Built for the job
Mendes’s film 1917 required a set like no other
Universally recognized as an astounding technical achievement, the Sam Mendes drama 1917 is nominated for a whopping 10 Oscars at Sunday’s ceremony.
In the film, two young British soldiers must sneak behind enemy lines in Normandy to send a lifeand-death message to a battalion about to advance. Its rumoured budget of $90 million makes it quite possibly the most expensive war film made in the U.K.
Certainly the big bucks can be seen on screen. It took an army of craftsmen to revisit the muddy hell of the First World War, fashioning a viewing experience that gives us the semblance of real-time, continuous action.
Mendes and his veteran crew plotted this journey with pinpoint logistical precision, so that each long take by wizardly cinematographer Roger Deakins could be stitched as invisibly as possible into the next.
Almost everything we’re seeing — from the British and German trenches, to the ruins of a French town and an abandoned farmhouse where the film alights halfway — was hand-built from scratch across different stretches of British countryside.
Five months of rehearsals on these locations were arranged before the 16-week shoot, which started last April.
The film’s Oscar-nominated and Bafta-winning production designer, Lee Sandales, is no stranger to the Great War, having earned previous accolades for his work on War Horse. In fact, his filmography heavily skews toward blood and thunder, with the Baghdad-set action-thriller Green Zone (2010), Greek myth-buster Wrath of the Titans (2012) and three of the recent Star Wars films, including the battle-laden Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016).
What made 1917 different from all of these — and the most taxing job Sandales says he’s ever had — was figuring out the film’s geography. “Because nothing ever repeats,” he says. “Every time someone takes a footstep, you’re passing through a set.”
For the scenes in no man’s land where the soldiers, played by George Mackay and Blake (Deancharles Chapman, pick their way through craters and under fences, a company called Trading Post made about 4,500 metres of it. A specialist worker attached the rubber barbs over the course of three months and sent them to the set.
Helped by the resources available at the Imperial War Museum, and by military adviser Andy Robertshaw, Sandales and team built up the film’s blasted, swampy environments trudge by trudge. “You do a huge amount of historical research — there was this overwhelming sense of making it as believable as we could,” Sandales says.
The film’s hair and makeup designer, Naomi Donne, and prosthetics designer, Tristan Versluis, were responsible for creating all the dead bodies. They life-cast actors as models for the heads and hands, then cast these with silicone, to be painted with all the skin tones needed.
The set to which Sandales gave the deepest thought was the deserted farm, constructed on an exposed hillside on Salisbury Plain.
“When I first read about this house in the script, I saw it as like this ghost. I couldn’t get the images out of my head of this abandoned place, where a family had once lived,” he says. “A lot of it was in the details: We had a cradle in the corner, which you just glimpse as the camera walks through. There’s a child’s toy, and a pair of glasses, a newspaper. I think we got it right, because there was a member of crew who walked in on that set, and came out with tears in her eyes.
“The fact that families were torn apart by the war — that sums up its tragedy, for me,” Sandales says. “It was without doubt the hardest film I’ve ever worked on. But also, without doubt, the most rewarding.”