Pulling off1917was not easy; planning it, perhaps, even harder.
The film only started shooting in April, astonishingly, before screenings began in November.
Read on below, and take a listen to our fullAwardistepisode at the bottom of this article.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Let’s start with the genesis of this movie, Sam.
But it’s also much more moving when it happens.
But when the writer is you, you feel very thin-skinned about it.
I was checking my email every 10 minutes to see if they’d read it.
But at the same time, it’s also much more moving when it happens.
That was, on several unexpected occasions, very moving.
He told me when I was a small child and he was in his 70s.
The telling of those stories brought everyone together in this giant, slightly crazy endeavor.
I knew also in my gut that he might think it was a gimmick.
I wanted him to understand that it wasn’t.
But I knew I would have to justify it when I talked to him.
How did you feel when you read it, Roger?
ROGER DEAKINS:Sam didn’t say anything.
[I thought], “There must be a mistake.”
MENDES:[Laughing]Surely some mistake.
DEAKINS:Surely some mistake!
I don’t like gimmicks.
I don’t like trickery with a camera.
I want the camera to be totally forgotten, in a way, when you look at a movie.
We didn’t want you to be aware of that.
I wasn’t aware after a few minutes, I’d forgotten about it as well.
I thought, “Then that’s working.”
MENDES:We both agreed that we didn’t want it to be self-advertising.
If you become aware of the camera, then you’ve failed.
You don’t want them thinking about what it’s doing.
It doesn’t showboat.
It doesn’t go through a keyhole or follow a moving bullet or pass through a wall.
It doesn’t defy the laws of physics.
Sometimes it operates almost like a horror movie in that it won’t show you what’s up ahead.
It’s like looking through a tiny keyhole on a vast expanse.
The choice to do it was about connecting the audience to the characters emotionally.
I think that was really good, especially in the trenches.
There’s no way out.
You’re not giving the audience a wide shot over here so they can relax for a minute.
You’re stuck with these characters and the world they’re in.
Let’s not think about mechanics yet.
Let’s not think about the ‘How,’ but the ‘Why.'"
Why is the camera there?
What do we want to see?
At one point do we want to hand off from one character to another?
At what point do we want to see what they’re seeing?
They were all choices based in character and story.
Those decisions were rehearsed, too.
We rehearsed those shots to see if it was the right rig.
Sometimes we changed quite close to the moment.
Gradually, you begin to develop a style.
You have no physical structure around you to dictate where the camera has to move.
you’re free to literally move anywhere.
You then have to make a determination about what the correct style is.
That helped us then really develop the style for the rest of the movie.
How do you segue from one character to the other?
It was a really interesting process.
But that wasn’t the case in this.
We had to work it out in advance of the sets being built.
we’ve made, this is the one that we changed the least on the day.
These are long takes and all sorts of weird things happen when you’re able to’t plan them.
But what the camera was doing very rarely changed from what we had rehearsed.
And you were working on a pretty tight schedule, correct?
You started filming in April, which I cannot believe.MENDES:Yeah.
[Laughs]
DEAKINS:That made the prep even more crucial.
Obviously, one of the big unknowns was the weather.
We needed to shoot it in clouds, or the exteriors.
We needed to have our shots worked out, the equipment worked out.
The pressure there, I found it quite enormous.
I can imagine.DEAKINS:I don’t want to do it again.
[Both laugh] It’s all coming back now.
MENDES:He’s getting post-traumatic!
You just keep going until you find the solution.
That’s what you have in the existing relationship.
You know you’ve got it.
It’s an instinct.
On some of the best days we had on this movie, we barely spoke.
DEAKINS:I won’t take that personally.
[Both laugh]
MENDES:He wouldn’t come out of his van, what can I say?
[Laughs] But you’re so in sync and you so know what you’re looking for.
When you get it, you don’t even have to say it.
That’s what comes from working together before.
Also we’ve done movies of different styles.
DEAKINS:Very different, yeah.
Not because it was a war movie.
It was very different [in] how we shot it we didn’t rehearse, we just shot.
MENDES:And the fluidity of it.
The sense that within this constantly moving shot was something quite precise.
What does James Brown say?
Keep it loose, but keep it tight.
It’s that combination of structure and freedom that you’re searching for.
That’s not unfamiliar to me from the theater.
They’re your characters.
It’s your scene."
And then just watch what happens.
Roger, getting the look of this film broadly what kind of research did you do?
You’ve done war films before.
Sam was surprised I didn’t put any lights up and it’s only just these two oil lamps.
So when a camera comes around, the balance of the light changes with dimmers and all that.
Even the little things, it was a lot of detail to it.
The essence of it had to look real.
[Both laugh] They’re period flashlights.
In that respect, it’s changing and morphing the whole time.
DEAKINS:And it’s deliberately surreal when we get to the destroyed town.
That was very specifically meant to feel like a dream-stroke nightmare, more like a noirish kind of look.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
The Golden Globes just proved it
