The Story Behind The Shot: the ingenious ‘one shot’ of Sam Mendes’ ‘1917’
When Sam Mendes started writing 1917, he did so partially to capture the mundane brutality of war and partially to remain at home in those important first few weeks of his newborn daughter’s life. By the next year, the film had blossomed into a real-time war epic that locked into two men’s experience so closely it felt like a “ticking-clock thriller”. Feeling it had to be filmed in ‘one shot’, he enlisted the help of legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins.
The film opens with two snoozing soldiers, Blake and Schofield, and follows them on a summons from the General in which he sends them on a suicide mission to warn a fellow battalion of an impending German ambush. The battalion happens to include Blake’s older brother. From that point on, they are in a race against time, and the camera follows their every move in, seemingly, one long, real-time shot.
Filming an entire feature-length film in one long shot is impossible. Instead, Mendes and Deakins decided to create the effect of one continuous shot by stitching together several long takes. Deakins shot the film on an Arri Alexa Mini LF digital cinema camera to capture the intimate shots he wanted. The film is an incredible technical achievement, for which he won the Academy Award for ‘Best Cinematography’.
The shoot took 65 days, with almost four months of rehearsals and a $90million budget. Every actor, including the 500 extras, had to be exactly on mark and cue for every take, some of which were as long as nine minutes. If someone so much as sneezed at the wrong time they would have to start all over again. It all had to be choreographed and executed perfectly, and lead actors George McKay and Dean-Charles Chapman had the difficult task of setting the pace for the entire film.
However, sometimes, the perfect accident can happen and add to the realism of a shot. In one of the most tense and memorable scenes, McKay’s character is running across the field in the opposite direction of the oncoming wave, with explosions and gunfire surrounding him. While the rehearsals had gone smoothly, in the final take, McKay ended up colliding with oncoming soldiers and tumbling to the ground, only to spring up still so perfectly in character that it seems intentional.
It was also a massive continuity task for Deakins, especially given the famously unpredictable English weather. Knowing each take would have to be seamlessly stitched together, he had to match the lighting in each perfectly. This also meant that cloudy weather was perfect as it lacked dimension and changes. Of course, that year, England decided to be uncharacteristically sunny.
However, the greatest technical accomplishment of the shot remains shrouded in mystery, with Mendes and editor Lee Smith wanting to leave the magic intact. They knew if they revealed their process, it would leave viewers looking out for every stitch and every incongruity, especially when the whole point was to make them feel like they were part of the action. And so the magic of the nearly two-hour continuous ‘shot’ remains a mystery, with only the huge efforts of the production crew able to demonstrate the incredible achievement of this war masterpiece.
