Golden Globes Best Director and Best Picture Winner Sam Mendes Talks ‘1917’

NOTE: This interview discusses in detail several story elements of the upcoming motion picture, 1917, written and directed by Sam Mendes.  If you’ve seen the film, you can read our review here.  UPDATE – 5 January 2020:  The film won Best Director and Best Picture, Drama, at the 77th Annual Golden Globes Awards.  The Universal Pictures release, which opened in select markets December 25, expands nationwide January 10, 2020.

An accomplished theatrical and motion picture director and producer, Sam Mendes now brings to screen his first self-authored film.  Based on stories related to him by his grandfather, author Alfred Mendes, 1917 depicts a harrowing journey across eight miles through No Man’s Land in a pocket of Northern France, 20km southeast of Arras, where one of the bloodiest battles of World War I is about to erupt.

Recently, I had the opportunity to discuss with Mr. Mendes his Best Picture/Director winner of the Dallas-Ft. Worth Film Critics Association Awards.  Opening in select theaters on December 25 and wider in January, critics laud its striking cinematography—giving the appearance of a single, unbroken take (albeit with seamless stops/edits).  Technique aside, I wanted to explore the richness of the story, characters, and their motivations.

CL: In what ways do you aspire to re-define what we expect from a war movie? 1917 is a little different in that it’s about avoiding a costly battle.

SM: I don’t think there are many war movies that are about people trying to stop fighting, rushing to stop fighting.  I don’t think you ever start by thinking, “I’m going to redefine a genre.”  You avoid the big statements.  What you want to do is tell a story where the central characters are vulnerable in some way.   For me, the big shift with SKYFALL was the fact that I was being allowed to make a Bond that was aging and vulnerable, and allowed time to enter the Bond franchise for the first time.  For the first time, M dies.  And that alone, rather than the sort of airbrushing that goes on, normally, where one Bond disappears and the next movie, suddenly, he looks different and no one ever mentions it!

I was pushing very hard to make him vulnerable.  I felt like there’s a human being here and we need to try and remember how complex the character was when created by Fleming.  That had become narrowed in the franchise to the point where Bond was the constant.  Everyone else was changing.  Bond was just the static figure in the middle of it raising an eyebrow and going, “Shaken not stirred.”

CL: Fleming described Bond as this sort of ordinary man with extraordinary things happening around him.

SM: Yes. I always felt that Bond was an antihero, that you love him for his foibles.   You know that he’s a womanizer, a drinker.  You know he’s a smoker in the novels.  He’s amoral in many ways, immoral in others.  So those are the things that- that’s where you get drawn to him.  There’s darkness in him and I thought that was always interesting.

With this movie I was really conscious of trying to tell a story about two men amongst two million. I felt like I wanted them at the beginning—it sounds counterintuitive, but—to not feel special in a way, for their heroism to be accidental if we encountered it in the movie.  I was also conscious—in the sort of canon of World War I stories/fiction/movies, the repeated pattern of stories abut the First World War—of stories of stasis.  That’s because ninety-nine percent of the experiences of this war were static.  It’s a war of paralysis… trenches, No Man’s Land, that’s basically it.  Hundreds of thousands of men dying fighting over 200 yards worth of land.

CL: Is that stasis why you think more movies aren’t made about the First World War?

SM:  I do.  I also think that in the twentieth century movies were governed by the tastes of the American public.  [They] did not have as much of a stake in World War I as they did in World War II.  And so, because of the lack of American presence, there was that.  Plus visually it doesn’t present much options.  So, for me, the key… was in unlocking a journey, that took us out of the expected landscapes of that war and into something completely different.

CL: According to Canadian historian Mark Humphries, 1916-1917 marked a change in British Expeditionary Forces tactics, from fixed bayonet line attacks to tactical deployments of small groups concentrated around heavy artillery, as a response to the overwhelming force of mechanized warfare never seen before.   The men of Company D are about to walk into exactly such a trap, and Schofield plays to Mackenzie’s ego by shifting away from “these are orders” to telling him the Germans already know, i.e. they’re outsmarting you.  Captain Smith’s forewarning sets up Mackenzie as some kind of foolhardy jerk, but here when we finally meet him, he shows some sense.  What was Mackenzie like in the off-camera cutaway in your head?

SM: I think there was a kind of narrative pressure to create a baddie in the movie.  There was a pressure to make Mackenzie into this sort of Kurtzian figure, who’d gone rogue.  And was, in his insanity, his madness, sending men over the top, knowingly, to their death.  And I didn’t want that.  What I wanted was for Mackenzie to be as lost in the fog of war as everybody else, and to be doing what he thinks is right in the circumstances.

The reason I have Mark Strong say that line about, “You know some men just want the fight. Make sure there are witnesses,” is because I wanted audiences to not know, when he stumbles into that dugout at the end, whether he’s going to take the orders or not.

