Making the film
How did your script for The Somme come about?
The script was a Channel 4 commission. My collaboration with Mark Hayhurst came about because we'd worked together before – in 2004, on a BBC series called If..., a programme about preventing violent offenders by intervening when they're young. His docu-drama on the IRA bombing campaign, The Year London Blew Up: 1974, has just been screened on Channel 4. He's a great writer and documentary is his forte, so we worked very hard and very quickly, just a couple of months starting in February 2005, on putting the Somme script together.
Scene from The Somme
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I can't say that I'd always wanted to make a film about the First World War, but once I began to research it, I was hooked. Obviously, when it started, the war was seen as a patriotic adventure. But by the 1930s, it had come to be seen as a futile endeavour in which millions of young men were slaughtered by uncaring politicians and stupid generals. The Somme in particular became a byword for horror.
Recently, however, the battle has been reassessed by military historians, and some now see it as a success, an event that changed the course of history. The point of the offensive was to wear German reserves down, and it successfully took the pressure off the French at Verdun. Its main failure was that it didn't get the war moving, and it took another two years of trench warfare before the final breakthrough. But you have to ask yourself if the price – the huge sacrifice of men – was really worth it.
I've always been a film obsessive but I came to directing through the back door. I did a degree in English at Leeds University in 1986, and I worked in theatre as a student, then became a journalist. I was freelancing for publications such as Arena and the Sunday Times magazine when I got my first job in television, as a researcher on Channel 4's scurrilous The Word in 1991.
What research did you do for the film?
We looked at everything we could get our hands on. We started with secondary sources such as Martin Middlebrook's The First Day on the Somme (written in 1971) and Malcolm Brown's The Imperial War Museum Book of the Somme (written in 1996). These books form an interesting contrast because while Middlebrook based much of his material on interviews with survivors of the Somme, men in their late 70s, Brown's book focused on their letters and diaries written at the time. He said to me he felt it was important to hear the voices of men who died in the battle. This material is refreshing – it has none of the bitterness and cynicism of hindsight. It has irony, sarcasm, vulgarity, but not retrospective knowledge.
Scene from The Somme
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Few of the participants seem to have been rampant patriots or xenophobes. In 1914, Richard H Tawney, the Oxford University man, was a Christian Socialist involved in the Workers' Association in Rochdale. He joined the Manchester Pals and chose to serve in the ranks. Despite being a socialist, he was happy to fight in defence of Belgium, France and Empire. Many of the volunteers had a similarly strong sense of their duty.
These men were not naïve, nor were they sheep. And if there was one thing that really blew me away it was the idea that most of the men involved in the Somme were volunteers. There was a strong moral sense and a collective sense of duty, which we don't see much today. There's a sense of mutual responsibility and also of individual resilience. It was really touching to read their letters and diaries.