SWAYNESWORD: When war goes private

My name is Crispin Swayne. I am a military historical consultant to the TV and film industry.
From script, through shooting, to project completion, I provide:
- military historical advice from many periods, including contemporary.
- 24/7 phone advice available to writers, producers, directors, art dept and all necessary crew.
- AD coaching and on-set advice on military protocols, weapons and tactics advice, crowd wrangling, marching, contextual behaviour and dress to pricipals and/or background.
Credits include: - Film: 'Dracula Untold', 'Atonement', 'The Golden Age', 'The Magic Flute', 'Children of Men', 'The Da Vinci Code', 'Batman Returns', 'V for Vendetta', 'Shawn of the Dead', 'Shanghai Knights'.
TV: 'Generals at War' (National Geographic 2009),'The Amazing Mrs Pritchard'(BBC), 'People’s War'(BBC), 'Spartacus'(National Geographic), 'Greatest Military Clashes'(5, Discovery), 'Great Battles'(I&II, Discovery).
Radio: 'Where in the World'(x3 with John Simpson, BBCR4).
Print: To read my recent article on military advising published in History Today, see below.

Saturday 15 December 2007

When war goes private

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Reeling Back the Past
(Published in History Today)
Captain Crispin Swayne describes his work on major feature films as a historical and military adviser, and what he hopes to achieve.

