“1917” tells the story of two English soldiers tasked with ordering the cancel of a British attack. They must journey across No Man’s Land, past all manner of German enemy traps to prevent the massacre of troops in this World War One story. “1917” is now playing in limited release and will then open nationwide January 10th. Its historical setting, technical masterwork, and powerful performances garnered three Golden Globe nominations. Its status as an Oscar-contender feels well earned.
Sitting down at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Dallas, Texas, I met with director Sam Mendes, actors Dean-Charles Chapman & George MacKay, and screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns on their press tour. During the interview, they discussed the difficulties of writing a movie that takes place in a single two-hour process. George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman discussed getting into character and staying in character. Director Sam Mendes explained the tone of the film as well as his work on the project. Included is a transcript of the interview. Please note: my audio recorder died halfway through the interview so the remaining half is paraphrased by memory.
Daniel Pappas: So this all began with your grandfather right?
Sam Mendes: Yeah!
DP: He just told you stories when you were a kid?
SM: He did! Yeah! He fought in the war when he was – he went to war when he was 17. But he didn’t really talk about it until he was in his 70s. He didn’t really tell his kids about it. He told his grandchildren for whatever reason. And uh yeah, I never forgot them.
DP: And you always had in mind to tell this story as a single shot film right?
SM: Once I had the idea of this man or two men carrying a message in two hours of real-time yeah that, that went hand in hand with that. That it would be one continuous shot.
DP: And then he turned to you (Krysty Wilson-Cairns) to write it.
Krysty Wilson-Cairns: Well, to help him write it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean he phoned me up he told me basically that sort of one image of his grandfather carrying a lantern, lost in the fog in No Man’s Land and I knew it was gonna be a different type of war movie. So I was very excited. And then yeah! He told me it was gonna be all one shot and he hung up on me. *Laughter* I was less excited about it in the beginning because that was gonna make my job really hard. How do you even write a story that’s set in real-time as all one shot as a traditional narrative is a bit tricky. But yeah, together we sort of forged a new path shall we say? We got it down on the page and just kept working it back and forth, back and forth until it became a proper collaboration.
DP: Did he know you were a big WW1 buff at the time?
KWC: You did not did you? No, he did not know with that phone call. I guess I’m a slightly surprising WW1 buff, not traditional am I?
DP: I’m really curious. There’s a lot of literature that’s popularized about WW1, ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ and other novels that I think carry a similar tone into the project that you all made. Was that intentional?
KWC: Well, I mean AQOTWF’s one of my favorite books. ‘A Farewell to Arms.’ Books are more about the human experience of war and I suppose we were trying to tell the human experience of war so I suppose that came naturally as a part of this process.
SM: Uh, yes. I mean, what do you mean by a similar tone?
DP: Related in the fact that there is a British sensibility. In the British sense, there seems to be more nobility and sacrifice involved.
SM: Yeah. I think so. I think the war, on the whole, it’s difficult to find. It exists in literature and first-person accounts. It gave birth, that war, to an incredible amount of wonderful art to try to express the nature of the war. From the war poets (Siegfried) Sassoon and Wilfred Owen to the novels, ‘Fall of the Good Soldier’ and ‘Parade’s End,’ and there’s a sort of cliché of the British [being] slightly recessive and sort of old-fashioned but the truth is I think the war was savage and relentless and chaotic and messy and I think the reality of that emerges more in first-person accounts.
In diary entries and things that were not sent at the time because the public perception of the war at the time was controlled by the government at the time by the press as being a good war in order to keep people going. So somebody like my grandfather who enlisted in a war he imagined to be totally different and he was shocked when he arrived there. And the image of the desolation of No Man’s Land goes into 20th-century literature right up to the present day. I mean a play like “Waiting for Godot’ is basically set in No Man’s Land.
The public perception of just the barren, the flat mud and a dead tree immediately conjures up images of the first world war so it’s a generation world-defining war but was not defined by combat but by death I think and level of destruction and chaos. [It’s] a sort of war that starts as the last old fashioned war with horses and carts and ends as the first contemporary war with machine guns and tanks and bombs and weapons of mass destruction and so – a war in which you can kill a person a thousand yards away but you can’t communicate with a person twenty yards away. Because there was no commensurate development in communications and so that particular perfect storm of chaos is a very difficult war to get your hands around cause it was also quite static.
So to try and create a story that was about a journey within that war was really one of the first things we had to try and find. We had to try and find a moment within that war when it was possible to take a journey, there aren’t many of them but one of them was the Germans retreated to the Hindenberg line in 1917 so that enables you through the keyhole of this to – the micro of these two men’s experience to begin to understand the scale of the destruction and the vastness of the landscape that it wasn’t just No Man’s Land but trenches and farmhouses and trees cut down and towns destroyed and civilians killed and the sort of collateral damage on a human scale was so vast. So trying to find a way to express the war visually is difficult and why there have been so few movies about the first war compared to the second world war.
