Behind the Scenes: 1917 (Mendes, 2019) with George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman

After finishing The Last Bond movie, I wanted to try and find something that I've never done before. And I kept reading scripts, and there was nothing that I wanted to do, and eventually my agent and Pippa, who's producing this movie, said, why don't you just write your own script? And I made a lot of fuss about, oh, I don't write, you know. They said, just try. My grandfather used to tell us stories of the First World War. And when I sat down to think about it, I thought, that's the story I want to tell. So then I brought on Christy Wilson-Cairns, who, unlike me, is used to writing page one, scene one, and not freezing. There's no ego with Sam. He knows what he wants, but he lets you change his mind. He's a complete genius collaborator. This film was very much Sam's passion project. It's a thing that he had in his mind for a number of years, and Christy Wilson-Cairns was able to get that out of his head and onto the page. This movie is based on a fragment of story my grandfather told me when I was sitting at his feet. He fought in the First World War. His name was Alfred Hubert Mendez, and he went to war in 1917. He was a messenger on the front lines, and he was given the job of carrying the message from post to post along the front line, because he was five foot four, and the mist on no man's land hung at five and a half feet, so he couldn't be seen above the mist when he ran. And I started with this fragment, really. When I read the script for the first time, I felt like it was an amazing dream that he had been holding on for such a long time, and we all kind of felt the same emotion of what we were about to go into. I want to say how wonderful it's been to watch everybody be so collaborative across so many different departments, and that's the nature of this film, and it's very moving for me personally to watch it happen. This was a totally different project, and everybody on the crew that I ever talked to said they never expected to work on anything like this. Wait, jump before he's dying, and you'll know because of the position in the sky. I thought, how is he going to render one shot and tell a compelling story in real time? The whole point is, as you're standing, they'll get up and see it like that. And then seeing Sam work with it and seeing it become one shot... Slow down, slow down. ...made me think he should donate his brain to science. He's very smart. I think they should study him. And go! It's filled with all the insight and heart and emotion, because for him this has been such a profoundly personal story. You go a little faster, Charlie go a little slower. That way when we come out, we're looking straight down. He's just a genius. He really, really, really is, and he's brilliant at what he does, and I am honestly thankful that I'm part of a film that means so much to him. It was brilliant to work with him. He's always been passionate on everything I've been on with him. I mean, that's why I love working with him. He always kept inspiring us, and the key was his inspiration, and just the willingness to do something like this. Because at that point, you need to be sort of drifting in. Gotcha. It'll take a couple of seconds before you do, but if you start there, there's a natural gap in the frame between those two trees. There were many people who died because of the war, but there were also many men who survived. One of them told me the stories that made this movie happen, and they never left me. This movie was so very personal to Sam. He wanted to make you feel that you are in the trenches with those young men, and what that experience of war was from their POV. I feel that it's the duty of one generation to hand on the stories of the previous generation so that we understand history, and I take that very seriously, because this generation sacrificed for something larger than themselves, and the nature of that is behind everything. That's really what the story is. It was a very simple idea, really, two men carrying a message, and I felt that every footstep, every step of the journey, breathing every breath with them, felt integral to the material. Blake, let's talk about this for a minute. Why? If we're not clever about this, no one will get to your brother. I will. It's a very personal story, and you want it to be kind of intimate with the characters, so the story lent itself to this concept of it being one shot. From page one, scene one, we knew that the challenges were when you go to a new scene, how do you get in and out of scenes in an interesting way? We start behind them, and we come up and reveal the quarry. What makes that difficult, obviously, for production, is we're used to using coverage and camera placement to tell a story. Just the language of film, you cut to a wide shot to establish geography, or you cut to a close-up and push in to feel connected to a character. We don't get to play with those tools, yet we still have to do all of those things, but design it into our one-shot film, and it starts from early days on prep. The first thing I needed to do was figure out what camera we would shoot it on, and I knew Ari was going to be producing an LF Mini, so we really pushed them to get the camera available for us for this shoot. We're the first film to use it. It's the smallest possible camera we can have, but with the best quality of image that you can possibly have on a digital film. One of the key elements in realizing this film has been Roger Deakin's input. From the very early days, Roger was right by Sam's side, working out exactly what it was that Sam was looking for. We made the 40-page document, which is basically a map of the film, that indicates how a camera can go, not just from A to B like a normal movie, but from A to B to C to D to E to F, without cutting. We spent a number of months, literally, researching different camera techniques, but then it was actually how to combine all those elements of technology to create something that flowed, and you weren't aware of the change from one motion to another. Ready, and action! The camera work just blew my mind. Things I didn't even realize were possible. At times in the film, the camera's on a technocrane arm that's pushing in or jibbing down, and then at other times it's on the steadicam, it's on the Trinity. There! That's the front line! Or it's on a handheld gimbal called a stabilizer, which Rapul then applied to very specific moments in the script. The Trinity essentially gives you the fluidity of a steadicam combined with the precision that you get from a stabilized head. And because I control it on remote wheels, it was a matter of figuring out how that operator's movement would actually move with the actors to get me where I wanted to be in the framing. The actual logistics of making