Lesley Paterson, the triathlon champion who won the Oscar-Corriere.it

Sport and entertainment have in common not only iconic moments, but sometimes even the protagonists themselves. The history of Lesley Paterson, multiple off-road triathlon world championwho wrote the screenplay for a film that won the Oscar for best foreign film with All quiet on the western front. There are endless roads that lead to Hollywood and the coveted awards, in her case the slow approach to the statuette began by serving drinks at the tables of the Governors Ball, where the Oscar party is held, when she worked as a waitress to support herself. “I remember serving Jennifer Lopez and Judi Dench, who is my idol, I never thought I could be on the same stage.”

Yet it happens in Hollywood to make dreams come true, so Paterson, along with writing partners Ian Stokell and the film’s director, Edward Berger, managed to make a screenplay adapted from Erich Maria Remarque’s classic 1929 anti-war novel into a film for the third time (the other two times in 1930 and 1979). That her aptitude was not only for training but also for art is demonstrated by her experience as a dancer before trying rugby, her first sport, in a men’s team, just because she liked playing in the mud. She was later taken by her father to run and cycle, so much so that she earned a place in the Scottish triathlon team at the age of 15, and shortly after in the Great Britain team, without leaving the performing arts in fact obtaining a master’s degree in theater and cinema. “My sense of art has really allowed me to develop from an emotional point of view – she explained – because when you enter the sport at an early age, and especially as part of a system like the British one, there is a single path to follow. Dedicating myself to art allowed me to open my mind and understand who I was and what I wanted».

After trying acting for several years, she turned to storytelling and started working on various projects including an adaptation of All quiet on the western front. It all started by chance with a summer sale in a Los Angeles bookstore where among the discounted books there was one that with Stokell “we adored at school: so we decided to re-read it, finding it really current even if it was difficult to draw a screenplay”. Used to not giving up and finding alternatives to the mainstream as happened with the off-road triathlon (the Xterra is a derivation where the disciplines of running and cycling unfold on off-road, narrow and often rocky terrain), Paterson succeeded in the challenge of adapting a difficult text into a screenplay because “it suited my spirit perfectly”. Furthermore, from her psychologist husband she learned the awareness that “adversity causes effective changes and neurological adaptations in the brain, making you stronger in the various attempts”. Her attempts started in 2011 when she won the first of five world championships and she almost jokingly told a reporter she wanted to win an Oscar. With the cash prizes won from the World Cup, around 190,000 euros, he made an investment by buying the rights to the book and dedicating himself full time to the screenplay despite having little feedback from film producers and those few available asking to make the film in German, with a further fundraising. After many attempts, production only started in 2020 as a foreign-language Netflix original film (Im Westen nichts Neues), which entered the catalog and aired last October, in time to obtain nine Academy Awards nominations at the beginning of the year, which ultimately led to three Oscars . Paterson also earned her own accolade, a BAFTA for Best Adapted Screenplay.

It is not an isolated case, considering sport and cinema as two communicating sectors, as they are both forms of entertainment. Since ancient times, sports competitions served as entertainment so it was natural for talented athletes to become highly regarded celebrities. The performance, showmanship and cult of personality skills necessary to become a top athlete have always helped to have successful careers in Hollywood. It is the case of Esther Williams who before being the star of the aquatic musicals, created especially for her by Hollywood on the wave of the success of synchronized swimming, was an athlete with the dream of Olympic gold. A champion swimmer since she was a teenager, she dreamed of competing in the 1940 Olympics, then canceled due to the Second World War. In her 1999 autobiography The Million Dollar Mermaid acknowledges that it was “very little compared to the tragedy that struck the world, but for a teenager the world can seem very small when you see the dream of a medal fade”. Eight years later she would have been too old to compete at the London Olympics (1948) when she had to settle for being among the top ten stars at the box office. It is the confirmation that sport and art go hand in hand, as indeed depicted in the famous photographic shot by Nino Migliori of Diver taken up when it is parallel, as if suspended, to the horizon of the sea.