The single-take WWI thriller required an army of collaborators, battling birds and clouds along the way.
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Since there could be no visible cuts, any mistake would mean starting from the beginning.
Mendess astounding technical achievement could not have been accomplished without an army of trusted collaborators.
Its like gymnastics, Deakins said.
Other people have made that movie, the blood and guts, Gassner says.
This is a story about integrity, the willingness to do anything even in the harshest conditions.
Of these, Salisbury Plain presented the most difficulties.
Normally with location movies, youre in and out in a couple of weeks, Pill says.
From start to finish, Pill was working on the locations for up to eight months.
I learned so much about soil, she said.
You have to put it back in a certain way.
If you just throw it in, therell be a certain amount of sinkage over the winter.
Even before digging into Englands pleasant pastures, one must take certain contingencies.
That included any three-thousand-year-old corpses that may have been lying around.
I had to get a license to exhume bodies, she recalled.
Obviously if they were modern bodies, youre calling the police.
But ancient bodies, you have to have a license to have permission to exhume them from the ground.
(They didnt find any, but its always good to stay prepared.)
The living presented nearly as much concern.
Working with local environmental groups, Pill had to ensure the production did not interfere with the animals habitats.
Certain puddles were cordoned off, for the safety of the shrimp.
Every jobs different, Pill said, laughing, but this one was extraordinarily different.
The birds comfort was ultimately not disturbed.
In fact, sometimes they gottoocomfortable.
Early in1917, the two soldiers stumble upon an abandoned farm.
But when the time came to dismantle the structure, the crew made an unfortunate discovery.
Pill cant blame the birds: It was the perfect barn in the middle of a perfect environment.
Theyre going to turn up next year and go, Hang on a minute, wheres our barn?
I have a very ambitious film.
But1917was to be his fifth movie with Mendes, his ninth with Roger Deakins.
The allure of the old team getting back together again was too strong.
He estimates that on1917, he walked an average of 12 miles a day.
Ive been doing yoga for 40 years, he says.
You have to be game-ready.
Suddenly, the weather rolled in.
Sam and I were sitting there nose-to-nose, trying to keep from blowing over.
This is fucking amazing.
We actually get to live this experience like this.
That was Gassners experience in miniature.
Every day was hard, he says, because you never knew what you were going to get.
But also it was an adventure, and there were no hard days.
You wake up and you go out and theres two feet of snow on everything youve built.
And you go,Well, shit, what are we going to do now?You start digging.
You figure out a way to solve the problem, because thats what the boys did back then.
(They decided to scale them up 8 percent.)
As it happens, Harriss hardest day on set for1917was the very first day of filming.
The movietakes place almost entirely outdoors, and those outdoor scenes are shot with natural light.
To ensure proper continuity, filming could only take place on cloudy days.
Roger said to me, I dont think were going to be filming today.
And I didnt really want to hear that, Harris said.
What they were accomplishing was fantastic, but we werentturning over, Harris recalled.
And I said, Oh, well, we actually havent turned over yet.
And that was of course not what the studio wants to hear on the first day of shooting.
That pattern continued through the end of the shoot.
That was hard to get used to.
It was quite disconcerting, to be honest, Harris says.
I love a stormy day walking on the cliffs down in Devon, he says.
Theres nothing better, really.
As a kid, he idly thought about studying meteorology at university.
Every day was like scheduling for the clouds, Deakins recalled.
(He recommends Dark Sky, in case the app is looking for a celebrity endorser.)
But even that was an imperfect method.
It was really frustrating.
But on a single-take set, we couldnt do that at all.
Sam always said to me, Its not your responsibility, dont worry about it, he recalled.
I said, its easy tosaythat.
It was much harder tofeelrelaxed about it.
Even worse than not shooting, would have been jumping the gun and shooting too soon.
The shot would have to be scrapped, and the whole machinery of production reset.
That would have been horrendous, he said.
You didnt want people to go through all that effort.
But I didnt want to shoot a shot I wasnt happy with.
It was a mixture of luck and skill.
I did calculate it on this cloud that was coming by, he says.
I really wanted that feeling of the sun rising.
The explosion [scenes], weve done that before, he says.
A sequence shot at Shepperton Studios gave Tuohy the chance to stretch his brain.
(As did the sound and effects teams, who were jogging alongside them.)
Then it goes completely black and youre running blind for a second or two.
Then the next flare goes off and you get your bearing again.
Oh, and to control the timing and color temperature, they also had to make the flares themselves.
They werent something you could buy off the shelves, Touhy explained.
We made them bespoke.
In all, Tuohy says, getting it right took doing the sequence 20 times, maybe more.
Though it was the most technically challenging assignment on the film, it was also his most unique accomplishment.
That was not an option on this particular film, says Cooke.
With the exception of one single beat, Cooke says, everything you see in the movie is George.
Dropping over a waterfall?
Getting completely buried under a pile of rubble?
Thats George MacKay, too.
But I was blessed with George and Dean.
Movies dont necessarily get made like that anymore, Cooke says.
They do crowd replication with VFX.
Everybody there was real.
(According to Tuohy, there were 18 explosions in each run.)
We took it in baby steps, Cooke says.
Making it work took constant communication.
I had everybody on the walkie-talkie.
Once it came time to actually shoot the sequence, the energy was palpable.
(Touhy says they did it in three.)
Its 500 people running into battle, so the crowds feed off each other.
The image becomes very big, Cooke said.
Producer Harris felt the same way about the day they completed the decisive sequence.
When I look back on that day it makes me feel slightly frightened, she says.
Its like goosebumps of fear, because it was logistically just a huge challenge.
