The Railway Man's Brisbane premiere attracts special guest Patti Lomax with The Railway Man star, Nicole Kidman. Photo: Jaap Buitendijk Patti Lomax never expected to see herself on screen, let alone portrayed by Nicole Kidman. "I'm just a housewife from a small town in northern England," said the widow of Eric Lomax, whose story is the subject of The Railway Man, which premieres at the Brisbane International Film Festival on Wednesday night. Logically you know that it's you she's portraying but emotionally it's almost like a detachment. It's very odd, it really is," she said. But my family feel that she's caught me and that's quite something because they were quite sceptical. Mrs Lomax, on her first trip to Australia to attend Wednesday's premiere, is of course much more than her humble description. As Eric Lomax's wife, she encouraged him to face the demons that haunted him after World War II. A prisoner on the Thai-Burma death railway, Mr Lomax was subjected to brutal torture by Japanese soldiers after he created both a radio and a map in an effort to receive news and plan an escape. He married Patti in 1983 after the pair met on a train - Mr Lomax being a lifelong railway enthusiast - but was still plagued by nightmares of the beatings and water-boarding he'd endured. It was Patti who encouraged her husband to start corresponding with Takeshi Nagase, a Japanese translator who was present at his interrogations and had become a central figure of hate for him. In 1995, the Lomaxes travelled to the famous bridge over the River Kwai to meet Mr Nagase and his wife, and astonishingly, the two were reconciled. In most movies, the wronged character would get revenge. "That's what he went to meet Mr Nagase for, right up to the time they actually met, nobody knew how he would react, he himself didn't know," she said. Mrs Lomax described the years of pain and stress for Mr Lomax as a habit that he had to unlearn after making the decision to forgive Mr Nagase. "It's not an immediate letting go of tension," she said. It's not like a piece of elastic breaking all of a sudden when it's over-stretched... it just slackened off over time. The film is based on Mr Lomax's 1996 memoir The Railway Man. It stars Colin Firth as the older Eric and newcomer Jeremy Irvine as the younger Eric. "He came to visit us with Colin quite early on, and he was so observant," she said. That young man is going to go far... you expect, almost, somebody of Colin's professionalism to do what Colin does, but young Jeremy was a great surprise. Mr Lomax visited the set when the film was shooting scenes based in their hometown of Berwick-upon-Tweed, but died aged 93 last year before it was completed. "I was pleasantly surprised when I first saw the film to see how much of the book was there," Mrs Lomax said. It's an amazing feat of filmmaking...it certainly hasn't let us down, it hasn't let Eric down. The Railway Man has a strong Australian connection, with producer Chris Brown based on the Gold Coast, director Jonathan Teplitzy based in Sydney and the war scenes filmed around Ipswich and the Gold Coast two years ago. Mr Teplitzy said the film's message was about the capability for both good and bad in any individual. "As modern people, we understand much more why he would kill the person, take revenge, than we that he would reconcile with it... but yet the thing that defines us as human beings is the latter," he said. The film recently screened at the Tokyo Film Festival. Mr Teplitzy said it was gratifying to see so many Japanese people embrace it, and seek more information on a dark chapter of their country's history. "Bar none, no one had ever heard of the Thai-Burma railway... they're not taught it in schools," he said. There's a great desire to find out the truth, and in a sense face the past rather than bury it. The Railway Man premieres in Australia on Wednesday night at the Brisbane International Film Festival. It opens officially on Boxing Day.