Also, there is no definable enemy compared to the second world war. No one says the Nazis were good, well maybe a couple of freaks say that, but you know what I mean! Everyone understands they were fighting against a universal evil. The first world war there isn’t that- you can’t locate yourself with a moral compass. They’re all the same in a way, these are people who played football in No Man’s Land in Christmas of ‘15 ya know? Germans vs English.
When Schofield goes into that town and meets a German it’s patently clear that poor lad is more terrified and lost than even he is. They’re just lost boys really. So to try and express that really in a human story to express the human experience of war and to stretch your imagination far enough to try to understand it in a way that’s visceral and detailed and not just a series of perceived notions about it from other movies that’s hard and that was the challenge.
DP: Is that why you chose the post-Somme period to portray? I mean the chaos and the loss of life there was so massive.
SM: Yeah. But there was Passchendaele but I mean, Somme was the famous one because that happened mostly on one day. But actually there were greater losses of life in other battles over long periods. That wasn’t why we chose it.
We chose it because there was a very specific moment in the spring of ’17 when the Germans retreated to the Hindenberg line and overnight the land that has been fought over for years is just abandoned and they didn’t know whether they’d retreated or surrendered and in fact, what they’d done was laid a series of traps and landmines, booby traps. They poisoned the wells and chopped down the trees, taking away anything of lasting value and it’s into that landscape that these guys go during a period where, of uncertainty, they didn’t know what was really happening. In a way, it was one of the few times where we could actually tell this story. You know, walk across an unmanned NML that was very rare. In this war.
DP: For both of the actors – I wanted to talk to you guys about your experiences making this film because obviously it’s very unique to anything either one of you have done before and I mean this in the best possible way but you looked miserable when making it. Which is a good thing in this case. You’re constantly rolling around in the mud or whatever very convincingly. Can you talk about, you’re wearing this period garb which is very awful and it’s just, can you describe the emotions going through your mind when you were making this?
George MacKay: It’s like it’s both. It’s genuinely like – we had a great time *laughs*. That said, what you see is what we were doing pretty much. I think we were blessed with having the most incredible sets to move through and to exist in and as Sam said, as much as he wanted us to act it, he wanted us to live it too. We were able to give the detail in all aspects of the costume and set and so, in a sense, so much that what was done for you and I guess to sort of separate the characters with the work that had to be done was, “how would they react?” “Had they been there before?”
Basically, I think when you sort of let in the present nature of the story do a lot of the work for you I think the thing for me was to suss out when and what, when Schofield’s been there before you know, in an equivalent situation, what was his experience like, does he know how to walk, where to look – you know, all that kind of stuff. So it was kind of about knowing the characters well enough so that when you got to that scenario you could just be him.
Dean-Charles Chapman: The same as George. I mean, even though we might have looked miserable, I genuinely got a kick out of it. I think the thing is as well, like the whole one continuous take, I mean none of us had ever done that before but I thoroughly enjoyed it and as an actor, you know, we’re doing scenes that last seven, eight, nine minutes long. You can really get lost in it. Fully immersed. The sets that we were acting in, they weren’t even sets. They were real. They dug trenches. They built farmhouses. Everything seemed so realistic. Even in the No Man’s Land set as well, you’d be standing out there and genuinely be scared, you know?
GMK: You’d feel very, very weird.
DCC: Yeah it was very weird in the German bunker. Pitch black. Eerie. Really creepy. *everyone chuckles* You can really just get lost in it. It’s amazing actually.
SM: It’s interesting really because no one complained. Because it’s pretty impossible to complain when you’re in the trenches for three weeks and those guys were in there for three years. We get to go and have a shower at night so it’s quite sobering. So no one ever moaned about it cause it seemed completely inappropriate. It was the least complaining set I’ve ever been on actually. I don’t think I heard anyone complain about anything.
KWC: No.
SM: Because you look around and you think “Thank Christ we’re not living through this for real.”
At this point, my audio recorder dies. To summarize what happened after:
The actors, George and Dean-Charles, explained some of the touchstone elements that helped ground their characters. For Dean-Charles, he gravitated to a photograph of an actual World War One battalion. He described how everyone in the photo stood rigid except for one man with a sly smile.
The final question of the interview:
DP: What was something in the planning phases that really delighted you to see in the finished product?
Krysty Wilson-Cairns talked in depth about her research and the first-hand accounts she pored through. One such account details the guilt a British soldier felt at taking the milk from a German barn. She explained the soldier’s guilt conflicted with his orders to defeat the German army. It racked his conscience thoroughly until he ran into a French woman holding a newborn infant. In that instant, the soldier realized whom the milk was for. Wilson-Cairns wrote that into the screenplay changing only enough to fit it in the context of the story.
Director Sam Mendes talked about his research and first-hand accounts. He described a British soldier stumbling onto music for the first time in two years. The soldier’s limited vocabulary failed to convey his emotions but Mendes inferred the music was the greatest thing the soldier ever listened to. Mendes explained that to go without music for two years and only know the fire of ordnance implied that the music would hold extra value. The beauty of that moment worked its way into the final screenplay and on to the page in a gorgeously complex way.
“1917” is now playing in limited release and will open nationwide January 10th.
