Part of the Shogun mini-series based on James book is being filmed in North Vancouver’s Princess Park.
Story from Sensational Vancouver
Princess Park:
I was walking in Princess Park this morning and noticed that a film crew is preparing to shoot some scenes for a mini-series based on James Clavell’s 1975 book Shogun. While North Van may seem like an odd location for a book that’s based in feudal Japan, Aussie-born Clavell spent 10 years living and writing in West Vancouver.
James Clavell:
Although Clavell is known for epic bestselling novels such as Shogun, Noble House and Gai-Jin, he was actually a screenwriter and director who got his start writing the screenplay for The Fly, a 1958 movie starring Vincent Price. He also wrote the screenplay and directed the wildly successful To Sir with Love staring Sidney Poitier and the 1963 The Great Escape starring Steve McQueen.
At his wife April’s suggestion, Clavell wrote his first novel, King Rat during a screenwriter’s strike in 1960 and based it on his experiences as a prisoner of war at the Changi camp in Singapore during the Second World War.
Buys house in West Van:
He used the $200,000* advance for the book to buy a house perched on a cliff in West Vancouver’s Whytecliffe neighbourhood owned by Remette Davis, a concert pianist who had an acoustic ceiling installed so that she could broadcast for the CBC from her home. The Clavell’s were the second owners and James wrote his second novel Tai-Pan from one of the seven bedrooms that looks out onto Howe Sound.
Clavell wrote, produced and directed The Sweet and the Bitter, a 1967 movie that looked at the horrible treatment of Japanese-Canadians during the Second World War, while living in the West Van house. The movie was the first and only movie produced by Commonwealth Film Productions, an early attempt to establish a viable film industry in Vancouver and was shot at a West Van studio and at various locations around the city including the BC Hydro Building (now the Electra).
The movie went over budget, eventually premiered at the Orpheum Theatre in 1967, and was a complete flop. The Clavell’s moved to Switzerland in 1972 and sold the Cliff Road house to Gary Troll, owner of Troll’s restaurant in Horseshoe Bay. Troll won $14 million in the lottery in 1997.
In 1986, Clavell broke literary records when he received a $5 million advance for his novel Whirlwind.
*Currently assessed at $6.5 million
This story is an excerpt from my book Sensational Vancouver
© Eve Lazarus, 2022
Related: The Other Tree in Princess Park