NOW WE CAN SEE THE
THERE is one particular soldier in Sir Peter Jackson’s unique documentary about the First World War who to this day haunts the director of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy. “There is a man whose face I can’t forget,” says Jackson, 56, speaking from his home in New Zealand. “It’s the face of a man who looks like a real character and reminds me of a lot of people. He’s the dry, comic guy who doesn’t smile at his own jokes.
“In the clip, he is among a group of soldiers and he is juggling a beer bottle while someone plays a tune on a mouth organ. When he drops the bottle on the ground, he picks it up, and starts to play it like it’s a guitar.
“I’ve always wondered who he was. And you can’t help but wonder: did he survive the war or did he die the following day? I hope he went on to have a happy life and children, and to enjoy himself…”
He trails off, moved at the unlikelihood of this scenario given the terrible death toll of a conflict in which many soldiers were conscripts sent into the killing fields of the Western Front armed with inadequate equipment.
The First World War has obsessed Jackson since he was a child growing up in New Zealand as the grandson of a veteran who fought in the conflict and survived until 1940 despite being wounded at the Somme.
Meanwhile Jackson’s great uncle, who served with the Monmouthshire Regiment, was killed in the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915.
“My paternal grandfather was wounded by a German machine gun on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and came back to England to recover,” he explains.
“While there, he met my grandmother and married her in 1917. So to some degree I do owe my existence to a German machine gunner, which gives me a slightly conflicted view of the conflict.”
AS THE years went by Jackson found he wanted to draw closer to a conflict that had such a pivotal role in enabling his own birth. Helped by a personal fortune estimated at £300million, he invested in a private collection of seven First World War aeroplanes, including several replicas that he commissioned. And several years ago he began working on his remarkable project to bring the conflict and its men to life using digital technology pioneered by his production company WingNut Films.
His intensely moving First World War documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old – which takes its name from the Laurence Binyon poem For The Fallen – will be released nationwide for one night only this month as we approach the centenary of the end of the Great War. The BBC will screen it at some point before Armistice Day.
This feature-length documentary – his first film since the last in The Hobbit series four years ago – quickly became a labour of love for the director.
“It’s a very personal project for me,” he says. “I was lucky to have access to the full First World War film archive from the Imperial
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War Museum, and to more than 600 hours of BBC audio interviews with veterans.”
It has taken him several years to craft the footage, which he assessed in forensic detail, into a film that reaches a crescendo with a terrifying 20-minute combat section, created by weaving the original footage into a dramatic narrative with the sort of digital special effects that are his trademark. But it is the immediacy of the digitally enhanced film stock that creates the most astonishing effect. The footage has been colourised, slowed down to normal time and converted to 3D (2D in some cinemas). This makes it incredibly involving, as if it had been filmed just yesterday using modern cameras.
“We are used to seeing original footage from the war in jerky, speeded up black and white, like a Charlie Chaplin film,” says Jackson. “What we have done is restore these films beyond what you could ever imagine and given it a modern message. What comes alive are the human beings – their humanity rises out of the footage.”
The realistic skin tones he has managed to conjure up from the original black and white footage creates an astonishing intimacy that rebirths as real, men trapped in time. For Jackson, this process proved addictive. As well as enhancing the 90 minutes of footage he chose to use in his film, he and his team have worked tirelessly to transform and colourise the entire 80 hours of material he was sent by the Imperial War Museum.
“I couldn’t stop restoring the footage and bringing everyone to life,” he says. “This was never part of the deal but it is our donation to