Where was '1917' filmed?
Winner of Best Drama and Best Director at the Golden Globes and now a favourite for further glory at the Oscars, 1917 is the kind of film that reaffirms faith in the big-screen experience. Sam Mendes’s movie is a phenomenal undertaking, recreating the claustrophobia and constant danger of the World War I trenches in all too vivid horror and topping it with a spectacular conceit.
François Duhamel / Universal Pictures and DreamWorks PicturesWe watch two young soldiers, Schofield (George MacKay) and Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman), as they race against the clock to deliver a vital message, overcoming enemy fire and acres of mud as they go. This Mendes presents as one continuous shot, meticulously constructing the action so that we’re with them all the way. ‘I had this thought,’ he told the Hollywood Reporter, ‘Why don’t we lock the audience into the men’s experiences in a way that feels completely unbroken, in a movie that resembles a ticking-clock thriller in which we experience every second passing in real time? It seemed like a natural way of telling the story. Albeit difficult.’
Universal Pictures and DreamWorks PicturesFor those working with him, ‘difficult’ was just the start of it. As production designer Dennis Gassner told Fortune magazine, ‘It all came down to tireless planning. Tireless. Down to the inch. Seriously, to the inch and down to the second. Sam would not let it go until we had each sequence that precise.’ With each frame needing to connect to the next, every element of the production had to be prepared with absolute precision – acting and camerawork, but also props and scenery. To make matters worse, 1917 was filmed almost entirely on location and outdoors, a sequence of open-air shots captured pretty much as they appear on screen, with everything from a full mile of trenches to bombed-out buildings constructed in real life, largely eschewing CGI.
Getty ImagesBefore shooting, Mendes rehearsed his two lead actors in a series of trenches constructed out of cardboard boxes in Shepperton Studios (home to James Bond movies including the Mendes-directed Skyfall), running the lines as they moved to ensure the timing. ‘Every location had to be exactly the correct length for the scene,’ he told Vanity Fair. ‘We had to walk every step the characters would take long before we designed the sets and built them. I’ve never rehearsed a movie for as long, or in such detail.’ They then repeated the exercise in marked-out areas of a field in their first location, on Salisbury Plain (pictured). This 300-square-mile area, most of which is used for military training, offered the flat, uninterrupted views needed to play northern France, though it previously stood in for the Russian steppes in 2012’s Anna Karenina, as well as appearing in Beatles film Help! in 1965. With Stonehenge just two miles away, tests were conducted to confirm that there were no archeological remains in the area, then the digging began.
François Duhamel / Universal Pictures and DreamWorks PicturesIt’s Salisbury Plain we see in the opening scenes of the film, under trees and then in a chalk-soil trench, the first of many we visit. From there, we move to more trenches, this time dug in the clay soil of Bovingdon Airfield in Hertfordshire. This site, which was run by the Ministry of Defence until 1972, was used for the reconstruction of the Live Aid concert in 2018 Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody and the desert planet of Scarif in Rogue One; here, it’s home to 2,000 feet of bogged-down trenches, as well as a reconstruction of No Man’s Land that’s an obstacle course of barbed wire, craters and bodies. For accuracy, Gassner and his team not only studied 50,000 images of both Allied and German trenches to ensure the construction was accurate, but also mixed in different soils to achieve the correct shades of brown.
Universal Pictures and DreamWorks PicturesThe action then takes us on one of the film’s few diversions onto a soundstage, again at Shepperton. In this case, it’s for the German dugouts, but the studio backlot was also used to build the bombed French town of Ecoust that appears later, where Schofield is caught under fire in the dark. After the boys’ time with the Germans, via a tunnel scene filmed in a barn back at Salisbury, they emerge in an ammunition dump alongside giant guns, which was filmed in the disused Ambrose Quarry in Ewelme, Oxfordshire.
Getty ImagesWe then follow them through a copse and to a farmhouse, filmed on another area of Salisbury Plain near the village of Shrewton, and up to a point close by called Tinker’s Track, before we follow Schofield to a canal, where he tackles a broken bridge. This was filmed on a trip north to Glasgow and the disused Govan Graving Docks on the River Clyde (pictured), which the production team spent three weeks clearing and preparing. They stayed north for the river scenes that follow, filming at Low Force, an 18 foot waterfall on the River Tees in County Durham, and then at the Tees Barrage International White Water Centre for shots in the rapids. They transported and placed a tree into the river in sections and were also careful to put up signs warning unwary walkers of the presence of dummy corpses in the area during the shoot.
François Duhamel / Universal Pictures and DreamWorks PicturesFrom the river, it’s back to yet another area of Salisbury Plain, where another 2,500 feet of trenches were dug for the front line where the 2nd Battalion is stationed – by this time, the production estimated it had shifted 1,615 tons of soil. Then, after all this travelling, our final stop is right back where we started, at a single tree on Salisbury Plain. Oddly, considering the intricate planning that went into every aspect of this film, this was selected at the very last minute. According to cinematographer Roger Deakins, the scene was originally to be set by a stream: ‘And then, when we were scouting on Salisbury Plain, we found what we wanted, the opening where we wanted them sitting under the trees,’ he told nofilmschool.com. ‘And then just away from that, there was this other tree… We both thought, “That is it.”’
1917 is in cinemas now
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