So, for me the war is a horrific mixture… a kind of perfect storm of, on the one hand, immense technical developments during the course of the war, that started with horses and carts and ended with tanks and machine guns.  At the same time [there is] no commensurate development in communications.  So you could shoot a man with a machine gun at a thousand yards but you couldn’t communicate with him at twenty yards. And that awful combination of the two things created this sense of paralyzed fear—this sense that you just didn’t know what was happening a hundred yards away.

The movie starts with the General telling them the Germans have gone.  The enemy have gone.  Two hundred yards later, they meet another officer played by Andrew Scott, playing Lieutenant Leslie.  He says, “No they haven’t.”  And the men don’t know [whom] to believe and neither does the audience.  To me that puts the audience in the shoes of… it gives a direct recreation of the blindness that was felt by everyone within this war.  And that, in a way, is also what’s behind the one-shot technique: put the audience in a position where they too are blind to what’s up ahead—don’t know the truth, don’t know the reality.  That was what it was like, fighting in this war.

CL: Schofield approximates it’ll take six to eight hours to get a message roughly nine miles to the front southeast of Arras.   What do you want younger generations to take away about a time and place in which instantaneous, worldwide communications didn’t exist?

SM:  I want them to understand the nature of this war is very different from what we have now.  I want them to feel what it might be like to sacrifice for something bigger than yourself.  That’s not something we’re big on at the moment.  We are a fundamentally selfish culture.  That’s our great good fortune.  We were lucky enough to be born in peacetime so we don’t have to consider such things.

But I also, I suppose, want to create or construct a scenario in which you don’t have to know anything about the First World War, to step into the world and to understand its rules.

So that was very important to me. It’s a contemporary piece of filmmaking, contemporary cinematic techniques—sound, music, surround sound, to make a big screen experience that communicates to you viscerally what the war was like, rather than intellectually.

CL: It’s fascinating how you use landscapes, facades, to effect transitions.  How did you work with Thomas Newman to use the score to punctuate and keep the single take approach engaging?

SM: We both felt like it was unlike any movie we’ve made before.  It was partly that it’s very present tense and that music can sometimes distance an audience and sometimes comment on something, but I didn’t want it commented on.  So a lot of the scoring in the movie is a sort of low grade tension and indefinable.  And then it goes through stages where it becomes a much more expressionistic thing.  You know, where he wakes up at night, and he’s somehow lost himself, doesn’t know where he’s going, doesn’t know the time any more.  It becomes hallucinatory, surreal. And the score echoes that in some way, expands on that.

But there’s another significant issue.  When you don’t edit, you no longer have the opportunity to control pacing, rhythm and tempo after the event.  There’s nothing you can do about that.  But you can introduce those ideas of pace, rhythm, tempo, musically.  So it’s a pivotal part of storytelling—the score that runs along side the image.

CL: What cements that decision for a director to want to open up something so personal to the world? Maybe it’s different for a director like you.

SM: No.  I think there are lots of stories from my family that I wouldn’t want to open up, but this is not his story.  This is not about my grandfather, so I don’t feel like I’m exposing anything.  I feel like my fascination with the war comes from the stories that he told me.  And the image that was pivotal in the creation of the story was the image of him carrying a message through No Man’s Land on his own. Through the mist, in that tiny man, in that vast landscape, that was the germ for this movie that grew into- when I asked myself what if that man just carried on, and had to carry his message further.  But George is not playing my grandfather you know it’s a different thing so I don’t feel like I’m exposing in a way any personal history particularly.

So that wasn’t difficult. But having said that, writing it and it being based on a family story made me feel more vulnerable about it.  You know, you feel more exposed.  It takes a long time to get to the point where you feel confident enough to do that with your own work. I’ve never even tried before to write a screenplay that I wanted to make.  So it was all novel, as far as I’m concerned it felt new.

CL: You’ve worked a lot in theatre, and continue to do that in parallel to your film career.  How does that experience inform the style of the storytelling?

SM: I don’t think… well, you never know how your influences come to bear, are brought to bear, on the material. You only know how you see the world.  But for me, I’m pretty familiar with the idea of rehearsing the material for a long time and then letting the actors tell the story without recourse to editing.  So I’m not unused to two hours of story with no editorial choices at all, and controlling rhythm, and tempo, and pace, you know—without cutting out, without editing. So for me that was a big part of it.  I use a lot of that part of my brain, I think, in trying to construct the shape and the rhythm of the story. On the other hand, [film] operates totally unlike theater in every other respect because it’s constantly moving, and it’s constantly changing its relationship between the camera and the characters.  So in a sense the movie breathes in and breathes out.  There’s never one consistent rleationship between the two.  Which—of course—onstage, isn’t the case in theater.  You’re in the same relationship with the actors the whole evening.

