Boxoffice Pro - January 2020

DIRECTOR SAM MENDES [CENTER] ON THE SET OF 1917 WITH DEAN-CHARLES CHAPMAN AND GEORGE MACKAY
I want to ask about your emotions as
you embark on a project like this. Do you
have a lot of apprehension, or is there
great joy in doing it?
Oh, I feel immense joy in doing it. I
feel very privileged and, particularly with
this one, I’d never had the experience of
sitting in a room writing a script before,
and then only months later turning up
to set and there are hundreds of people
there to help you fulfill the vision that you
put on the page. There are upsides and
downsides of having written it oneself.
The downside is you feel very vulnerable,
much more vulnerable than I normally
feel about my own directorial work.
The upside is a different level of
emotional connection to the material.
The highs are higher and the lows are
a bit lower. And that’s what I found on
this. But I was never apprehensive. I was
excited. I knew there would be bad days,
which there were when you’re dealing in
extremes of location and weird weather
and impossibly complex, technical,
ambitious, high bars that you create for
yourself. I mean, there were days when I
thought, why have I done this to myself?
This is a sort of mental torture, because
in a normal movie, if you do a six-minute
or seven-minute take, you never expect
to get it entirely perfect. You use bits of
it—you have the close-ups, and then you
might have a master shot and you might
have an over-the-shoulder shot and then
you put ’em all together. On the bad days
I thought, why have I put myself in a
situation where there’s no way out? But
when you get it, the level of exhilaration
is so extreme that you want more. It’s like
catching the big wave. You fear it, but
when you’re on it, it’s amazing. And then
you want to do it again.
I read that you were hoping for some
happy accidents while filming. Can you
point to a few happy accidents?
Oh, in every take there are moments
when one of the actors does something
unexpected or the light does something.
My favorite, I suppose, is the last shot of
the movie. I wanted the sun to come out,
and it did during the shot. Roger said,
look, I can do lots of things, but I can’t
organize for the sun to come out. But it
came out. I felt like someone was looking
down on us.
I loved making a movie almost entirely
outside—you’re more at one with the
physical reality of being in that war. I
mean, what we did was a drop in the
fucking ocean compared to what the men
of the First World War did. But just to
state the obvious, when you get on that
mud, you can’t stand up; you keep falling
over. And it doesn’t matter how many
things you put on your feet, mountaineering
equipment, this, that, and the other,
you can’t keep your balance. And these
men lived in it for years; they lived in it
for fucking years, the filth. Every night
getting in the shower, washing the mud
off, [I] thought, how lucky am I to get a
warm shower? That stuff is sobering, and
it brings home the reality of it. And I can
honestly say no one ever complained on
this movie, because how can you complain
when the real people went through
it for years, and we’re just doing it for a
couple of weeks, you know?
How does your background in theater
help you with a project like this?
It helped me a lot. It helped me a lot
in staging, in trying to judge rhythm
without editing, and the arc of the whole
story, knowing that it was going to be
one piece, and I had to establish that
while we were shooting it rather than in
the cutting room. For me, the best point
of a play is when you get it to the stage
where you look at your cast and say, it’s
yours now, you learned how to fly, now
you have to take off, and then you let
them do it. And that happened again
and again on this movie. I had to let the
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