I really don’t like being on set with the actors filming.
Oh, that’s not my favourite part, at all.
People my age obviously know your work with Lord of the Rings,
and this documentary couldn’t be more different from something like that.
So, how easy or difficult was it
to make such a distinctly different style of film?
It’s different in the sense that
I’m not going out with a camera and filming anything.
I didn’t have to film anything, this was purely a cutting room film.
You know, it was created entirely in the cutting room
with archive footage and archive sound.
But the good thing is that
my favourite part of any filmmaking is the cutting room.
I really don’t like being on set with the actors filming.
Oh, really?
Oh, that’s not my favourite part at all.
So, in that regard, this is good for me.
Yeah, that was great.
I was in my environment that I love the most,
which is in the cutting room.
So many young soldiers were, like, told to go outside
and have another birthday and stuff like that.
Yeah, yeah.
Or make up new ages.
Why do you think the young people were that eager to join the war?
Well, it’s a very interesting question, isn’t it?
It’s a very interesting question.
And I think the answers are quite simple.
I think largely because their mates were going,
they didn’t wanna be left behind, you know.
‘Cause, you know, if you’re a 17-year-old.
I mean, the age was 19, technically.
But if you were a 16, 17-year-old
and a couple of your mates go who were 16 and 17,
you feel like a real prat if you’re the one who doesn’t go.
So, you know, I mean, it was very much a peer-driven thing.
They didn’t know what they were fighting for.
I mean, this was a war where nobody knew what they were fighting for.
World War Two, they were fighting the Nazis
and, you know, they were fighting fascism,
that was a war where you did know what you were fighting for.
But this war, no, I don't think any of them had a clue.
Exactly.
The Government told them to fight, and they were fighting the Germans.
And that’s what they did.
So, some of the younger soldiers in the documentary
saw war as, sort of, an adventure.
So, when you watched the archives,
what things did you see them get most excited about?
Food, probably.
- Really? - Well, yeah.
I mean, even like the poster here,
these guys are eating and they’re all pretty happy.
You know, I think it was the same as we live our normal lives.
I mean, the things that they cared about the most was what they ate.
And it wasn’t very nice, but they did the best they could.
And that was the exciting time, I think, in the trenches,
was breakfast, lunch and dinner.
That’s right, with the plum jam and all that stuff.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, the danger aspect of the movie is, like, hard hit on.
Like, it shows all aspects of the gruesome side,
Like, you’ve got the lice and the rats.
The First World War was a gruesome war, believe me.
- Of course, yeah.
It wasn’t a gratuitous thing, it was a gruesome war.
And to not show that would have been actually a very inaccurate thing.
Was it difficult to choose
which bits you would include and which bits you wouldn’t?
Well, we were driven by the narration.
So, we didn’t show bodies for the sake of showing bodies.
But if the narration was talking about shelling
and, you know, guys getting killed either side of them with shells,
then we showed guys who were killed.
You know what I mean.
You know, all of those choices
were really driven by what the guys were talking about.
Oh right, I see. Okay.
So, we did notice that you chose to show the horrors of the battlefield
in, sort of, more muted colours.
Was that purposeful?
No, the reality is that
there’s not a lot of combat footage of the First World War.
You know, there’s very little of actual, real combat.
They just didn’t film it ‘cause the cameramen would have been killed.
‘Cause the cameramen were lugging cameras the size of a small fridge
around on a tripod.
And so, cameras didn’t get into combat.
You know, there’s a little bit that we show in the film,
where cameramen are filming from behind sandbags
of guys charging across no man’s land, which we use.
But they were, kind of, a long way away.
But there’s nothing, there’s not one single bit of film
that actually shows a British guy fighting a German guy.
And so, that was, obviously, part of it.
So, what we used, there was a magazine called War Illustrated
that came out during the First World War,
every week that would come out.
That was a weekly magazine that you’d buy at the newsagents,
and they always had these drawings of fighting in them.
So, we actually got our hands
on an entire set of old War Illustrated magazines,
and we used those pictures of the fighting.
And we didn’t colourise them.
You know, it just didn’t seem right to colourise them.
I mean, it’s alright to colourise the footage.
I mean, we colourised the footage
because that’s how the soldiers saw the war.
You know, they saw the war in colour.