They Shall Not Grow Old
Peter Jackson interview: the Lord of the Rings director on his First World War film, They Shall Not Grow Old
Jackson explains how he took Great War footage, transformed it and gave the troops a voice again.
Thanks to a mix of great enthusiasm and vast wealth, Peter Jackson owns seven planes from the First World War. Under his supervision, a team also built replicas of flying machines long lost to battlefields or scrap. The Lord of the Rings director has, among others, a Sopwith Pup and a Fokker triplane in New Zealand — a visible sign of an obsession with the conflict he has had since he was a boy, when he watched the air force epic The Blue Max and built Airfix kits at home.
“I was interested in the First World War as a kid because my father was, and, as an only child, I would obviously pay a lot of attention to what Dad did,” Jackson tells me, calling from his base down under. His family has a connection with the war, too, as his paternal grandfather joined the 2nd Battalion South Wales Borderers in 1910 and went on to fight at Tsingtao, Gallipoli, the Somme, Passchendaele, Cambrai. He survived, only for his health to deteriorate. “My father said it was because of him being in the trenches, up to his waist in freezing water, for so long,” Jackson says. “As a 10-year-old, my dad had to carry him up the stairs on his back.” The veteran died in 1940.
Which brings us to They Shall Not Grow Old, a 90-minute documentary by Jackson, commissioned by the Imperial War Museum and the 14-18 NOW arts project to commemorate the centenary of Armistice Day. Taking its name from the Binyon poem For the Fallen, it is an audacious attempt to update archive film using technology that only someone with Jackson’s pioneering record in digital effects would have. It is even available in 3D.
His equipment has turned everything into colour while also sharpening it and, crucially, slowing down the jitters that came with early hand-cranked cameras. He upgraded 80 hours as a gift to the museum before finding an hour and a half for his documentary. It premieres at the London Film Festival next month and will be screened in cinemas and schools, and shown on the BBC in November.
“The footage made you focused on the human beings,” Jackson says. “It really brought them to life once they stopped being slightly sped-up characters from 100-year-old footage. Their faces are incredible. You see their reactions, and it draws attention to them.”
For me, simplistically, the enhanced film adds personality to men who, over the decades, have been reduced to a ghostly horde. With faces now distinguishable from the walls they walk past, the soldiers’ eyes are clearer, as is their possible fate. Jackson doesn’t flinch from colourising corpses, turning dead men light purple, with their bones ripped out of skin. “I mean, it was a war,” he says. “The bodies stank as they deteriorated, so we show them scattered around. It was part of the experience of being there. But there’s no footage of anyone being killed. The cameras genuinely steered away from combat, though we did use footage of a trench raid, which was extraordinary.”
It’s not only the lucid visuals in They Shall Not Grow Old that stop memories from fading away. The soldiers’ voices are there, too. The documentary is narrated using snippets from 120 veterans, recorded for the BBC’s The Great War series in 1964. Some are being aired for the first time. The recollections of the men who were there are frequently brutal in their simplicity. “For a lot of those kids, it was their first action, and they never knew more,” one says, as bodies are lowered into foreign graves and priests read out last rites. “Well, it started off in a reasonable manner,” another recalls, “people on horseback with swords, but it developed into something ghastly. A man’s life wasn’t worth anything at the end of the war.”
The director likes these recordings because they were made less than 50 years after the war, when the men weren’t old, in wheelchairs and wearing poppies at remembrance ceremonies. They therefore had better recall. What’s more, Jackson used a forensic lip reader to look through silent footage of men talking, then had actors put words back in their mouths. Guns boom, tanks rumble: the overriding effect is of a film long buried in trench mud, found for the very first time.
Never before has it felt so much as if the viewer is there — and that was the entire point. This is not a study of the war. We aren’t shown the air force, navy or home front. It shows what it was like to be a soldier on the Western Front: how they ate, drank and lived.
“They don’t talk about campaigns or strategies or generals,” Jackson says. “I don’t think the word ‘Somme’ gets mentioned. We stayed away from being specific about place or time and simply made it about the human experience of being in the war. It is really just about what these guys were thinking.”
