Journey’s start to journey’s end
“Sam and I had always talked about the concept of nature, and what war does to nature,” says Wilson-cairns. “And so we wanted to start with greenery and trees and birdsong.” The film begins with Schofield perched against a tree, taking a breather behind the frontlines. “We start behind the third-line trench,” Wilson-cairns explains; British trenches then were divided into specific areas. “You think of it as one long trench in the mud, but it’s not. Sometimes it would be like an entire city. And this would be the mess area. It had a bit of nature still to it. A touch of tranquility. It’s as far off the line as you can get.”
The unique way in which the film was created, with Mendes and his cast and crew spacing out the dimensions of the journey during a lengthy pre-production period, led to some interesting sights. “For the second and frontline trench, we shot at Bobbington Airfield, and that would be Sam and I literally running along an empty field with stakes and the script. We would do the lines with George and Dean, and we’d be like, ‘This is the point that they’re going to pass the collapsed trench wall,’ and we’d put a stake in the ground. We probably looked like a caravan of mad people. And then the incredible set team would come and dig trenches, and we’d come back three weeks later.”
“We do a lot of exterior/interior, exterior/interior,” says Wilson-cairns. “That’s one way to feel the passage of time, with movement.” It’s also, potentially, a way to mask any cutting points. And so, early on, the first location Schofield and Blake duck into is located in the British trenches, where Colin Firth’s General Erinmore gives them their fateful mission. “We wanted to have an accurate representation of where headquarters officers
would be stationed,” says Wilson-cairns. “Erinmore wouldn’t have lived there. He’s appeared here with this information.”
From there, through the British trenches, Schofield and Blake head into No Man’s Land for the short trek towards German trenches. (World War I was a war fought over inches; the trenches here are about 400 yards apart.) “The shortest distance between German and British trenches in the war was something like 80 yards,” says Wilson-cairns. “I could probably throw something 80 yards.”
It’s here, as they negotiate their way through barbed wire and through a huge, muddy pool of water, featuring a corpse into which Schofield plunges his hand, that the horror of the war begins to manifest itself. “We did research into No Man’s Land, and discovered that very rarely did you see a full body,” adds Wilson-cairns. “Either they’d been eaten by rats or they’d been blown to smithereens. That’s why you only see bits of bodies. You get a sense of bodies half-encased in the wall. And we never focus on it.” Schofield’s icky interface with the corpse came from a post-war diary that Wilsoncairns had found. “In it, [the soldier] described the body as having the consistency of camembert.”
“The German trenches were more advanced,” says Wilson-cairns. “They were massively better designed. They were reinforced, they were safer, they had been dug two storeys into the ground.” 1917 takes place on 6 April of that year, a crucial date in the First World War. The Germans had executed what is now known as The Hindenburg Retreat, pulling back from their trenches in an attempt to lure the British forces forward, and into a deadly trap. It very nearly worked; had it done so, it would have swung the war inexorably in the Germans’ favour.
As it is, Blake and Schofield have no knowledge of this — so, when they get to the German trenches, they find them not only abandoned, but light years ahead of the ramshackle British equivalents. Concrete-based, not wood. And with a nice upgrade in booby traps, with a hungry rat inadvertently setting off a bomb, forcing Schofield and Blake to run for their lives lest they get buried in a cave-in. “It seemed more interesting if that booby trap were triggered by something other than themselves, something seemingly mundane,” says Mendes.
There may be no single more important location in the entire film: the abandoned farmhouse where, thanks to a downed and frightened German pilot’s blade and a misplaced moment of kindness, Blake meets his end. The choice of his final resting place was no accident. “We wanted somewhere domestic,” explains Wilson-cairns. “We wanted somewhere that you could recognise as someone’s home. I wanted it to feel almost like a place where we could have grown up.” Sharp-eared viewers might notice that, as Schofield and Blake split up to explore the farmhouse and its gardens, Mackay’s character has a very different reaction to it. “He says, ‘I don’t like this place.’ It’s everything that he doesn’t want to think about; about home.”
Everything so far has been within walking distance of the British trenches. But when a stunned Schofield is picked up by Captain Smith’s (Mark Strong) troops, he goes on a journey, in the back of a truck, with nothing but other soldiers and his own tortured thoughts for company. “You have to process his grief, but he hasn’t had time to process it himself,” says Mendes. “Before he knows it, he’s in the back of a truck with other men, and none of them know what he’s been through.” Wilsoncairns says that the distance covered by the truck wasn’t important. “We wanted the scene to go on long enough so that you got a sense of distance being travelled,” she says. “It’s an important
emotional scene for Schofield, but I couldn’t tell you if it was a mile or four miles.” It’s the destination, not the journey. And what a destination.
“I wanted the movie to go into something that was a bit more of a hallucination,” Mendes reveals. “Like a descent into Hell, almost.” So, the village in which Schofield awakens, after a brush with a German sniper, vastly differs from the one he glimpses before he blacks out. For now the village — loosely based on Écoust-saint-mein, an actual French village — has been engulfed by flames, turning it into something out of a painting. But the inspiration was not, as many assume, Hieronymus Bosch. “It’s more of a Dalí,” says Mendes. “Bosch is populated by people. This is a predominantly empty landscape in which he is very, very alone.”
Dazed, battered, with no sense of where he is or even what day it is, Schofield makes his escape into a river, which carries him away for what seems like miles. Mendes and Cairns very much visualised this river in metaphorical terms also, as the embodiment of the River Styx, the river of Greek legend that bears the souls of the dead to their final destination. And, as Schofield is borne down by the weight of dozens of corpses (a touch plucked from real-life accounts of the war), he has to make a choice: get busy living, or get busy dying. “When he comes out of the river, he has gone over the River Styx,” says Mendes. “And he struggles up the slope and forces his way into the land of the living.”
Although much of 1917 was shot in and around Shepperton Studios, some shots in this sequence were captured at the most un-styxian of locations: a white-water-rafting centre in Teesside, allowing Mendes and his Oscar-winning DP, Roger Deakins, to control their environment and camera more cleanly. “Every rock was placed there specifically by the art team,” laughs Wilson-cairns. “And that water was cold. George was battered around and submerged several times. He was a trouper.”
Washed up on shore, Schofield finds himself in a forest clearing behind the British frontline, and witness to an eerie sight: a group of exhausted and injured British soldiers enrapt as one of their number sings a soft lament. “All of these things happened to people in the First World War,” says Mendes. “None of these things is far-fetched. The concert in the woods was actually a piano concert, taken from a first-person account. A soldier described it in a letter to his wife as ‘the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard in my life’.”
Finally, Schofield fulfils his mission by finding the British frontline. “This is a brand-new frontline,” explains Wilson-cairns. “It’s not been shelled yet, it’s just been dug; all that fresh white earth is so weird to see.” It leads to the film’s defining image, of Schofield running along the frontline as the first wave of British troops streak past him, taking the fight to the enemy. “At first [in the script], he never went over the top,” says Wilson-cairns. “He had to wait for everyone to go over and then he made it through. But we came up with that idea of him running along the top and we were obsessed with that image, and the scope it would show you.” It was one of the last things shot, in Wiltshire. “George had been running for months by then. Sam said, ‘George, you will never be fitter than you are now.’”
After an encounter with Blake’s older brother (Richard Madden) outside a field hospital, a shattered Schofield ends as he began, back up against a tree. “We knew early on that there would be a symmetry in the ending,” says Wilson-cairns. Interestingly, while this tree is miles away from the one at the beginning, it was a little closer in reality. “Those trees are thirty feet apart,” she laughs. But of course, that journey would have made for a much shorter movie.