Making the film
Where did you shoot the film?
Scene from The Somme
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We wanted to shoot it in France, but, because of the scale of the Somme, the costs were much too high. That's a shame because I'm a great believer in getting a sense of place. I directed a film on the Wright Brothers' first flight for the BBC's Days That Shook the World, and we shot it in North Carolina, on the same beach and, by complete coincidence, on the same day as the original flight – there's something very special about using the right place.
That said, if you go to the Somme countryside today, it doesn't look like it did in 1916: the big change being the hundreds of military cemeteries, and modern agribusiness has remodelled the landscape. So we chose Poland. In Poland, we found meadows and pastureland that looks like Picardy in 1916, and we could afford a much more ambitious production in terms of costumes, extras and so on.
We shot the film in three weeks – 18 days in the first three weeks of July – which was pretty gruelling. We were working 11-12 hours a day. We also shot some night scenes – the Manchester Pals got to their forward trenches at about 4am and had to wait three-and-a-half hours before the battle started.
What was the hardest thing about directing?
The schedule. We were outside for most of the time, with extremes of heat, rain and ferocious midges. We had to manage big set-piece battles, which were physically demanding for the actors. We had 100 extras in costume, some passing out from heat exhaustion. Having 50 men walking around with fixed bayonets was something of a health and safety anxiety – and there were some big pyrotechnics, squibs and so on. In fact, it's great that we didn't suffer any injuries.
When casting the film, we didn't search for actors who resembled old photographs of the actual characters. Instead we were looking for actors who embodied the personality – the feeling – of the person. Patrick Kennedy, who's been hailed as the new Jonny Lee Miller, plays Sergeant Tawney, the Christian Socialist with his pipe. Ed Stoppard plays Captain May. For the Manchester Pals, I asked a group of actors to read the same letter written by Patrick Burke, in which he describes going through the trenches and killing unarmed, surrendering Germans. We then rewrote the script with the people we'd cast in mind. So Ray Waring became Lance-Corporal Sidney McCoy.
Scene from The Somme
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We had a very strong cast who were attracted by the material. On the shoot, we played it straight – no silly voices – even if that meant there was a mix of accents. Greg Wearing, for example, is from Cheshire – he doesn't have a deep Mancunian accent, but it's near enough. I wanted to avoid the artificiality of much costume drama.
The worst moment was in the third week when the whole shoot was washed away by a huge thunderstorm. I was shooting a scene with Cyril Jose (Oliver Jones) crossing No Man's Land under heavy fire and suddenly these black clouds covered the sky. We tried to put up lights, but suddenly there was this hot wind like a blast furnace opening and we abandoned the set just as the heavens opened. It was like a monsoon. As we drove back to Warsaw, the roads were blocked by fallen trees.
During another cloudburst, we were shooting a scene in a German trench with an extra, a real amputee who was playing a casualty with both legs blown off. He was a old guy, who'd lost his legs in an industrial accident and was having a great time as an extra, being fussed over by make-up girls, who made his stumps look gory. When the rain started, we didn't want to have to reset the shot so we covered him up with a tarpaulin and he puffed away on his cigarettes.
At the end of the first week of the shoot, I turned 40 and, for my birthday, I was presented with a German revolver by the Polish costume department. Might be useful against hostile critics: they say the pen is mightier than the sword, but what about the revolver?
Carl Hindmarch is a writer and director. His work includes The Power of Art: Caravaggio (BBC2, 2006), If... We Could Stop the Violence (BBC2, 2004), The Four Minute Mile (BBC2, 2004), Days That Shook the World (BBC2, 2003) and Pump Up the Volume (Channel 4, 2001)