Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front is an incredibly powerful and harrowing book about World War I and the 1930 film adaptation (which won Best Picture) nails the heart of the novel despite the inability to show the graphic violence Remarque describes.  Seventy-one years later, director Mimi Leder (Pay It Forward) will helm a new adaptation from a script by Ian Stokell and Lesley Paterson.  “With this version, most of it takes place in the last 24 hours of the war. WWI fighting was brutal, hand-to-hand and ugly, and it practically wiped out a generation of young men,” Leder tells Deadline, adding “What is so compelling is the catastrophic levels of violence, this mind-numbing savagery, and what happens to a boy who in the journey to becoming a man has to become an animal.”

Hit the jump for Leder’s additional comments on her plans for the adaptation and my concerns with her take on the project.

Daniel Radcliffe has signed on to star in an update on the World War I tale All Quiet on the Western Front, though not anytime soon.  Following a decade spent on various Harry Potter sets, Radcliffe will spend most of 2011 in the Broadway production How to Succeed Without Really Trying, with Western Front scheduled for a spring 2012 production.

Author Erich Maria Remarque created the character — young German soldier Paul Banner — earmarked for Radcliffe in his 1929 novel, which director Lewis Milestone adapted for cinemas the following year; the film went on to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards.  More after the jump: