Dan Snow's History Hit - Sam Mendes on 1917

Episode Date: January 9, 2020

In this podcast Dan talks to Golden Globe winning film maker Sam Mendes about his new World War One film 1917.Based in part on an account told to Mendes by his paternal grandfather, Alfred Mendes, it chronicles the story of two young British soldiers at the height of WWI during Spring 1917.

Hello everyone and welcome to Dan's Notes History. You can't miss it if you're in the UK at the moment. You can't miss it. It's on the side of every bus. It's on the side of every billboard. It is 1917. The gigantic new film from Sam Mendes. Today I'm lucky enough to have Sam Mendes on the podcast. This was a great chat. He's an Academy Award winner. He's a Golden Globe winner. Now he's been on the History Hit podcast. The finest of his accolades so far. We had a good chat about the movie, which I've got to say I thought was really good.

I thought it was brilliant. I loved 1917. I think inevitably, like all war films, it sails a little close to cliche from time to time. But that's fine because I think it will introduce a generation that will be unfamiliar with the First World War to that war on a gigantic, on an epic scale. It's an extraordinary film technically and I think

the narrative of choosing the particular moment in 1917 when there was a bit of mobility, a bit of fluidity restored to the battlefield was a very clever decision as well. I won't spoil the film but it does talk about that moment in the beginning of 1917 when following the great Somme offensive of 1916 ending in November 1916, the Germans retreated on the Somme front to a pre-prepared defensive position which the British called the Hindenburg Line. It meant that for a few strange days, the British, who'd been locked into their trenches since December of 1914, were moving forward through open country. And as you'll hear, Sam Mendes believed that would make

for a better historical backdrop for a great film than endless positional warfare in the trenches. Yeah, you can see it on historyhit.tv, the new history channel. Lots going on at the moment. Out doing a little bit of filming for them at the moment. So please go to historyhit.tv, use the code January. You get involved in the January sale. you get part of the january you get involved in the january sale you get to watch sam mendez for free if you use the code january you

then get the first month for free and then you get the first four months after that for just one pound euro drachma per month pretty sweet deal so go and check it out and we're so grateful for your support as we try and build the world's best history channel so here's sam menders i do urge you to go and see the movie it is absolutely remarkable to watch and go and do it on the biggest screen possible 1917 here's sam menders so many thank you very much for coming on the show. It's a great pleasure, Dan. Nice to be in. I mean, the pleasure is all mine. This film is extraordinary. I, okay, let's start at the end.

Talk to me about your ancestor, who we met at the end of the film, last thing we hear about. Yes, well, it's dedicated to my grandfather, Alfred, who fought in the war from 1916 to 1918, arrived there as a 17-year-old, chose to enlist and never really spoke about it thereafter

to his own children or his own family including my dad and then when he was from the West Indies born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and went back there after the war and made his life there basically he had periods where he was in other countries.

And when I was a kid, he'd retired to Barbados and we would go out and visit him, you know, as much as we could, which was probably once or twice a year. And he would sit on his porch and tell stories. And eventually we managed to get him to talk with him.

And he chose to talk, I think, much to my dad's surprise and his brother. And he told us stories of what it was like. And he still, for example, washed his hands incessantly, even in his 70s, because he remembered the mud of the trenches and never getting clean. So it was clear that it was still in him part of him and the stories he told none of them were stories of heroism or bravery or extraordinary acts they were all stories of luck and chance and coincidence and how thin the line between life and death and

how lucky he was to be alive when his friend who he went with, enlisted with, died standing next to him and just was hit by a shell and just evaporated. And he said there was nothing left to bury. So those, to an 11-year-old, 12-year-old, were very vivid and unforgettable stories, particularly coming from a grandfather who we associated as a very jovial, good-natured, theatrical, charismatic type. He wasn't quiet and introverted at all. So it was a very interesting combination. And he was an actual storyteller. He was a novelist himself. And so he enjoyed telling stories to rapt audiences.

And one particular story he told was the story of carrying a message across no man's land. He was a very small man and as he told it the mist in the winter of no man's land used to hang around six feet so they sent him because he couldn't be seen above the mist and that was a very vivid recollection of mine and that for whatever reason just wouldn't let me go this story wouldn't let me go just you know these things hang around and when it came time to write something or to think about writing something that was the story i found i wanted to tell and i couldn't exactly tell you why except that i felt um i felt it felt somehow important what a privilege that you can take a story from your family's past and then spend hundreds of millions of dollars on it. I just think it's amazing.

Yes, if everyone was given hundreds of millions of dollars to tell their family stories, you'd probably get some really good movies, actually. But, yeah, they gave it to me instead, so there we are. Well, I'm glad they did. Now, let's... First of all, as a filmmaker, is the First World War a challenge?

I mean, the galaxy of films about the Second World War. Is it easier, good versus evil? They were bad. Is it harder to get films away? Is it harder to galaxy of films about the Second World War. Is it easier, good versus evil? They were bad. Is it harder to get films away? Is it harder to think of films? Is it harder to get them over the line when it's the First World War? Yes, I think it's partly because most films

are made with American money and the American presence in the First World War was not large. Whereas the Second World War, you know, if you watch your favourite Private Ryan, to all intents and purposes it appears that the Americans were on the floor because there were no non-Americans in the movie at all.

But, you know, they feel very connected to the Second World War for good reason. And the First World War, not so much. So there's that. But also there's the nature of the war itself. The First World War was a war of paralysis in many ways. Static war fought in trenches and over 300 yards of land millions

hundreds of thousands of people lose their lives just over a tiny stretch of land how do you tell a visually interesting story uh something that demands a big screen uh to tell a story in which there isn't that much visual interest you know it's just a brown wars a lot of mud you know and and and if people want to just bury themselves in mud for two hours? So it took me a while to work out how to develop this fragment of a story and create a journey that felt epic. But there is this moment in 1917 where the Germans retreat to the Hindenburg Line and suddenly, overnight, the British have no enemy. There's no one there.

There's movement again. Well, there's movement and confusion, as there often was in that particular war. Lack of communications. I mean, you've got a general at the beginning of this story, played by Colin Firth, telling the men that the Germans have definitely gone. But 200 yards later, you've got another senior officer

played by Andrew Scott saying, no, they haven't. You're an idiot. If you go over, you're going to die. And the men don't know the truth, and neither should you as an audience. And the truth was there was this 72-hour period where there was general confusion about whether it was a retreat, a withdrawal, or a surrender.

Some people thought the war was over. Then they'd just go on, we won. And actually, history being written by the victors and all that, in retrospect, if the Germans had won the war, the Hindenburg Line retreat would have been one of the greatest maneuvers of all, because they did it under cover of night. They took them six months, the British didn't know about it at all, and when they, as it were, revealed their line, their new 42-mile expanse of line, it was three miles deep, unbelievable fortifications, pristine engineering, an incredible deep-lying artillery.

I mean, it was an amazing construction. And they'd compressed a very wide and less fortified stretch of line into this very, very... So it was a very skilful thing. But for this glorious moment, well, for this moment, they thought it was a glorious victory. So there is this moment when the soldiers are cut adrift in this land that has been raised to the ground by the Germans, and yet it's the spring of 1917,

so nature is also fighting to get back through again and nature in a way is a character in the movie it sure is but what i i the minute as the history geek the minute i saw the hint at the retreat the hint i i immediately oh that's what he's doing because you need to it allows as with the great war movies you can move through a landscape yeah you move through a story but all the narrative but also you're you're right look different things towns rivers yeah and in fact the first one doesn't let you do that usually but did you have a story that you needed and you went to a story and going you've got to give me you've got to give me something that isn't just positional attritional nightmarish warfare i need a little i need

something and someone went you know what there's this little tiny bit here or did you kind of hear about that and then build the story around it no No, that was research. I was looking and looking for a way to have a journey that wasn't 300 yards long, you know. So I had to, and unless I'd found that, I couldn't have made that, I wouldn't have written the script, I wouldn't have made the story. It was that realisation that there was that moment, that perfect moment, which is why, you know, the movie is played over one day and it's very specific which day it

is and and indeed that was the day that there was this confusion they were beginning to mobilize to move up to the new german line but some sections of the army had no idea what was going on and that's what we've that's the situation we come into you know you have this combination as you know in the first world war the first the first war that begins with horses and infantry and ends with tanks and machine guns and weapons of mass destruction, the beginning of modern warfare. But at the same time, no communication. There isn't a commensurate degree of sophistication and communication.

There is no way of telling someone. So even people 30 yards away from orders being delivered can't hear and die. And this happens over and over and over again. The sort of level of the awful perfect storm of the sudden development of industrial warfare and the lack of industrial level of communication is a hell really. And so you're trying to find that kind of fulcrum point where suddenly, through a keyhole, a keyhole of one man's experience, you're able to suddenly see

the vast panorama of death and destruction. You know, the whole movie is based on the idea that through the micro, you can understand the macro. You know, through just two hours of real time and one man's or two men's experience, you can see and begin to understand the sheer scale of the war. It struck me even on no man's land

that the scale is not expressed going from the British line to the German line because that's almost visible. In many cases, it was visible 200 yards away. The scale is best expressed looking down the lines because that goes on for miles and miles and miles, hundreds of miles. And sometimes you have to find different ways of looking at things

in order to find a way to articulate the vastness of the chaos that was the Great War because we're so stuck in cliches, so stuck in repeating images, you know, over the top die, over the top die, back in the trench, over the top die.

I mean, you know, it's almost impossible to break out of that and I was looking for a way to try to break out of that but at the same time, we do have that. You know, there are trenches,

there is no man's land, there are people who go over the top at the end of the movie, but it's trying to unlock other areas of history. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History,

we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Well, the technique that is so revolutionary

and deserves every award in the book is obviously shooting it as if it's on one steady shot the whole way through. And what's so brilliant about that is it lends itself, first of all, like nothing else. You see the back, the rear areas, they're all asleep in the grass, and flowers and poppies, not poppies, but flowers having a nice time. And then they kind of get their stuff together, and they go through the communication trench, and then they end up at the front line, then they go over the front line, and it's all a one-er.

And you see thousands of people people and you do get that sense of geographical scale and I'm asked about the technical stuff but I have to ask every director that comes on the History Podcast about how annoying are historians when you wanted to do something did they go, well it didn't really go like that and how do you ever rule them, does the filmmaking

come first, how important was history to you? Very important, I mean we had two historical advisors, Andy Robertshaw and and uh peter barton both of them were brilliant legends yeah and both different uh you know areas i mean they both obviously know pretty much everything about the first world war but they also had specific areas that i would sort of set them on like attack dogs you know andy would talk to the men all the background about how what was in their packs and their kit bags and the you know and and how to use their weapons we had another military advisor called paul biddis who himself had been in the military but also knows about the first

world war who was training them and talking to them about uh all sorts of psychological elements to uh what they're what they were expected to do and and what they would have been through just to get to the front line peter Barton was the one who pointed out, I said, look, I want you to pick holes in this everywhere you possibly can. And it was brilliant. And he made a huge impact on it because, you know, even if it's just throwing a spotlight on cliches, you know, the men waiting to go over the top knowing they're about to die. He says, the men waiting to go over the top knowing they're about to die he says nonsense they most men went over the top thinking they were going to victory you you know but that's a huge thing when you're talking to 500 background live you know just

reminding them of that yes they're adrenalized yes they're frightened but they're not knowing they're going to die this is a myth and that's something we impose upon it with a kind of nostalgia of hindsight and our knowledge of the war and all. So, you know, there are those aspects. And then, you know, just geography. Where is a coast? Where is the land? You know, how far would they,

how much of a trench would they have been able to dig in 24 hours? You know, even en masse, all of these things. And a lot of those things went into the script, went into the way that we approached it. We adjusted all sorts of details because of historical ways. So in a way, you know, it was crucial. But then, of course, there are things that I said, you know what, I'm going to ignore that. Because, you know, film necessarily is a compression. And this is not naturalism.

It's kind of poetic naturalism. You know, there are, there's a sense, and I don't want to give it away, but even though it takes place in two hours of real time, that time is at one point irrelevant. You know, central character doesn't know where he is anymore, doesn't know what time it is, even if he's been asleep or knocked out for two, three days, you know. And he physically doesn't know where he is in the landscape so you don't want to be you don't want to literally to be over

literal about distances and over literal about time because the film operates in a dreamlike way at times as well which is a you know which is film and and it's not otherwise I'd have made a documentary or written an essay. It strikes me that you had a story, a narrative idea about this movie and you wanted to get across the scale, but it feels like technically you obviously, the

cinematography, you wanted to absolutely kick on. For me it felt as big a shift as the first time I ever saw Saving Private Ryan when that ramp goes down and suddenly you see bullets for the first time in ever saw Saving Private Ryan when that ramp goes down and suddenly you see sort of bullets for the first time in film, you know, whizzing around. And talk to me a little bit about some of the techniques that you use and whether you must have pioneered. Did this film need it? Did your story, your script need you to make

all these innovations to realise it? Yeah, the two things happen at the same time. You're searching for a perfect marriage of form and content. You want the form to match the content and if you're telling a story in two hours of real time and your goal is to lock the audience together with the characters

for those two hours, make them experience every second passing with the characters, take every step with them, then it seemed like a natural step to not edit, to not cut, to not give an audience any sense that there was anything except this single dance between the camera, the actors and the landscape, which is the choreography that we're engaged in the whole time. But if you haven't seen it, I i don't want it's difficult to imagine it because you know i think everyone's worst version of that is the cameras sort of trotting along

behind two people and seeing what they're seeing basically for two hours and or or seeing their faces as they react to it but the the truth is it's a constantly shifting uh movement from the subjective camera to the objective camera, from the intimacy of understanding their emotional reaction to what they're seeing, and also showing the landscape, the journey, the scale of the journey, understanding distances. And then there are this other character, as I said earlier, it's nature. You know, this is a land that, yes, it's been raised to the ground largely by the Germans, but it's French farmhouses and towns and canals and rivers and orchards and streams and woods and and the spring when re-emerging and so there's this other

life that comes back into the film which you also want to kind of pay homage to so it's though that dance is an instinctive thing that you and the you know I had one of the greatest cinematographers of all time shooting this film, Roger Deakins, and I've worked with him three times before, and this is our fourth time, and most of prep for us was just talking, talking, talking, talking, trying it out, talking again,

storyboarding it, trying it out, talking. You know, and then an endless amount of rehearsals, because if you think about it... That's what I was going to say, yeah. Well, you have to, if you write a scene that says they go from a quarry to a woods, down a hill, through an orchard to a farmhouse that's all very well but when you can't cut the distances have to be exactly the length of the scene and the scene has to be exactly the length of the set

and only when you've measured it can you then start building the orchard building the farmhouse digging the trenches you know so you have to get out there on open fields before you do anything holding a script, just marching up and down with a bunch of people sticking flags in the ground saying, well, this is where the trench starts, this is where the comms trench enters, this is the left turn, this is the dugout,

this is where they have a little fight. And there were all these, so there were white posts marking the trenches and then there were orange posts marking events within the trenches. And the same for no man's land german dugout etc uh right the way through the film so you know if you ask george mckay now who played scofield he could walk the journey of the movie for you still step for step

because it's so in his muscle memory we literally did it for months because there was no way of moving if we hadn't if we didn't know. Because if you build an orchard that's two times longer than you need, you've got a long scene with no dialogue. They just run out of things to talk about. Or if it's too short, they're standing still for a section of the scene because they can't move anywhere. So it has to be exactly the right length. And that was really a challenge. And then rehearsals those actors i

mean as someone on on telly the the stress of getting something wrong at the end of the scene i mean it must have been awful can you reveal how many takes you have to do certain or certain things oh we had to do you know multiple takes 30 40 50 takes sometimes but you know these are eight minute scenes so that's a lot of shoe leather and travelling distances all the time. But the truth is that all the rehearsals in order to build the set and plan the camera rigs meant they were very, very familiar with it.

And in a kind of way, that meant that they were living it by the time we came to shoot it rather than acting it. And I kept saying just don't think about where the camera is, very occasionally I'll say just in that moment look over your right shoulder and by that time they were so comfortable with it

that it was easy and then what you want though is this very odd combination of things, you want incredible precision in the camera work but you don't want incredible precision in the physical movement of the you don't want incredible precision in the physical movement of the actors. You want them to not be thinking about how they're moving, not be thinking about how they're being with each other, just simply being.

So you want spontaneity in front of the camera and you want precision behind the camera. So that balance was always the most difficult thing because sometimes it takes ten takes to get the precision in camera, by which time they've done it ten times and they've sort of lost their spontaneity. Often the directors will tell you the first two or three takes are the ones where you get the precision in camera, by which time they've done it 10 times and they've sort of lost their spontaneity. Often the directors will tell you

the first two or three takes are the ones where you get the most electricity and sometimes you don't need any more than that. But here, that didn't happen very often. You know, there's no, there's only one scene which is the first take in the movie, you know. And, but most of them were, you know,

after sort of 20. And so the job is then to keep the actors alive, you know, literally alive. Literally. Literally alive. But also, if I kept saying, look, if mistakes happen, just keep going. Because some of them are just human. You're just a human being.

You're slipping in the mud. You're falling over. One key moment at the end, near the end, one of the characters is nearly delivering a message and he gets literally knocked off his feet. Oh, that was a mistake? That was a mistake. Well, that was a mistake? That was a mistake. But, exactly, because I just said, if that happens to you, get up and keep running, you know.

And he did. And it's in the movie. So those are happy accidents that you would hope for in normal movies, but you're able to kind of get those rough edges, really, which give a feeling of life rather than acting. I could talk to you all day you although i must let you go just on on period drama full start is this something you'd like to do more of i mean i historically love it of course i thought the position was great i mean what is it

um what as a director what attracts you to telling big historical stories well i'm not always attracted to telling big historical stories. I think that there are two camps of historian, as you know. There's the let's get it right camp, and then there's the let's make it immediate camp. And I think I'm probably in the let's make it immediate camp, because for me, one of the things that pleased me about the idea of this is that you don't need to know anything about the First World War. You don't even have to know what Christopher Nolan told you in Dunkirk. Okay, just so you know, the British are trapped,

the Germans are here, the French are there. You don't need any of that at all. It just has a date, that's it. And it's told in a very contemporary way, and it's scored in a contemporary way, and we use all the bells and whistles of contemporary cinema, Surround Sound and Dolphin Vision, and you're going to be able to see it in IMAX?

It's a big screen experience. And for me, that's the big challenge, is to somehow bring history into a place where you feel like it's happening yesterday. And that's what excites me when I find something like that. You know, you're also looking for stories that... Movies need a mythic scale. You need a mythic landscape

somehow to tell a story. And it's one of the things that attracted me to Bond. It's a contemporary myth, really. And some historical periods have that and some strangely don't. But of all the wars, the myth, the shadow of the Great War

falls the furthest in a way and the landscape people can't really tell you what they're fighting in Normandy but everyone

can just sort of tell you what a First World War vista looked like I suppose yes what other periods would you like to

do I mean obviously come on 18th century we need a big film there do we yes need we need one we need a big film there. Do we? Yes, absolutely. Need, need, we need one.

We need, we do need. It's essential for our mental health. I'd love to do a movie set in Shakespeare in England. I would love to, I'd love to feel like, I'd love to go back to that world of the Globe and the competing theatres. I think that era of Marlowe and the Spies, I think that whole era is fascinating.

I certainly always loved that period. But things come to you in odd ways and odd times, and you can never anticipate it. And sometimes someone could be sitting there writing something right now that'll end up on my desk, and it won't always be like this one where i sat down and wrote it from scratch um and uh and i had the luck to be told it by by my grandfather so thank you very much indeed pleasure One child, one teacher, one book, and one pen can change the world. you