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Sam Mendes on 1917
DIRECTOR SAM MENDES SALUTES THE SACRIFICE AND HEROISM THAT FUEL HIS EXTRAORDINARY NEW WAR MOVIE 1917
AT the end of 1917, Sam Mendes dedicates his searing new movie to his grandfather, Albert H Mendes, and the “stories” he told of his time during the First World War. “They stayed with me,” says Mendes, when we meet in his London office prior to him receiving a knighthood in the New Year’s Honours. “My grandfather arrived on the Front in 1916 and he got home in 1918 – he was gassed, he was injured. Obviously it formed who he was. He was 17 when he got there. The fact that a member of my family went through it was fascinating to me.”
Through his 20 years as a filmmaker – working on such acclaimed projects as American Beauty, Road to Perdition and James Bond movie Skyfall – Mendes carried these stories with him.
After 2015’s Spectre, his second 007 movie in a row, he took a step back, just as he and his wife Alison Balsom had their first child together, Phoebe. “My life changed,” the 54-year-old shrugs. “I felt like I wanted
to be at home. And I had this idea; I felt like I wanted to do another kind of movie.”
Drawing from “a fragment” of one story told by his grandfather, Mendes has carved out a breathtaking tribute to those who lost their lives in the First World War. The film has just been nominated for three Golden Globes, including Best Picture.
Oscar nods seem a certainty for a movie that dares to conceive its story as a real-time drama delivered in one shot, as two Lance Corporals – Schofield (George MacKay) and Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) – venture several miles with instructions to stop 1,600 troops from falling into an ambush.
To help him realise his vision, Mendes brought in a co-writer – the Glaswegian Krysty Wilson-Cairns, whom he’d first met on the supernatural TV show Penny Dreadful, which he executive produced.
“She’s super-smart and very quick and she’s young and she’s a woman – all these things I’m not! I thought, ‘I need someone like that in the room with me.’ She came in, loved it from the moment I pitched it to her … She was the one who made it happen.”
Wilson-Cairns immediately was drawn to the idea of tackling the First World War. Her grandfather “was a massive history buff” and, while he was only 10 at the outbreak of the Second World War, other family members had fought in both world wars. “He’d lost brothers and uncles,” she explains, “so he had a huge personal interest and he passed that on to me.” That included bestowing her with a collection of out-of-print war books, which WilsonCairns had stashed away in a storage unit in Glasgow.
After digging them out, she drove them to Mendes’ house and they swapped books and stories. “He had an incredible collection of stuff from his grandfather and his grandfather’s friends. He even showed me his grandfather’s medals that day. And the first few hours, we were just talking about what the war meant to both of us, through our lineages, how it’d been passed down to us, what the First World War was in a way. There are so many interpretations of it. I think for both of us it was just a human catastrophe.”
While there have been some impressive First World War films of late – an all-star adaptation of Journey’s End and Peter Jackson’s documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, which used archive footage from the Imperial War Museum – Wilson-Cairns is not wrong when she says the conflict is “underserved” on film. “When it’s presented, it’s presented as trenches and no man’s land. And when you read the first-hand accounts, or even [see] a lot of the documentaries, you realise there’s so much more.”
The crucial element in 1917 is based on fact: that the Germans tactically withdrew to the so-called Hindenburg Line between February and March of that year. “For a large part of the Western Front the Germans retreated to the Hindenburg Line and for 72 hours or more the British troops
did not know where they’d gone,” says Mendes. “Large chunks of them thought they’d surrendered and they thought they’d won the war; others were convinced they were lying in wait. Only the generals knew they’d created a new line. This was an extraordinarily sophisticated manoeuvre and they’d left behind snipers and booby traps.”
For a war known for its stationary nature – “Men died over inches,” says Wilson-Cairns – this discovery opened up the possibilities for Mendes to craft a journey beyond the trenches. To do this, he conceived of it as a one-shot movie – appearing to the audience like a single tracking shot that never cuts away from the protagonists. “The one shot isn’t a gimmick, it’s a way you experience every step,” says MacKay. “You have no choice but to be with these people.”
While some films, such as 2015’s German-language drama Victoria, have shot an entire movie in one unbroken two-hour take, 1917 was far too logistically complicated to do that, with the narrative taking the soldiers from no man’s land to the abandoned German trenches and beyond. Instead, it was broken down into segments, and
seamlessly woven together to look like one epic shot thanks to Lee Smith, the editor who worked with Mendes on Spectre.
In reality, 1917 was filmed in large unbroken takes, anywhere between four and nine minutes long, which still required remarkable concentration from the cast, which includes Bodyguard star Richard Madden, who plays a small but crucial role. Numerous takes were spoilt by momentary human error.
