Sam Mendes’ remarkable World War I film “1917” follows, in what appears to be a single tracking shot courtesy of master cinematographer Roger Deakins, two British soldiers sent across No Man’s Land to deliver orders to call off an assault that would put thousands of their comrades at the mercy of massed German forces.  The script, which the director co-wrote with Krysty Wilson-Cairns, was inspired by stories Mendes’ grandfather had told him about his service in the Great War.

“He fought in the war,” Mendes said of this grandfather in a recent interview in Dallas, a stop on a promotional tour on which he was accompanied by Wilson-Cairns and by George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman, who play the soldiers Scofield and Blake.  “He went to war when he was seventeen, but he didn’t really talk about it until he was in his seventies.  He didn’t tell his own kids about it, but he decided to tell his grandchildren for whatever reason.  I never forgot [his stories].

“Once I had the idea of this man, or two men, carrying a message in two hours of real time, [the technique] sort of went hand-in-hand with that—that it would be one continuous shot.”

Wilson-Cairns recalled, “He called me up and told me it was going to be about the image of his grandfather, lost in the fog of No Man’s Land, carrying a message, I knew it was going to be a very different type of war movie, so I was very excited.  Then he told me it was going to be in one shot, and hung up on me!

“It was going to make my job very hard—how are you going to write a story in all one shot, which as a traditional narrative is a bit tricky?  But then we got together, and forged a new path as it were and got it down on the page.  We just kept working it back and forth, until it became a proper collaboration…[about] the human experience of war.”

It helped that Wilson-Cairns was, unbeknownst to Mendes, something of a student on the war. “He didn’t [know that], not at that phone call,” she laughed.  “I guess I’m a slightly surprising World War I buff.”

Asked about the film’s approach, Mendes said, “The war exists in literature and first-person accounts, and that war gave birth to an incredible amount of wonderful art trying to express the nature of the war, from the war poets like Wilfred Owen to novelists like Remarque…and there is sort of a cliché of the British as slightly recessive and old-fashioned, but the truth is that the war was savage, and relentless, and chaotic, and massive. And I think that the reality of that emerges more, later on in first-person accounts—in diary entries, things that were not sent at the time. 

“Because the public perception at the time was controlled by the government and the press as being a ‘Good War’ in order to keep people going.  So somebody like my grandfather, he enlisted to a war that he imagined to be totally different, and was shocked when he arrived there.  And the image of the desolation of No Man’s Land goes into twentieth-century literature well into the present day—a play like ‘Waiting for Godot’ is basically set in No Man’s Land.  The barrenness and flat mud and dead tree immediately conjures up images of the First World War.  It was a generation-, world-defining war that was bit defined by combat but death—the level of destruction and chaos. 

“The war starts as the last old-fashioned war, with horses and carts, and ends as the first contemporary war with machine guns and tanks and bombs, weapons of mass destruction—a war in which the killers are persons a thousand yards away but you can’t communicate with men twenty yards away, because there was no commensurate development of communication.  

“So that particular perfect storm of chaos is a very difficult war to get your hands around, and so to try to create a story that was about a  journey within that war was one of the  first things we had to try to find—to find a moment in the war when it was possible to take a journey. That enables you through the keyhole of this micro-experience to begin to understand the scale of the destruction and the vastness of the landscape…that it wasn’t just No-Man’s Land, but trenches and farmhouses, trees cut down,  towns destroyed, civilians killed, vast collateral damage.  Trying to find a way to express the war visually was difficult.

“Also, the fact that there is no definable enemy as there is in the Second World War, where you’re fighting universal evil.  You don’t locate yourself in that moral compass. They’re all the same, in a way.  The German Scofield encounters in town is, as is patently clear, the poor man is as terrified as he is.  They’re just ‘lost boys,’ really, and trying to try to express that human experience in a human story in terms that are visceral and detailed…was the challenge.”

Mendes also explained why the episode was set in early April, 1917, after the Germans had undertaken a strategic withdrawal after the Battle of the Somme—which the British misread as an unruly retreat. “It was one of the few times in the war when you could tell such a story,” he said.  “To be able to walk across No Man’s Land…was very rare.”

