he admits. “It either works or it doesn’t–there is no middle ground with that kind of tension. There was one other challenge in that the book is a monologue, and Freddie tells us everything. It’s no wonder that this was adapted for radio a number of times, because you just have an actor read the novella out loud. That’s the drama. That’s not cinematic, though, so I had to find a way of using my cast and their skills but also how we moved the camera, the sound, the editing, the music to be our language. It wasn’t a verbal language. A lot of it fell on Ben [Radcliffe], and I thought that vulnerability of his youth was going to help us. He is excited to make this trip and nothing is going to faze him. He’s going to fly as good as everyone else, but then the fear sets in. He is inexperienced, and he’s never had to deal with this kind of thing dozens of times. I found that in Ben in the 150 actors that we auditioned, and he did so much homework. He really threw himself into it, and we talked a lot about how his character would react to things in each situation.

It was a combination of his performance the tools of storytelling. In the editing, we would tweak it to see how the tension would build. Sometimes we would add a jump cut but then see how it would play if we let the scene play longer to see how it played. Orchestrating that was a big part of it. There is such an impressive, mesmeric world that one is invited to create when you decide this kind of filmmaking. I wanted the audience to inhabit the environment to feel it more acutely. Showing the plane more isolated in the enormity of the universe was very interesting to me.”

The Shepherd‘s last act will surprise viewers not just because of how Softley successfully swerves the narrative into touching territory, but also because he re-enforces the narrative that a younger generation may not know the sacrifices that came before them. I admitted to Softley early in our conversation that I was a cynic, but The Shepherd‘s honesty is truly heartwarming and vital. I won’t spoil where the story goes, but it enters a magical place.

“That was very important to me,” Softley says. “I had written a longer version of the story before Alfonso Cuarón came on board. He was a fan of this story since he was as young kid in Mexico. In that version, the flawed relationship with his father was really trying to put a context between the 1950s where the story is set with a generation of youth is looking forward. Their parents never stop talking about the war, and this younger generation is seeing things like rock and roll coming up. In the mind of this young man, no one will ever live up to the previous generation’s heroism. He’s flying for completely different reasons, and it’s almost like his father’s presence as a pilot is an annoying pressure on him. He only understands when he gets to the airfield what they were doing. There is no ego at all–it’s all about self-sacrifice. It’s almost like, for the first time, he understands who his father was. I wanted to keep some references to that. I wanted him to grow up and be more aware that pursuing your own achievements to just pat yourself on the back or amplify your own importance is not the way. This young man is humbled by his encounter in the sky. To me, that was something that was very important. The legacy of that was the entire world standing up to fascism–it was unacceptable. For a while there was an incredible social progress all about us helping each other.”

The Shepherd is streaming now on Disney+.