ALIGHTER failing to ignite or a cameraman tripping up would ruin a take. MacKay remembers getting to the end of a very long, complex sequence and his rifle slipped off his shoulder accidentally. “We’re talking the last 10 seconds of a six-minute take … That was so frustrating. You’re like, ‘I’m so sorry, guys, I’m so sorry.’”
A mile’s worth of trenches were dug for real at Bovingdon Airfield in Hertfordshire, “in Kubrick’s neck of the woods” says Mendes with a smile, while Salisbury Plain also served as a crucial location.
Mendes and his team literally paced out every step that Schofield and Blake take; given the precise real-time nature of the story, it had to be plotted to perfection. While there is intense action, their adventures also had to be credible, says Wilson-Cairns. “Obviously, crazy things happened in the First World War, but they didn’t all happen in the space of two hours.”
Mendes also brought his team to Scotland to shoot a sequence where Schofield crosses a broken bridge, filmed at Govan Dry Docks on the Clyde.
“It was shot right in my back garden,” says Wilson-Cairns. “I grew up on the south side and, believe it or not, my grandfather used to run haulage out of those dry docks, when it was horses and carts.”
While she left Glasgow for London 11 years ago, Wilson-Cairns is clearly delighted by this. “It was really special to come back to Scotland to film, for me personally. It meant an awful lot.”
Present all the way through the extensive rehearsal period and the 65-day shoot, Wilson-Cairns calls the making of 1917 a “Herculean team effort”.
“Everyone was welcomed into the fold,” she smiles. “So I loved taking them on a night out in Glasgow, getting them all …” She checks herself, before revealing too much, then says: “Having a lovely, refined Glaswegian evening.”
She chuckles at the memories. “There were a lot of Glaswegians on set. I wasn’t the only one leading that night out!”
The same went for MacKay, who is something of an honorary Scot (his mother’s English, his father’s Australian, though he speculates that his lineage stretches back to the Highland clan).
He’s twice worked up here, in the Proclaimers’ musical Sunshine on Leith and fishing drama For Those in Peril. “I love Scotland,” he says. “If I didn’t live in London, I’d live in Scotland. I’d move to Glasgow. We had the best time there. The people there are so warm. Just so human and lovely.”
The same could be said for MacKay, who had finally been rewarded with the starmaking role his whole career has deserved. Mendes says he has, “something of the Robert Donat”, the actor famed for his role in Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps. “He has nobility,” the director adds. “There is a dignity. He feels of the period.”
Mendes also marvels at MacKay’s endurance levels. “The sheer degree of physical punishment he took in this … I don’t think I’ve ever met a fitter man.”
One scene – glimpsed in the trailer – sees Schofield run along the ridge of a trench as men start pouring over the top. MacKay is repeatedly knocked over by onrushing extras, though nothing was planned.
“Those were just collisions that happened,” he says. “They were just in their moment, focusing on where they had to get to, and I was focusing on where I had to get to, and we just collided. Sam gave a wonderful note about that scene:
I feel there is euphoria to that run, a freedom, an unshackling.”
Emotionally, it was just as taxing. “The first thing I thought when I saw it … It made me very clear who I come back to in my life and who I want to come back to,” says MacKay.
“And that was quite a profound feeling to have. The context of the film might feel alienating to some people – First World War and all of that. But it’s actually about human experience and I think the war is a context for the human experience.
“When I watched it, I felt very strongly about a few people in my life that I wanted to get in contact with.”
While 1917 goes to great lengths to show the horrors of wartime, from rotting animal carcasses to mobile hospitals full of wounded soldiers, it doesn’t revel in heroics. “I think Sam and I really loved this idea, writing a war movie where the whole point of it is a journey to stop a battle,” says Wilson-Cairns.
“As much as I love reading about the war and I’m fascinated by it, I think it was the worst thing we ever did as a civilisation, and it continues to be. The idea that war is a last resort is idiotic. It should be no resort. It shouldn’t even be on your list.”
For Mendes, he’s painfully aware how fortunate most of us are to have grown up in peace. “I think we live in an era which has forgotten – and I count myself firmly among them – what it means to sacrifice something.
“To sacrifice something for the greater good. You can’t believe what they went through, and a whole generation of men were lost in that war … When I was a young boy, hundreds of thousands of those men were still alive and they’re gone now.”
With a film like 1917, it’s not just Mendes’ own grandfather who will be remembered.
1917 opens in cinemas on January 10
We live in an era which has forgotten what it means to sacrifice something for the greater good