Long Shot

1917 I Sam Mendes’ World War 1 epic plunges viewers into the Western Front – in one unbroken take.

It was always one shot in my head,” explains Sam Mendes, “two hours of real-time.” Enjoying a cuppa with Teasers in his Soho office, he’s talking about his blistering new World War 1-set film, 1917, a staggering achievement that even bamboozled none other than Steven Spielberg, whose Amblin outfit co-produced it. “When he saw it, he said, ‘There are some shots, I need to know… how?’”

It’s been an idea Mendes has toyed with for years, encouraged by tales told by his grandfather, Alfred Mendes, of his time serving in Flanders. “There’s a fragment of one story – he was given a message to carry. He was given several actually. And it’s what happened to him on this journey, in my grandad’s case a quite different journey [to what happens in the film] although there are some similarities. That was the little kernel for this.”

1917 tells of two young soldiers – Schofield (George MacKay) and Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) – sent across no man’s land to convey a vital missive to prevent 1,600 British troops falling into an ambush. But it only became a reality when Mendes discovered that in the year the film is set, the Germans strategically retreated to the Hindenburg Line. “For 72 hours or more the British troops did not know where they’d gone.”

It’s this pocket of time that allows the two soldiers to leave the trenches, which was a rarity in a famously static war where “nobody moved, for literally years”. With this in mind, Mendes decided he wanted to film it with a series of long unbroken takes, inspired by the Mexico-set opening he shot for James Bond effort SPECTRE. “That gave me courage – that maybe we can take that and extend it for the entire [runtime of the] movie.”