Making the film
Fly over the Battle of the Somme – computer-generated animation from the film (requires Windows Media Player)
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Find out more about the real people on whom the characters in The Somme drama are based
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The Somme, a Channel 4 film screened on 11 November 2005, was written by Mark Hayhurst and Carl Hindmarch, and produced and directed by Carl Hindmarch, who talks here to Aleks Sierz.
When did you become interested in the First World War?
I'm 40 years old, and anyone my age with a grandfather was aware of the First World War. My grandfather on my father's side (Edwin Austin Hindmarch) volunteered with three of his mates in 1914, and served in the Durham Light Infantry. I think there was a fourth lad with them who wanted to go, but his mum wouldn't let him. Edwin was a signalman who fought in the Battle of Loos in 1915, but not on the Somme. He never talked about it afterwards. That reticence seems to have been very common. Some survivors clearly felt betrayed after the war, some became bitter, and a silence fell over the whole experience.
I was born in 1965, and while growing up I was conscious of seeing war memorials commemorating the dead. At the time I felt they somehow glorified war. I didn't know then that they were actually paid for by local communities needing a focus to grieve for their sons and husbands. As a teenager, I remember being gripped on Sunday evenings by the World at War series [on ITV, first shown in 1974], which was a knockout documentary about the Second World War.
Scene from The Somme
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It brought history into the realm of the personal, which is what really fascinates me. The narration was by Laurence Olivier; there'd be a reel of documentary film, followed by an old man in a chair saying: 'Well, of course, this is how it felt.' And I thought that was a great way of bringing history to life. Very powerful.
Our film is a drama-documentary using the exact words of people who experienced the Somme. We also used archive – primarily extracts from the official cinematographer Geoffrey Malins's film. He shot it over a few days during the early stages of the battle and it was groundbreaking. It was in August 1916 and the War Office had recently relaxed censorship – it's incredibly graphic, with scenes of trench warfare, the wounded and dead – and audiences flocked to see it. The real Battle of the Somme was still raging.
Using original footage enhances the drama. If you watch those vintage films in silence, with their very long takes and wonky camera work, they feel very dry. But if you take out a scene and splice it into a modern dramatic film, it really comes alive.