- You have a brother in the second battalion.
- Yes sir.
- [Officer] They're walking into a trap.
Your orders are to deliver a message,
calling off tomorrow morning's attack.
If you fail, we will lose 1,600 men.
- Dean-Charles Chapman and George MacKay,
I have a question for you guys.
What was the big draw for '1917'
when you guys were approached to be in the project?
- Working with Sam was the main thing,
and his vision for the film was, you know,
especially this
- It seems bonkers how this was filmed.
What was that like for you guys?
- But yeah, I mean, we did a lot of
rehearsals day in, day out for months
from November to April when we started shootin'.
- When we were making the film, as much as possible,
So we had hundreds of men on set
and those explosions, everything was done,
It was a real, exciting thing to feel that
as we were doing it.
It's like a dance with the camera and set
where Sam was like a master at working out
the rhythm of things before hand.
So you know, you can't change the pace of a scene
like you can when you're editing a film,
usually with lots of different coverage.
And so yeah as Dean says, we worked and worked and worked
about kind of finessing what the rhythm would be.
- Is it harder as an actor to shoot things this way?
- It was beneficial for me as an actor
because I found it, it allowed us
Like the scenes would last for a number of minutes long
and you just find yourself being lost in the scene.
- Acting I think, in its essence,
is to kind of know the technicality
and all the sort of mechanics of it so well
that then you sort of forget about it
and hopefully do and make something completely real.
And it's sort of having to be so technically aware
for so long and then as Dean says,
you just kinda let go of that.
- Are you guys still so deeply immersed
or were you able to kind of have a laugh after shooting?
- There was one scene in particular with me,
the first time we shot it,
And it was really really tough.
And it stayed with me, we talked about it
like a long time after we finished shootin'.
- We should put him out of his misery.
- No, get him some water.
He needs water.
- And the thing is with a story,
this stuff actually happened to these people years ago.
- When you guys were doing research,
what were some of the things that affected you most?
- I think the thing that sort of took me by surprise
I mean like, the majority of 'em
were my age, I'm 22, younger.
And like, then we went to see the real soldiers' graves
and lookin' at their graves and you think, bloomin' hell,
like what a sacrifice these have done, you know.
You hardly grew up and you know,
- I'm 27 and I would have been relatively old
amongst the men and I think in this modern day
when you're surrounded by comfort,
it's sort of almost like takes longer
to sort of suss out what your values are because, as again,
you're not faced with those extremes.
There's, it's a beautiful thing that we're surrounded
by so much choice always, and so yeah,
to see these lives were ended so early is heartbreaking.
- Why do you think, you know, we're still so interested
in telling stories from World War I era?
- I think you really get to know yourself in life
when you've gone through something extreme,
when there's something bigger than you yourself.
It teaches a lot about you and I think that's why war
is an example of that, where you're in this extreme
and everything has been turned upside down
So I don't know if it's necessarily the first World War
as the history per se, but it's that kind of
extreme looking at ourselves
that we keep going back to I think.
- What lessons are there to still be learned?
- You know, there's many lessons of you know,
to do with the war and you know, the decisions being made
often times by people who weren't in the immediate,
you know, physically sort of
where a lot of the men were fighting and so therefore,
you don't have that understanding
and decisions aren't being made with a fully rounded view
of what the situation is and what that means
to do the things that those men were being asked to do.
- Why should people see this movie?
It made me very clear
about the people who I love in my life are.
And I didn't really expect that from watching it, but I,
you know, I called a few people afterwards
because there's something bigger to it.
There's something, there's a very simple story of, you know,
these men delivering a message,
So, yeah, that's why.