Life in the trenches

Fittingly, for his new WWI movie, director Saul Dibb referenced such horror films as Alien, writes Esther McCarthy.

NEXT month will mark the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Spring Offensive, one of the most brutal and bloody battles of World War I.

The series of German attacks along the Western Front of northern France and west Flanders raged for months and is now regarded as one of the most pointless of conflicts, as men lived or died, in a cruel game of chance, according to their positions in the Front when the attacks took place. Many Irish would have been among them.

Now, a new cinematic take on RC Sheriff’s play about British soldiers waiting in Aisne for the inevitable attack comes to the big screen.

Journey’s End — starring Paul Bettany, Sam Claflin and Asa Butterfield — focuses on one group of men at close quarters, as they wait for their almost-certain demise, and is an intense, ticking-clock account of men at war, during the offensive known as Operation Michael.

Having just wrapped an adaptation of Zadie Smith’s novel, NW, which was very contemporary, director Saul Dibb was ready to take on something different.

“I read it and felt it had this real ring of truth to it,” Dibb tells me.

“I felt there was a chance for us to make something that was a very powerful, contained film about men at war. In Britain, we don’t tend to do that really — we tend to do relationships that are split up at war. It’s also about appealing directly to a female audience in a way.

“American films, which is where I took my lead — particularly ones that deal with the Vietnam War or the Iraq war — have no compunction about dealing directly with male experience of war. A company of men. Our approach was about trying to get under the skin of this company of soldiers who because it is the First World War happen to be men.”

Journey’s End is a particularly jittery experience to watch because, usually for a film, you are left in little doubt from the outset as to the grim fate of these men.

The front was, to use a terrible euphemism, “lightly defended”, according to Dibb, meaning the men there knew it was a matter of days before they would die.

“We often talked of it as a kind of horror film. One of the references I had for it was Alien — the idea of this very tight, confined space that you can’t escape. And outside is a kind of monster. This spectre, that is inevitably going to probably come and kill you. It was about setting up our stall right at the start of the film, so that the audience would experience the pressure, what the soldiers would feel, that this thing was coming. Can you imagine what it was like for them?”

The story centres on one group of men, led by the war-weary, mentally disintegrating Stanhope (Claflin) as the offensive approaches. He and his men are joined by the young and naive Raleigh (Butterfield) who is excited at the prospect of his first posting.

It’s character rather than action driven, as the men connect — and argue — over food, memories and thoughts of home.

“It’s not if, it’s when,” said Dibb of what unfolds. “Hitchcock said it, didn’t he? You can put the bomb right under the table at the start. These are 120 men walking towards an enormous assault.

“You never know for sure as a director if you’re doing that because you never see the film for the first time again. I think we just trusted in the material, trusted in the conviction of the performances. There was always an elephant in the room. And because they didn’t talk about it, that elephant becomes bigger and bigger and bigger.”

The film is very focused on how war can brutalise and cause psychological damage.

“They only ever spent six days of every month at the front, which I thought was amazing. They would go out for six days, like a terrible kind of Russian roulette. Most of the time, nothing happened. There was that kind of deadlock, which would send you mad. You’d go back, have a drink, recuperate, and work your way back towards the front again, for six days of hell-filled waiting.”

As well as bringing us period dramas including The Duchess and Suite Francaise, Dibb has a background in documentary making, and it was vital to him that the film was historically true.

“Sheriff, who wrote the play and the book, was in the trenches. He was an officer and he wrote about his experiences. I think you can tell. Who would write about food in the way he does if you hadn’t been there?

“For me, it’s really important — maybe because I come from making documentaries — because I think there’s good fakery in films and then there’s a lot of bad fakery in films, which makes films either sentimental or unbelievable or not true to life. It was really important that this felt like something that stayed absolutely true to the experience of these soldiers.”

He already had and interest in and knowledge of the period, but when researching further prior to filming, decided to focus on footage rather than photographs to see how these men lived and moved.

“I decided not to look at photographs as reference, that were black and white and austere. But to look at archive material that people have very brilliantly colourised. It brought a whole load of people to life, whichever side they were on, and it was much easier to see them as people — joking, playing football, smoking. All of that stuff within the trenches — playing cards, writing home. Suddenly they were alive, and more informal and more accessible.

“I wanted to refer to factual material. And great books like Six Weeks, which was the average life expectancy of an officer at the front. I’m kind of interested in the minutiae, particularly when it takes place over four days. I want to know how they shave, what they do in their time off.”

Research threw up some interesting facts to Dibb that found their way into the film.

“A lot of them would wear scarves from home. They would break up and personalise what they wore. I didn’t know that the trenches were made in a kind of higgledy piggledy zig-zag fashion. I though from seeing fictionalised WWI films that trenches were all in straight lines. They were more like mazes and warrens.”

Interestingly for Dibb, Journey’s End was the first script he read following Brexit.

“I was sent the script pretty soon after the Brexit vote and it did speak in those terms. It made me think me, my parents, my children, have all lived in peace time. We shouldn’t take that for granted. These are much more uncertain times. I think everybody feels it.”

Journey’s End is in cinemas today