Will's debut is not annoyingly directed - he knows where to use a close-up, a subjective camera (Danny Dyer having drunk too much rum), when to track from up on high (they're all about to face their death going over the top). It captures what the experience must have been like - boredom leading to silly feuds, tension, waiting for the attack to happen, sudden chaos and death. It's quite an experience. The moments of humour are welcome.
Will wanted an unknown cast, most of whom are slightly better known now than they were then - Daniel Craig, Paul Nicholls, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Danny Dyer, James D'Arcy, Cillian Murphy, Ben Whishaw, Antony Strachan. Shot by Tony Pierce-Roberts, edited by Jim Clark and then Laurence Méry-Clark, music by Evelyn Glennie and Xavier Marchand.
"I wanted to make a film about the First World War, which obsesses me, and I wanted to make it super-accurate. We took enormous pains to get everything right, from the badges on the caps to the state of the trenches in July 1916. Everything was scrupulously accurate. And one of the things I wanted to do was have no stars. And I achieved that. The only thing that's happened is they've since become enormous stars. But actually at the time, when I cast Daniel Craig, he wasn't well known at all, Ben Whishaw - it was his very first film, he was doing his A levels - Cillian Murphy, I think had made one little film in Ireland, Danny Dyer had yet to take over the pub in Eastenders, Julian Rhind-Tutt, James D'Arcy all these guys have gone on to have fantastic careers, and they owe it all to me, or course! But they were unknowns at the time. The most famous actor in it was Paul Nicholls, who had just come out of Eastenders.. It cost a million pounds, it was an arthouse war movie, it was fascinating to do.. As a portrait of the reality of trench life in World War One - which was in a way my main ambition - I don't think it can be faulted."
(Interviewed in 2018.)
"Soldiers swear, vilely, all the time - swear like troopers, in fact. Anyone who wants to know how soldiers swore in 1916 should read 'Her Privates We' (published in 1930), a magnificent novel by Frederic Manning, a writer who served at the Somme as a private soldier. Manning's fellow soldiers swear vigorously and colourfully.
"The war had been going on for two years and everyone - from the generals to the private officers - thought the battle would be a walkover. They thought the week-long barrage before it started would kill every German soldier opposite. They didn't know the German soldiers could descend to deep concrete dugouts and sit the barrage out. If you had said to a British Tommy, on the eve of the battle, that the Germans were just sitting there, waiting, he'd have thought you were joking.
The trenches at the Somme were solidly constructed, deep, well revetted and duckboarded. The Somme valley had been a quiet sector until the decision to have a battle there in 1916. People tend to forget that it took place in the middle of summer. Wildlife abounded, No Man's Land was unmown, uncropped pasture. Summer was everywhere except in the earthy confines of the trench, its only evidence in the strip of blue sky above your head."
(Excerpts from 'Bamboo', published 2005.)
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'A very fine actor..' Will later proposed Craig as the lead for Sword of Honour
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