I’m newly arrived on Redcar beach, surrounded by Second World War wreckage, having just been introduced to Joe Wright, the director of Atonement, the recent film of Ian McEwan’s novel. He says to me ‘It’s a four-and-a-half minute shot. I don’t know why, I just thought it would be a good idea.’ Joe and I start walking along the route the camera will take during the shot. Looking around, I breathe a sigh of relief about the way the location looks. Next time you find a film’s historical or military accuracy lacking, bear in mind that very often the advisor isn’t called onto a production until the cameras are almost ready to roll.
On this occasion the art department has done an excellent job of matching our beach with photographs and accounts of the real evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940. The seafront has been completely re-constructed with authentic damaged buildings, signs and a ferris wheel – just as an old Royal Engineer neighbour of mine, who was there, remembers. Anti-aircraft gun emplacements line the promenade, a copy of the crimson-sailed Thames sailing barge Glenway lies stranded on the beach, and period vehicles and military equipment are strewn everywhere around a makeshift field hospital.
We finish walking. ‘Any questions?’ ‘Yes. Where are the Stukas?’ ‘Too expensive.’ ‘Why no officers among the extras?’ ‘To accentuate the lack of order.’ If big historical inaccuracies in films are vampires, I reckon I’ve got just six silver bullets to fire per production; I let the Stukas and officers go. I dig in my pocket and bring out a list of background action for Joe to approve. This includes ‘digging-in’, praying, weapon cleaning, the burning of equipment, card playing in shell holes and the restraint of deranged soldiers. ‘Great,’ says Joe. ‘One hour till the first run-through.’ Ten assistant directors walk up the beach towards me followed by over 1,000 local film extras. Nodding at them, the first assistant director smiles and hands me a megaphone. ‘Good luck, mate.’
From now on it’s my job to make sure all the action surrounding the drama is historically accurate and militarily authentic. To get our ‘soldiers’ in character I megaphone them a brief and moody history of the BEF’s fighting withdrawal up to Dunkirk. The assistant directors move about the beach distributing the extras and the actions I’ve previously agreed with Joe. We then rehearse the extras through their cues and actions as many times as possible before the hour passes.Once run-throughs are being filmed, I watch playback on a monitor with the director, discussing any changes to be made. Then I’m off hot-footing it around the beach, adjusting helmets on heads, the position and hold of weapons, the stoop and run of stretcher-bearers. Men, some too small for Bren guns, some too brutish for medics, have tactfully to be repositioned or even replaced.
I feel like I’m in the Army again, ‘cutting about’ as we’d say, appraising, encouraging and tweaking. Countless parades and inspections have served me well, for urgency and an eye for detail are essential skills here. I’m alternating somewhere between a fierce Footguards sergeant major and an avuncular captain, however forget that I am dealing with poorly paid civilians and not soldiers at my peril. Too much stress on set, and the shot will be filled with bored extras rather than exhausted Dunkirk evacuees. Give everybody something to do and a mark to hit. Make the action too difficult to sustain and performances will pall. Complicate the action with real Dunkirk tales – the summary execution of suspected fifth columnists, or the shooting of French soldiers trying to storm British boats – and more than likely that suggestion will be overruled for detracting from the main story. It’s a matter of striking a balance. After a day of rehearsals, on the third ‘take’, Joe gets his shot.
Advisers are often excluded from productions for reasons other than budget. However galling it may seem, drama comes first in films, even historical ones. Some directors don’t want to risk muddying their dramatic vision with anything as complex as real history, much as some advisers don’t want to compromise reality with drama. Atonement is a fictitious drama, but one that takes place in a true, historical military setting. It is worth remembering that some of cinema’s most admired reconstructions of the battlefield, works like Saving Private Ryan (1998), Platoon (1987) and Full Metal Jacket (1987), were also works of fiction. In films like these, drama and history need each other. If the military and historical scenes look real, they add gravitas to the drama. Whatever the constraints, the Dunkirk scene in Atonement is a collage of genuine reported stories from the time. In much the same way, incidents from Vietnam in Michael Herr’s journalistic report Dispatches provide an extreme but authentic backdrop for Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as regurgitated in Copolla’s film Apocalypse Now (1979). As the adviser on Oliver Stone’s Platoon, Dale Dye’s experiences in Vietnam give a certain authority. While it’s the adviser’s job to strive for historical accuracy, it is the director’s responsibility to make the drama believable. And if an audience ‘bonds’ with one of the director’s fictional characters, a curiosity and emotional connection is made with a historical period or event.
Another example of on-set advising well into a production was for Kenneth Branagh’s production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, with libretto by Stephen Fry. Branagh sets this in the First World War. Filming takes place entirely at London’s Shepperton Studios. I arrive to see a whole trench system awaiting me inside the studios, including no-man’s land, a smashed windmill, and a castle. The uniforms, weapons and other gear are assembled from a range of First World War images, the effect being that the soldiers could come from any nation that participated, from America to Algeria. I’m introduced to Kenneth Branagh in the middle of a field of hand-made yellow flowers. We agree for the soldiers generally to follow British military protocol of the day. I’m left to get on with it.
