Most stories about World War I, whether they’ve been on television or film or whatever media they’ve been in, they’re always very grim and dark, and it’s either raining, or it’s the winter. You never see any sense of life. There’s never any green. And this film is quite the opposite. Was that an intentional choice on your part? Or was that just how it worked with production and when you could actually shoot it?
No, it was intentional. I mean, one of the ironies of this moment in history when they retreated to the Hindenburg Line was that it was the spring. Traditionally the spring or the summer was the time to [make] grand maneuvers because the conditions were not too appalling. And that was a stroke of luck for us because it meant that when the action in the movie takes place, the world is somehow coming back to life again. Nature, which really is a character in the film, is beginning to restate its primacy over these stupid humans who are destroying the land. So, the leaves are back on the trees blossoming, the rivers are running with fresh rain, and it feels like the world’s coming back to life again. And I was struck by the fact that that was an important part, nature is a character in the story. That was just a stroke of luck.
Did working on the Bond movies give you the knowledge you needed to stage some of the action set pieces in this film? Do you think you could have made “1917” before you did those films?
No, I don’t think I could’ve made it in the same way. It gave me a bit of confidence. Bond gave me a little push in various areas. First of all, I spent a lot of time in the writer’s room with Bond and developed those movies with the writers from the blank page. So, it gave me the courage to think I could perhaps do it myself. And then working on the scale and, to be crass about it, not be afraid of a couple of big bangs. That part of filmmaking became a little bit more accessible to me. And then also, the first shot of “Spectre” was a long continuous shot, and doing that gave me a little insight into what it’d be like making a whole movie like that and what the difficulties and the challenges would be. So for all those reasons, I think that Bond was quite an important part of being able to get to the point where I could make this film.
I know you did many months of technical rehearsal, but when you got on location, was there any particular one sequence that was harder to stage than another?
Yeah, I think No Man’s Land was the most difficult for me because to the naked eye and in photographs, it looks just like an expanse of nothing, like the surface of the moon. But I was aware that it needed detail and needed to be fully imagined if it were to work as a sequence. That somehow they needed to encounter the things that dwelled in No Man’s Land. The dead on the whole, rats, worms, clothes, physical hazards, the way that the land rises and falls. It’s sort of, it’s both, as you get closer to it, it is full of detail, and I thought that was very difficult. Also, the moment in the film, the first section of the film is not easy. Still, it’s, in terms of what the relationship is between the camera and the characters, when you’re in trenches, you can only follow someone down a trench or pull them down a trench, you can’t do anything else. But suddenly we got to No Man’s Land, and the camera could go anywhere. And to try and make it remain logical in some way and expressive and not suddenly to show off or to do something to draw attention to itself.
The actors you brought on board to appear for only a few minutes — Andrew Scott, Benedict Cumberbatch, Colin Firth— they do a remarkable job in such a short amount of time in crafting their characters. Did you have any of them in mind while you were writing the script? Or was it just the traditional casting process?
I might’ve had Colin Firth in mind, but for me, the reason that those guys are well known is that they’re really good, and I wanted to cast the best possible actors in the roles. And the way I did that was to try and call them and persuade them and explain to them the nature of the project and what hey would be part of in its entirety. I think that for a few of them, it was a relief not to be carrying the burden of the whole film, to be a supporting player in something that they believed it. And because I wanted this feeling that these two relatively anonymous young men intersecting with these giant lives, these vast, high-status figures, I needed people with that kind of authority to be able to impose themselves on those scenes. And so I felt fortunate that those guys all did it.
“1917” opens in limited release on Dec. 25. It is currently scheduled to be in theaters nationwide on Jan. 10.
