The Sense of an Ending is a story of love, regret and forgotten youth, starring some of Britain’s top acting talent, including Jim Broadbent, Charlotte Rampling, Harriet Walter, Emily Mortimer, Michelle Dockery and Matthew Goode.

The film is based on Julian Barnes’ 2011 Man Booker Prize-winning novel of the same name and is adapted for the cinema by Nick Payne and directed by Indian director Ritesh Batra.

Tony Webster (Broadbent), is divorced and retired, and leads a reclusive and relatively quiet life. One day, he learns that the mother of his university girlfriend, Vero­nica (Freya Mavor), left in her will a diary kept by his best friend who dated Veronica after she and Tony parted ways.

Tony’s quest to recover the diary, now in the possession of an older but equally mysterious Veronica (Rampling), forces him to revisit his flawed recollections of his friends and of his younger self.

As Tony digs deeper into his past, it all starts to come back; the first love, the broken heart, the deceit, the regrets, the guilt. Can Tony bear to face the truth and take responsibility for the devastating consequences of actions he took so long ago?

Author Barnes’s meditation on the fallacy of memory was notable not only for its linguistic precision and nuance, but also for an intricate structure set in two time periods and an unreliable narrator whose disclosures (or lack thereof) drive the pace of the narrative. “On one hand it’s a psychological thriller, so people read it fairly quickly. On the other hand, it’s a novel that withholds things from you,” says the author.

Nick Payne, an award-winning playwright, had read the book, and during a meeting with production company Origin Pictures – a company with films such as Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom and Woman in Gold under its belt – he was asked if he’d read anything recently that he’d liked.

To make the adaptation work they needed to translate the novel’s intricacies onto the screen in a way that was entirely relatable to the audience

“I said: ‘Well, I’ve just finished this amazing book, The Sense of an Ending’. It had won the Booker not long before so I assumed the rights would be unavailable but miraculously, they weren’t.”

Producers David Thompson with Ed Rubin stepped in to secure the rights. They knew that to make Payne’s adaptation work they needed an innovative director able to translate the novel’s intricacies onto the screen in a way that was entirely rela­table to the audience.

Ritesh Batra, the Indian director who had recently found success with the Bafta-nominated film The Lunchbox, had also fallen for the book. “The Sense of an Ending is just one of those books I’ve always carried with me. Maybe I’m an old soul, but it just really speaks to me,” says the director, adding: “I have loved the book since I read it back in 2011. I tracked it down a little bit, found out that it was already in development and forgot about it.”

Sometime after that, while Batra was enjoying the acclaim he received for The Lunchbox, he recalls that The Sense of an Ending’s producers approached him with the offer to direct. “I was very curious to see what the writer had done with it. I read the script and obviously fell in love with it,” he says.

Batra then got together with Payne and worked through a few pending issues on the script. “We just bounced it around between us for a while,” Batra recalls. “It’s nice to work with people who are secure with their talent and just really open.”

Also, any concerns Batra may have had about Barnes’ view of the adaptation process were soon allayed by the author himself, who simply told Batra: “Go ahead and betray me”.

“The best way to be loyal as a filmmaker is to be disloyal to the book; I’ve always believed that,” says Barnes by way of explanation. “As long as you’ve handed it over to highly-talented people, you have to let them fly free with it.”

It was always Batra and Payne’s intention to remain faithful to the essence of the book and, for the director, the hope is about making a film that complements the book, yet stands up as a film in its own right. “I really hope we populated Julian’s universe in a way that’s true to the movie and the book as well. He’s just a wonderfully gene­rous man and I hope the movie and the book can exist together as complements.”

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Unforgettable, Class: 15: Barely coping with the end of her marriage, Tessa Connover learns that her ex-husband David is now happily engaged to Julia. Trying to settle into her new life, Julia believes she has finally met the man of her dreams, the man who can help her forget her troubled past.