Scofield and Blake go through a series of grueling episodes to deliver their message, but ironically MacKay and Chapman spoke of the shoot—a relatively short one, though it required great precision to manage the continuous six-to-eight minute takes, with great affection.  “We had a great time,” MacKay recalled.  “That said, we were blessed with incredible sets and detail.  In a sense so much of the work had been done for you.  It was about knowing the characters well enough that when you got to that scenario, you knew [instinctively] what to do.

“I felt quite close to Scofield, the  man behind the soldier, physically and emotionally.  I read first-person accounts, more than anything—to know where’s he’s from, and also artwork.  I wound up using a postal book.  In the end, though, I trusted that Sam gave me the job.”

Chapman agreed: “You can really get lost in it, fully immersed. At the same time, it’s quite sobering.  It was the least complaining set I’ve ever been on, actually.”

He added where he found inspiration about his character: “In the costume department, there was a picture of a group of four soldiers.  One soldier in particular was leaning against a truck, his jacket open, smiling–he had no teeth.  He had two rings on, one on his pinkie finger.  That photo really got me.  His personality just reminded me of Blake—even in the middle of a war zone, Blake was optimistic.”

Mendes emphasized that the relatively short shooting schedule was misleading. “For me, the shoot began with the rehearsals,” he explained.  “If you think of it as a series of layers beginning with the rehearsals—that meant that they [MacKay and Chapman] did it over and over, and so when it finally came to shoot, it was the final stage of making the film, but we had been making it for a long time.  It went quite fast, as long as the weather was okay—a combination of incredible precision on the part of what the camera was doing and spontaneity on the part of what was going on [in the shot].”

For Wilson-Cairns, the collaborative feel Mendes cultivated extended to her being on set fairly consistently..  “It was wonderful for a writer,” she said.  “I remember one day when we went on set, and it was all foggy, and you felt you were on No Man’s Land…it felt like time-travel.”

Mendes agreed that the decision to create the illusion of a single-shot film led to frustration when some small thing would go wrong near the end of a take: “After six and a half minutes, you had to start over.  And sometimes it would mean four or five takes before you got back to where you’d been.” 

He recalled one harrowing sequence in which Scofield is escaping enemy fire in a bombed-out town.  “George, where he’s running along the trench, and stumbles, that was an accident,” he said.  “He just carried on, with all the people cheering behind the camera.”

Mendes closed by noting how satisfied he had been with one sequence toward the close of “1917,” in which Scofield finds the troops he’s searching for by following the voice of a soldier singing a song.  The episode was inspired by a recollection in one of the first-person accounts he read: “[The soldier] was wandering through the forest, and he heard music.  It was a soldier playing a piano looted from a farmhouse.  He was playing Debussy, a nocturne.  [The writer] said it was the most beautiful music he’d ever heard.  He hadn’t heard music at all for two years, and hadn’t realized how much he’d missed it.  I just thought that an amazing thing, and it became the scene in the wood with the singing soldier, used in an entirely different way.  Sometimes when you find a piece of research and it finds its way into the movie like that, it’s very pleasing.    

“Everything stops, and you bear witness to the extent of the human tragedy.”

“1917” is a Universal Pictures release.   

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Patrick McGrath’s 1990 novel “Spider” was a brilliant portrayal of the mental unraveling of a man recently released from a long institutional stay as he brooded over his real and imagined past. David Cronenberg’s screen adaptation, though equally extraordinary, is very different. While McGrath’s book drew the character from the inside out, as it were–delineating Dennis Cleg’s disintegration through the first-person narration of its deeply troubled but articulate protagonist–the film makes the material cinematic by dramatizing the process from the outside in. We’re not told about Spider’s experiences, memories and hallucinations, nor are we merely shown them; instead, as a result of Ralph Fiennes’ remarkable turn in the title role and the simple but elegant directorial devices Cronenberg employs, we’re invited virtually to live the process of rediscovery along with him. This puts certain demands on the viewer: you have to acclimate yourself to the picture’s deliberate, portentous tone and arrange the fragmented narrative elements into a coherent whole (just as a pane of glass is laboriously reassembled at one point in the story), always keeping a sharp eye to distinguish between reality and illusion. You also have to be prepared for a denouement that doesn’t offer the salve of ultimate triumph. (This picture refuses to make things easy on its audience the way “A Beautiful Mind,” another recent effort dealing with schizophrenia, did.) But “Spider” is, after all, a David Cronenberg film; it’s purpose isn’t simply to entertain and certainly not to be phonily uplifting, but to challenge us with an artistic vision of the darker regions of the human psyche. And it concludes, as the director’s masterpiece “Dead Ringers” (1988) did, not with a spiritual bang but the whimper of loss and desolation. That’s not what will satisfy most multiplex patrons, of course, but it’s a perspective carried through with such uncompromising rigor, technical precision and dramatic acuity that “Spider” takes a place near the very top of the Cronenberg canon–which, given the quality of his past films, is saying a great deal.

