Iain Softley turns Frederick Forsyth’s 1975 novella about a lost RAF pilot into a 39-minute short, with Ben Radcliffe alone in a failing jet and John Travolta in the role he did not originally want to play.

Christmas Eve, 1957. A young RAF pilot named Freddie Hook talks his way into the last flight home from West Germany, takes off alone in a de Havilland Vampire and, somewhere over the North Sea, loses his radio, his compass and every electrical system that would tell him where he is. That is the whole set-up of The Shepherd, a British short directed by Iain Softley for Disney+, and it is also the set-up of a Christmas story that Frederick Forsyth published half a century ago and that radio has kept in circulation ever since.

A pilot, a fog bank and an hour of fuel

Freddie, played by Ben Radcliffe, is stationed at RAF Celle in Lower Saxony and has been refused leave for the holidays. When his wingman hurts an arm in a snowball fight, Freddie takes his place and secures permission from his commanding officer to fly overnight to RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, about an hour away, even though he has only recently received his night rating. The weather is clear when he leaves. Air traffic control at Celle shuts down for the night behind him.

Shortly after he crosses the coast, the Vampire suffers a multiple-instrument failure. Repeated calls to Lakenheath go unanswered, the fog comes in, and Freddie tries the last procedure he has left: flying a triangular pattern, a distress signal designed to be spotted on radar by anyone still watching. With fuel running low and a ditching in the sea looking more likely by the minute, he thinks back to his girlfriend, Lizzie, and writes her a final note.

Then another aircraft appears below him. It is a de Havilland Mosquito, a twin-engine wartime machine that has no business being in the air in 1957, and its pilot, Johnny Kavanagh, played by John Travolta, cannot be raised on the radio. He can, however, make himself understood with hand signals, and he leads Freddie down through the fog towards a runway.

The Forsyth twist (spoilers from here)

The airfield turns out to be RAF Minton, a station abandoned since the war, ten miles short of the base Freddie was aiming for. Its only occupant is Sergeant Joe Marks, played by Steven Mackintosh, who settles the pilot in the old officers’ mess and tells him what Minton used to be. A photograph on the wall shows the Mosquito pilot. Marks identifies him as John Kavanagh, a Canadian RAF Pathfinder who used to fly solo patrols to bring stranded crews home, and who went missing in action on Christmas Eve, 1943. When two airmen from the neighbouring base arrive, having tracked the Vampire on radar, they tell Freddie that nobody has been stationed at Minton for years.

Readers of the book will recognise the shape of it: Forsyth’s story is a ghost story told with the straight face of an aviation report, and the adaptation follows its structure closely, down to the photograph on the wall. The film closes with a note on the guide pilots who brought crippled aircraft home during the Second World War, which is the real history the fiction leans on.

Thirty years in the hangar

The most unusual part of the production is how long it took to arrive. John Travolta, a licensed pilot who has flown his own jets for decades, has said that he came across a Vampire jet more than thirty years ago and, a couple of years later, found Forsyth’s book in a shop with that same aircraft on its cover. He optioned the novella with the idea of playing the young pilot himself. The project stalled for years.

When Iain Softley came to the material, after reading the story and writing the screenplay himself, one of the producers was contacted by Travolta’s agent. Travolta joined as an executive producer and, by then far too old for Freddie, ended up playing the title role, the shepherd of the story. Softley has said that Travolta’s knowledge of aviation went beyond his part, with suggestions offered throughout the shoot.

The producers are a mixed group: Alfonso Cuarón, through his company Esperanto Filmoj; the British theatre impresario Bill Kenwright, who died in October 2023, weeks before the release; Richard Johns, whose new company Argo Films launched with this short; and Gabriela Rodríguez, a long-time Cuarón collaborator. Softley has said he had written a longer version of the story before Cuarón came on board, and that Cuarón had loved the tale since he was a boy in Mexico. The Shepherd was Cuarón’s second short for Disney+, after Alice Rohrwacher’s Le Pupille, which was nominated for the Oscar for best live-action short.

One airworthy Vampire, one replica

Principal photography took place in April 2022 at Raynham Hangar Studios in West Raynham, Norfolk, a former RAF station, and the film was announced as completed that December. The aviation side was the hard part. According to Softley, the only Vampire still in flying condition in the northern hemisphere belongs to a Norwegian group, whose pilots brought it to Norfolk and flew it for the cameras. The runway at the location was too short for a landing, so the art department built a full-size replica from parts found in barns and sheds around the country, and the final film combines the real aircraft, the replica and computer-generated shots.

Behind the camera, the cinematographer is John Mathieson, Oscar-nominated for Gladiator and known for Logan, the original score is by Anne Chmelewsky and the editor is Gareth C. Scales. Ben Radcliffe was chosen from roughly 150 actors who auditioned for Freddie; Softley has said he had Radcliffe in mind from early on. The supporting cast includes Millie Kent as Lizzie and Claire Price as Freddie’s mother.

From a 54-page book to a 39-minute film

Frederick Forsyth, best known for The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File and The Dogs of War, had flown Vampires himself during his national service in the RAF in the 1950s, which goes some way to explaining the technical precision of the story. The Shepherd was published by Hutchinson in 1975 as a slim volume of 54 pages. Forsyth died in June 2025, a year and a half after the film’s release.

The book has had a long second life on the radio. In Canada, a reading by Alan Maitland was broadcast on the CBC programme As It Happens nearly every Christmas from 1979 onwards. In London, the actor Nigel Anthony performed an adaptation at St Clement Danes, the central church of the Royal Air Force, in 2014, in aid of the RAF Benevolent Fund, and BBC Radio 3 aired a new version read by Luke Thompson on Christmas Eve 2016. The novella is written in the first person, almost as a monologue, which is why it suits a single voice reading aloud. Softley has acknowledged that this is exactly what made it difficult to film: he had to replace a narrator who explains everything with sound, music, editing and an actor alone in a cockpit.

Where it sits in Softley’s career

Iain Softley made his name in the 1990s with Backbeat, about Stuart Sutcliffe and the early Beatles in Hamburg, then Hackers and The Wings of the Dove, which earned four Academy Award nominations. He went on to K-PAX, The Skeleton Key and Inkheart. A 39-minute Christmas short for a streaming service is an unusual turn for a director with that résumé, but it fits a career spent largely on adaptations and period settings, from a Henry James novel to Cornelia Funke’s fantasy and the Beatles’ Hamburg years.

The film premiered at the HollyShorts Film Festival in Los Angeles on 10 August 2023 and arrived on Disney+ on 1 December 2023, timed for the holiday season. At under forty minutes, it is shorter than most of the Christmas titles it shares a catalogue with, and closer in length to the radio readings than to a feature.

What The Shepherd sets out to do is modest and specific: put a reader’s favourite Christmas story on screen, keep the aircraft as historically accurate as the budget allows, and let the last act land as Forsyth wrote it. Whether a short this compact can carry the weight its makers attached to it, a story about a younger generation discovering what the previous one did in the war, is a question each viewer will settle in well under an hour.