Originally, says Firth, his scene was yet more brutal: as the boys hurry off to almost certain death, an orderly unfurls a white linen tablecloth for the officer’s high tea. If the pair fail, 1,600 men – including Blake’s brother – will die. They must shin up the dugout, race across no man’s land (mind the barbed wire, gunfire, rats, craters and corpses), along the (abandoned, probably) enemy trenches, through a French countryside strewn with booby traps, then find an adjoining battalion and tell them to call off their dawn attack as they would be advancing into a trap. Two young lance corporals, Schofield (George MacKay) and Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) are hauled in front of their general (Colin Firth) and given a mission.
This film has one linear storyline and just one long shot – well, really a couple of dozen, invisibly stitched together by the cinematographer Roger Deakins. Both Bond movies were “chaos”, he says, making noises that indicate months-long logistical migraines, high-wire acts of placation and compromise. The film, 1917, is Mendes’s first since Skyfall and Spectre and clearly intended as an antidote to 007.
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At 34, Sam won the best director Oscar for his debut, American Beauty 20 years later, a movie inspired by Alfred’s stories may bag him another. “That image of that little man, cut adrift in that vast, misty landscape, really stayed with me.”Īfter the war, Alfred moved to Barbados, became a civil servant, wrote socialist novels and died in 1991, aged 94. His stories weren’t about bravery, but how utterly random it all was.” His small stature meant he was often chosen as a messenger. When he got to the western front, “he just couldn’t believe what he found.
He was also quite deaf, so he shouted them all.”Īlfred Mendes was 16 when he enlisted, excited at the chance to serve in a good war that was going so well. He was very theatrical and charismatic and Edwardian. And he told us loads and loads of stories, especially after a couple of rums. After five decades’ silence on the subject, “he finally cracked. He asked his grandfather, then in his mid-70s, to tell him more about the war. “It’s because he remembers the mud in the trenches,” he said, “and never being able to get clean.” W hen Sam Mendes was small, he would laugh at his grandfather’s habit of forever washing his hands.
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