The first shot entails coordinating a brass band marching down a slippery incline, a general in his staff-car and a subaltern and runner, all halting by the entrance to a trench system in perfect time to Mozart on playback through an almighty sound system. I also have to run the principals through weapons training, and prepare two hundred extras to go ‘over the top’ the following morning. I fire one of my silver bullets when some gas-bombs are to be thrown by hand. I’m on-set, on and off, for ten weeks.
Anybody who goes to see The Magic Flute hoping to see authentic reconstructions of the First World War will be disappointed. It is a surreal and dream-like production. If the Dunkirk scene in Atonement is more about the ‘look’ of Dunkirk, then The Magic Flute is more about the ‘feel’ of the early years of the First World War. I found Lyn Macdonald’s histories indispensable for helping me with this mood. On Atonement the feeling we’re left with after Joe Wright’s four-and-a-half minute shot of Dunkirk is utter chaos. Other recent historically accurate films that also convey the feeling of war effectively are Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, which captures the random brutality of war, and Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (2001) which is about losing control of a situation. Whether I am advising or not, the mood I generally expect from a war film should echo Wellington: ‘Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.’
Joe Wright and Kenneth Branagh’s knowledge and respect for history made my job easy, although I wish I’d had more time to work with the cast and extras on both productions prior to shooting. In the Army it takes six or more months to turn a civilian into a soldier, yet on many British film or TV productions I might not even have an hour. The cast of the American television series Band of Brothers (2001) attended a compulsory two-week ‘boot-camp’ before a camera was even out of its case. This is one of the reasons Band of Brothers looks and feels so real. As producer Tom Hanks put it,
There’s two kinds of authenticity. There’s one that says all the buttons are right, and all the ammunition is correct, and all the buildings look like they looked in the photograph. That’s a relatively easy thing to accomplish. The thing that's much harder to get right is literally the motivations and the nature of the interplay between the characters. If we can’t be absolutely truthful to what they said and did at any given moment, we must as least be as authentic as possible, so that it still adheres to the framework of the reality of being there at that moment.
Maintaining this authenticity is especially challenging when working on a biographical picture or a film based on a true story. Steven Spielberg leads the way in films such as these, such as Schindler’s List and Munich.
Working on a film from the script stage is the Holy Grail of advising jobs. I know from my own scriptwriting that dramatic impact is crucial to any production, so when gleefully ripping out historical and military inaccuracies from great sections of script, the adviser has to provide the director with authentic alternatives. As academic historian Robin Lane Fox, Oliver Stone’s adviser on Alexander (2004), says,
Historians work with the evidence they have and they observe where there are gaps and sometimes they may guess beyond them, but their questioning is guided by the evidence. A filmmaker is guided by the need to visualise, whether there is direct evidence or not.
Of Gladiator (2000) Ridley Scott says practicality and logic informed the decision-making process about some of the period detail. As the Romans didn’t have cigarette lighters he felt justified in using a pit of burning oil for the soldiers to light their arrows. To historians who say that the Romans may not have done this, Scott replies, ‘They bloody well do now.’
On war films, a thorough knowledge of history and soldiering is crucial to bridge any gaps. There are times, however, when a line is crossed and the drama is no longer based on reality. I removed my name from the credits of one TV series I advised on, for this reason. Mel Gibson has been accused of crossing the line, notably with his American and Scottish so-called ‘freedom’ epics The Patriot (2000) and Braveheart (1995). Another Hollywood film was so untruthful it opened itself to questions in Parliament. U571 (2000) portrays American submariners capturing an Enigma machine from a German U-boat early in the Second World War, a task that was actually accomplished by the British Navy. Interviewed on BBC radio, U571’s screenwriter David Ayer admitted this was a mistake, agreeing his script was
a distortion ... a mercenary decision ... to create this parallel history in order to drive the movie for an American audience. Both my grandparents were officers in World War Two, and I would be personally offended if somebody distorted their achievements. I won’t do again.’
How might the US react to a British film about the London Fire Brigade portrayed as ‘the heroes of 9/11’? Tony Blair condemned U571 as ‘an affront’ to British sailors. However David Balme, the sailor who led the actual raid on the U-boat in question, said,
I don’t know why anyone complains, because no-one had heard of this before the Americans made the film. It brings home the whole Battle of the Atlantic to a generation who otherwise would have known nothing about it.
Sub-Lieutenant Balme has a point. The furore surrounding U571, and films like it, has indirectly raised an awareness of history. This is reflected in the proliferation of websites exploring the truth behind mainstream film and TV productions, where cultural imperialism and historical inaccuracy are increasingly criticized. Producers are acutely aware that such negative publicity detracts from a film’s status, and may even lose them the Best Picture Oscar. Both scriptwriters and directors of military and historical dramas now know they must strive for more authenticity.
We would all pay attention to Hollywood’s interest in our past. The good news for British film-makers is that we have a large mine of history from which to dig film gold, if historians and screenwriters can only strike up a more conscious dialogue. However Balme also said of U571: ‘I realized that the scale was beyond the budget of a British film.’ With some courageous funding (and hopefully a bit of help from the government), I’ll get my bootcamp, and Joe Wright will get his Stukas.
Crispin Swayne offers a military and historical screen advisory service: http://swaynesword.blogspot.com/2007/05/military-and-historical-screen-advisory.html