Making the film
How did you choose the characters for the film?
Most of them chose themselves. Their letters or diaries are so alive that their personalities just jumped out at you. The material was amazing: people like Charlie May, an aspiring journalist on the Manchester Evening News, writing vivid letters to his wife. And the stories of these people are amazing. Cyril Jose, of the 2nd Devonshires, lies about his age to join up. He says he's 18 when in fact he was just short of his 17th birthday. He's wounded on the first day of the Somme, but stays on to fight for two more years – growing increasingly cynical. By the war's end, he's a Marxist.
Scene from The Somme
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We also spent time at the Imperial War Museum, and Malcolm Brown was our guide through their incredible collection of letters, diaries and memoirs. He has a great feel for the material and he led us, for example, to Cyril Jose, the boy soldier. Because of May and Tawney, we chose to focus on the Manchester Pals, and that led us to Arthur Burke and Albert Andrews. They were not in the same battalions, but they were all Manchester Pals.
We also thought it was important to reflect the French and German experience. And that was a lot harder. For the Germans and French, the Somme was nowhere near as significant a battle, so we had to dig around a bit. But we went to the Somme museum at Peronne and found Jean Fraisse and Charles Barberon's letters and diaries – both had very interesting stories.
Barberon was an eloquent school teacher – a natural poet philosopher with a dry sense of humour – and Fraisse had the misfortune to originally be turned down by the French army as unfit – only to be called up to fight two years later, so it shows how desperate they were by 1916.
The German character, Franz Cassell, is interesting because he's a Jewish architecture student, fighting for the Kaiser, while Eversmann was an unwilling conscript thrown into this 'hellstorm'.
The premiss of this film is that everything in it is true. And everybody in it is based on a real-life character. We didn't make anything up; we used only the words from their letters and diaries. It was a heavy responsibility because we were dealing with real people's lives. We sought permission from all the surviving relatives, and most were delighted that the material would reach a wider audience.
What was the hardest thing to do in the script?
The hardest thing was combining the documentary truth with a large number of points of view while keeping a dramatic story going. It was also very hard to edit the material that these guys wrote because it was all interesting. There's a temptation to take the path of Ken Burns, who made the American Civil War series, where he had actors simply reading from memoirs, diaries and letters. The result was quite hypnotic, but we wanted to dramatise the material, and convey the experience as it happened.
The material is so powerful that it connects you 90 years back in time to the people who experienced that battle. We really wanted their voices to come across without any journalistic gloss. But we were also interested in giving a general context about how and why the Somme happened as it did.
We didn't include some famous incidents from the battle, like the rum drinking or Captain Neville kicking a football across No Man's Land during the attack, because these didn't happen to our characters. We kept the script as disciplined as possible.