Fiennes gives a tightly controlled, carefully observed performance as Cleg, who arrives in London looking displaced and terrified, constantly muttering to himself and scribbling symbols only he can comprehend into a notebook he takes care to conceal from what he presumes are prying eyes. He makes his way to a half-way house presided over by the rigorous Mrs. Wilkinson (Lynn Redgrave), who is soon transformed in his paranoid fantasies into a woman, or rather women, from his sometimes-delusional past. (All are played, in whole or part, by Miranda Richardson in an astonishing display of versatility.) As he wanders the oddly desolate environs of what was his East End neighborhood as a boy, Cleg attempts to reconstruct his history, effectively watching, as a ghostly observer, his tormented younger self (Bradley Hill) descend into the hallucinations that will doom him. He recalls an idyllic relationship with his mother (Richardson), a sweet, proper woman who called him Spider and protected him while trying patiently to please his gruff father Bill (Gabriel Byrne). But Bill, a plumber who escaped his unhappy home life by nightly visits to the local pub, was–or so Spider believes–seduced by a local prostitute, Yvonne (played at first by Alison Egan but shortly by Richardson as well), and together the two murdered his mother after she’d discovered their affair, burying her in the vegetable garden of his father’s nearby allotment. Yvonne thereupon moved into their home as Mrs. Cleg–a circumstance that the boy obviously could not tolerate. The grown Spider’s obsessive fear of a gasworks that looms over the Wilkinson house is a clue to how he sought, emulating the techniques of the insect with which he identified, to deal with the woman he perceived as a hideous interloper in his family. Of course, though some of what the troubled man recollects has some basis in fact, a good deal of his memory is distorted, and much of it is simply mad invention. The viewer is called upon to disentangle the different strands of fact and fiction in the intricate web Spider weaves as he makes his rounds and tries desperately to remember and record his own story.

Like his protagonist, Cronenberg constructs a complex structure. His “Spider” is moody, soft-grained, fragmented, elliptical and flawlessly sustained; while structurally dense and very deliberately paced, it’s also surprisingly delicate, almost gossamer–like the web-images that he inserts into the piece without becoming overly insistent or obvious about it. This is the work of a great filmmaker working at the top of his form, effortlessly evincing a technical mastery that quietly throws the sort of directorial ostentation so common today into the shade. The film’s lack of the technical effects people have come to expect of the director of “The Fly,” “Naked Lunch” and “eXistenZ,” moreover, shouldn’t obscure the fact that it shares the themes that have long dominated his work: in this case the evil that arises from inside man is purely mental, not needing embodiment in some sort of physical apparition–it’s all done with atmosphere and precise character shading, as was the case in “Ringers.”

Cronenberg’s achievement wouldn’t be possible, of course, without the amazing performances of Fiennes and Richardson–the one a triumph of small, halting gestures and the other of broader strokes–as well Byrne’s subtle, nuanced turn as the father Spider views in quite a different light from the reality of his character. Hall contributes a sensitive portrait of the young Cleg, while Redgrave and John Neville make the most of their turns as Mrs. Wilkinson and a sad old resident of her house. Technically the picture is equally remarkable. The exquisite production design (Andrew Sanders) and art direction (Arvinder Grewal), emphasizing varying shades of brown and grey, create a gloomy, depopulated cityscape that seems eerie and menacing even when it’s brightly lit; and the cinematography by Peter Suschitzky captures it brilliantly, The visuals are complemented perfectly by the spare, atmospheric score from Cronenberg’s usual collaborator Howard Shore.

“Spider” is hardly a crowd-pleaser, and to work its magic it demands both a viewer’s attention and his active participation, as “Memento” did (though in a flashier, more obvious way). It’s also a film that benefits from repeated viewings, which many will be unwilling to give it. Those who surrender themselves to its challenging approach and dark vision, however, will be richly rewarded.