And, of course, conditions are changing.  There are unknowns: the light changes, animals, babies, accidents, and landscape—which you’re not dealing with in theater.  So it was both unlike and familiar to, similar to, theater.

CL: Did you always envision the film as a continuous shot?

SM: Yes. I did.  Once it was clear it was two hours of real time, I felt the best way to lock the audience into that experience with the men was to not cut.

CL: Was it Firth’s idea to quote Kipling’s “The Winners?”

SM: Firth’s idea?  Good god no!  *uproarious laughter*

Every line is written.  No… that was me.  But I felt like he had to justify why… he was asking just two men, and I think he had a reason: that it’s quicker and it’s safer to travel on your own.

CL: That comes, to me, hand in hand with the fact that the roles become reversed.  Erinmore motivates Blake with the fear of knowing that his brother might die. Then, the opposite happens.

SM: That’s well put.

CL: Any personal significance to “The Wayfaring Stranger?”

SM:  No. it’s a song I love really and it was based on a first person account when I was researching.  A soldier who stumbled into the woods and observed another solider playing on a piano looted from a French farmhouse—playing Debussy’s Nocturne, with other soldiers surrounding him.  He was struck dumb by the sound beause he realized a. how beautiful the music was and b. he hadn’t heard music for two years, and he didn’t realize until that moment how much he’d missed it.    And I thought, “What a beautiful scene!  Is there a way to factor something like that into our movie?”

CL: You hear it faintly in the distance.  It’s so bizarre because you’ve been in the hell of war the whole time, as the character and the viewer.

SM: Exactly.  So and then it became the song which has another set of meanings in its lyrics.  I felt it somehow spoke too me.  I’ve always loved that song and there’s a very artociuarly beautiful version of it sung by Andreas Scholl.  We did our own simpler version of it.

CL: Canterbury Tales, Arthurian Legend, Lord of the Rings… England has these stories purposed at rallying around a sense of national identity and pride.  When putting together your grandfather’s stories, how do you carry or deal with the weight of the monomyth?

SM: It does shift from something perhaps naturalistic to something more mythic at a certain point.  When it goes to night and it’s kind of a descent into hell at that point.  You could read that as a sort of Dante-sque journey through the various circles of Hell.  Then he struggles back across the river Styx and up the slope back into life again.  So I was aware that there was reaching for something on a more unconscious level, but I don’t think I ever consciously constructed a myth, no.

CL:  All that remains of World War I are the documentaries and stories reconstructed from accounts of those who lived through it, and now they’re gone.  What are your thoughts on Disney’s shuttering of Fox’s repertory distribution and its impact on people’s understanding, comprehension and engagement with cinema and, by extension, cultural history.  What are the dangers of living in a world of perpetual reboots, remakes, franchises, and sequels?

SM:  I think it’s a mixture of things, really.  It would be deeply, kind of, odd of me having made two giant franchise movies before this film to come out and say I don’t love that form.  I do love that form. It’s very good.  I love BLACK PANTHER.  I love GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY.  I have no problem with large scale, commercial moviemaking.  The issue is choice, choice in cinemas.  You have an enormous amount of choice at home. Television’s stronger than it’s ever been, in my opinion.  We are in a pretty healthy position in many ways.

The problem is that we’re still stuck in a model where we imagine that because someone has made a two-hour film, it therefore would follow that it gets a guaranteed release in a cinema.  And that is gone; no question about that.  Now, the movies that get released in cinemas and that have a chance up against superheros, franchises, and animated films, are movies that demand to be seen on the big screen.  So it kind falls to the filmmakers who have the ability and the power to do that, to continue to try to make films, if they can, that need to be seen on the big screen.  Use the bells and whistles of what’s available to you as a filmmaker in the contemporary landscape.

For me, you want the audience thinking they’re missing something if they don’t see it on the big screen.  If the audience does not feel that, then they won’t see it on the big screen.  Then they’ll see it at home.  And I’ve made a bunch of movies that, frankly, would be perfectly fine now if I were to have made [them] for Netflix.  And that’s just the way the landscape has changed.  I don’t have a problem with that.  The issue is ambition.  I think you have to be ambitious to tell these stories on a big screen, and to make it worthwhile for people parting their $15 or $20—or whatever-it-is—and going to see it in these cinemas.  We’ve constructed these palaces for ourselves.  And I’m not talking about increased comfort.  I’m talking about IMAX, And Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, and 7.1 surround sound, and sound that moves the ground underneath you.  Why would you not want to go there and see movies?  Why would you not want to use them to the fullest degree?

But I think some of the movies that I’ve made and might make in the future now probably don’t earn the right to be in the cinema.  They’re fine seen on a smaller screen.  I think it’s just a question of making sure that choice is always available.  But I’m pretty positive about it at the moment.   I think it’s not unhealthy.