The result is incredibly moving. One effect, to illustrate quite how impressive the finished stock looks, is that the First World War doesn’t even feel 100 years old: squint and it might be reportage from Iraq or Afghanistan. “You can see the clowns, the troublemakers, the grumpy ones,” he says. “You can see the people you know now. And, of course, that war was different from modern wars because a lot of the soldiers, from 1916 onwards, were forced to be in the army.
“The professional army in Britain was virtually wiped out by Christmas 1914, so what you had then were people who volunteered or were conscripted. Shopkeepers, bankers, farmers. Regular folk. That comes across clearly. So you’re not looking at the professionalism you’d see in a modern documentary about a modern war. You’re looking at human beings in uniform who had to do what they were told.”
The First World War is still on the national curriculum, but with seismic global events occurring all the time, one day it might not be studied in such depth. Teachers may have to decide whether this old struggle is more relevant to pupils than, say, 9/11. This is the reason Jackson was commissioned to make the film. Lessons weren’t really learnt from what happened between 1914 and 1918, but sacrifices shouldn’t be forgotten, the argument goes.
What’s more, Jackson says, this wasn’t just any war. “It profoundly changed the world from both a technological and political point of view. What began with horses finished with trucks, planes and tanks. Furthermore, it’s the war where oil was discovered in the Middle East, and afterwards Britain and France grabbed chunks of the regions. Borders were drawn up between countries, Sunni and Shia were chopped in half. There was no rhyme or reason. So, to some degree, the First World War is still being fought.”
One way in which the war lives on is in the various, and very variable, projects that try to replicate the feeling and fear of being a soldier. The Imperial War Museum had a slight and sterile trench installation that basically just offered a strange odour, while earlier this year came The Trench Bodmin immersive theatre project, which promised “the chaos of battle”. Everything feels far removed from the reality.
Cinematic efforts have been equally patchy, and the fact that Blackadder Goes Forth remains the most evocative depiction of the war for many Brits shows how under-represented this conflict is on screen compared with the Second World War — if you don’t count Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, that is. JRR Tolkien fought at the Somme, and echoes of the war are all over Middle-earth and its gargantuan adaptation. Jackson cites the Dead Marshes in The Two Towers, with people under the water, as being “very much born from bodies in shell holes being drowned”.
So why do directors find this war so hard to capture? “I think First World War movies are in danger of being a cliché,” Jackson says. “They take the most basic concept, which is soldiers going over the top, and that’s all the films are. I’m just not excited about most of them.
“Also, and this is going to sound weird, First World War films are often too serious. They show troops having a miserable time, whereas, if you are in a bad place, humour comes to the surface. The soldiers didn’t have self-pity. There are a lot of laughs. Many veterans say it was an escape from a boring home or dull job. An incredible adventure. They don’t quite talk in the way you would expect people from the war to speak. It was the first time many had travelled overseas. It was like a Boy Scout camp. That’s what comes across.”
Given that he is a First World War nerd, what surprised him most about everything new he heard and saw? “How the captured German first-aid guys pitched in, whether it was a German or Brit who was wounded,” he replies without hesitation. “They were not under bayonet point, but immediately assisted.” The film shows a lot of conversation between enemies. “They had to do what they were told, like us,” the narration runs.
“It wasn’t a war in which there was a political belief being fought for on either side, in a strange way,” Jackson says. “The thing with the First World War is that I don’t think either the British or Germans knew why they were fighting. It wasn’t like fighting the Nazis, where you had a clear objective. If you were a soldier at the front, you didn’t know what the hell you were supposed to be doing, other than killing.”
He pauses. Incredibly, I feel he has put as much heart into this documentary as he did into the six films of his enormous Tolkien project. “It was a war, to a degree, without purpose.”
Tickets for screenings of the film on October 16, as well as a Q&A with Peter Jackson screened live, can be booked at theyshallnotgrowold.film
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