sure that we maintain picture, sound, and actually the controls of the camera, and the focus on the camera is challenging, because the camera following these two characters is moving vast distances, I mean hundreds of yards at times. So this posed, obviously, technical issues for the crew and for the actors. Peter Cavacutti, who was a steadicam operator on this film, actually developed this smaller rig, and we christened the dragonfly so he could run with the actors running down a trench. Three, two, one, action! They had this wire camera, a bit like they have at football stadiums, where they basically plot coordinates for points for the camera to go to. There's scenes where it's going in the sky and the camera's attached to this wire, and then suddenly it goes low to the floor, following me and George in No Man's Land. It was groundbreaking technology, really. Things that haven't been done before. I'm replicating the arm on the camera vehicle. The trench run was just a really big couple of days. Action! Watch of everyone going over the top, it was very moving to see 450 men sort of run away from you. Let's just reset these guys. And then also in the kind of collaborative sense of the crew, to get those shots, it was just so exciting. To go from crane, to hand it off onto another crane, then onto a tracking vehicle, and then be moving. The scale of the shot sometimes overshadowed how much technical brilliance and sort of collaboration there was just to get the camera on the move. You're matching action. The timing of things. The lighting environment. While you're shooting the movie. We've had to literally time out every single sequence in the film to determine how long these sets are going to be, how long the sets of trenches are, which you would never normally do that on a film because you'll be cutting. No set, nothing was even begun until we knew those basic things. You have all these amazing people who are at the top of their game, and everybody's having to pull on every resource that they know, have previously experienced, or haven't experienced, and figure out how to do this and to make it work. In theory, it's three shots, a shot of him getting out of the truck, and the two shots for his journey. There was this pioneering mentality of like, right, well, the scene is roughly going to be about six minutes and we can't stop. So how? How can we do it? So we used ticker tape markers to sort of map out what we do. The land cannot be longer than the scene, and the scene cannot be longer than the land, and so you have to rehearse every step of the journey, every line of dialogue on location. We built well over a mile of these trenches, and the mud, the level of exhaustion just walking through, even for the film crew walking through those sets, was such a technical challenge. And because we were shooting in story order, we'd have to shoot in cloud to get the continuity from shot to shot, piece to piece. This movie is endless exteriors. No location ever repeats. So you're constantly moving through landscapes, and that means that we have to contend with weather, and the weather has to match. So this is our first day, and the sun's been out too much, which actually for us isn't so good, because we need pretty specific lighting conditions, ideally grey weather. So we've just been rehearsing all day. If we hadn't had the amount of rehearsals we did, none of us would have known what to expect. There was so much to work out, and all of it needed to feel like second nature. Sometimes you have a camera being carried by an operator, hooked onto a wire. The wire carries it across more land. It's unhooked again. That operator runs with it, then steps onto a small jeep, which carries him another 400 yards, and he steps off it again and goes around a corner. We have this river sequence, which is one of our trickier sequences to shoot. Finding the right river, which had the right amount of rapids, but then also became calm at the end of it. We spent a lot of time looking at all the different rivers in all of the UK, and we found ourselves at the River Tees, which has really provided us a stunning place to shoot this sequence. Sam and Roger are so specific about how you deliver information. How do you get the right angle, and what is the right angle? And then that takes a bit of working out, and then you go, how do we get that? Quite honestly, I didn't have 100% confidence in it. So that was a bit nervy till we got there and shot it. But once we got going, it was like, wow, that's pretty cool. Everything had to be in the frame, because by definition, you're doing a 360 around. So none of the exteriors we had light on, because you can't put a light anywhere. It's the same with the interiors in a way. The interiors had to be lit by the practical sources. And the biggest light and setup was in acoustics. Light being one of the greatest ways of telling any kind of emotional story or creating any kind of atmosphere, and Roger Deakins being a master of it, helped enormously. They had all these flares going up over the top of the town to light the environment. And the amount of moving parts working in harmony to get this shot was amazing. These are all immense challenges in different ways. It's the way in which the dance of the camera and the mechanics all have to be one and have to be in sync with what the actor's doing. When you achieve that, it's really beautiful and exhilarating. Three, two, one, go! It's a perfect example, really, of the collaboration of so many departments working on a shot between the art department, special effects, everybody, camera, the grip department in terms of how to achieve something, which in the film will look like a fairly straightforward shot. There is only one way this war ends. Last man standing. I hope you get there. Thank you. I don't think there's been a film that will have had quite this level of detail in terms of the one-shot nature of it. And I think that's really what sets it apart from anything else we've seen on screen to date. Until shots are joined together as though it's one, you don't really realise how immersive it is and how that technique kind of draws you into it. You're not really aware that it's one shot. And that was what was surprising to me. It's like a piece of theatre, every take. Once it starts, it can't stop. You keep hold of me! If something goes wrong, you just have to keep going. We need to keep moving! There were so many scenes that I just completely got lost in. Sometimes a scene was six minutes long and when they'd call cut, I would completely forget who I was. And I was Blake. You just hope that when you start a movie, you're going to make something that is special to people and people feel personally about. So it's been a voyage of discovery for everybody. Both ridiculously prepped and detailed, and at the same time, completely unknown.