Krysty Wilson-Cairns Interview: 1917

Aside from famously using a single shot, 1917 relies heavily on a tight and emotional script that viewers will get to witness unfold starting Christmas Day. Screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns spoke with Screen Rant about her collaborative process with director Sam Mendes, and about her own personal interest in the World Wars.

First and foremost, this is an amazing movie. Going in, I get caught up because this has been the big one-shot thing. But then you get so caught up in the story that I completely forgot about that. I know the story came from Sam’s grandfather. Talk to me about that collaboration process with Sam, and about when he laid out the story for you.

Krysty Wilson-Cairns:  Sam and I have worked together a bunch of times, actually. I started on Penny Dreadful, which he executive produced, and then we had another couple of projects together. I wrote [films] for him that for various issues didn’t go [through].

So, he phoned me up one day, and he was like, “Third time’s the charm.” I was like, “Okay.” And he’s like, “I have this story I want to tell. It’s inspired by my grandfather and what he went through in the First World War.” He didn’t know I was a war buff at the time, so I was like, “Don’t mess this up. Make sure you get this job.”

And so he [asked] me my interest, and I was, “Of course I am. I can’t wait to get into it.” And he was like, “Okay, come by my house on Tuesday… Oh, by the way, it’s all going to be one shot,” and he hung up. I was like, “I didn’t hear that, did I?”

I turned up on Tuesday, and we basically sat down and were like, “Okay, this is everything that both of us want to see in a war movie. This is how we want to kind of pay homage to the men that fought in this war, this horrific war; the men that fought, that died and survived.” We went through, we got a map and we knew the day and everything that we wanted to use, and we carved out a journey for these men. And then we began to work on their characters.

Sam is so openly collaborative, and he’s really wonderful to work with. And sometimes as a young woman, you worry you go into these rooms and you’re dismissed, but with Sam it never factors into it. You’re really treated as an equal. I think that’s what makes him so incredibly brilliant as a director; he listens to everyone. He leads from the front, he knows what he wants, but he will allow you to change his mind a little bit.

How did your background in horror kind of help you prepare for the cruelty of war?

Krysty Wilson Cairns: Well, I worked in Penny Dreadful, which was a bit like Victorian horror. Actually, that didn’t really play a part in this. What played the huge role for me was growing up and being interested in history.

My grandfather, he really believed that to avoid future catastrophe, you should learn from the past; that [for us] as a society, history was one of the most important things. So, as I grew up, he would read me stories about the war; first and second. He really impressed upon me the importance of learning about that, so I was always kind of obsessed by it. I would go to Northern France and do tours when I was very young with him, so I’d always had a huge respect for the men who’d fought and died. That really informed this process, because I came with so much information both from literature and from real firsthand accounts, and I was able to bring that to this film.

There’s a great line in this film. I’m going to paraphrase it, but it’s something along the lines of, “Why did you choose me for this?” And he says, “Well, I thought was gonna be something easy, like getting food.” Can you talk to me about the two main characters that Dean and George play, because I feel they’re so relatable in so many different ways. But I didn’t realize, after researching this, how young the men were at war.

Krysty Wilson Cairns: Yeah, my God, really young. And a lot of young men lied about their age to enlist even younger than they were. In fact, in my research, I was at Lochnagar crater, which is an explosion site. It looks like an asteroid hit; it’s so unbelievably large. Around it they have, in tribute to the men who died there, their names and ages carved – and there was a 15 year old boy.

I remember being there [when I was] younger, and you think, “Oh well, they were soldiers. They were grown men.” But when I went out this last time for research for this project in particular, I realized I was older than most of the men in the cemeteries. That was really harrowing; they were so incredibly young. I think a stroke of genius by Sam in the casting, by Salm and Nina Gold, was the casting of George and Dean Charles. Because they look incredibly young. They are incredibly young, but Dean looks even younger than he is.

It really brings home this idea that they weren’t grown men; that they didn’t know what they were going to. They were children to the slaughter, really. Also just the idea of casting George and Dean, who aren’t superstars yet – I mean, they will be, because they’re absolutely fantastic – but it gives the story a sense of jeopardy. You don’t know if they’ll make it or not.