The Wind That Shakes The Barley (2006) :: Crew

Production Crew Notes

• Director - Ken Loach
• Producer - Rebecca O'Brien
• Writer - Paul Laverty
• Production Designer - Fergus Clegg
• Director of Photography - Barry Ackroyd
• Costume Designer - Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh
• Casting - Oonagh Kearney
• Editor - Jonathan Morris

Director » Ken Loach

I first became interested in Irish history through Jim Allen when he wrote Days of Hope, the story of a soldier who volunteers for the First World War, but who gets sent to Ireland instead of going to fight in France. Then Hidden Agenda was about contemporary events in the North, but we always felt that they could not be understood without knowing why Ireland was partitioned, and how the conflict originated. I think what happened in Ireland in 1920-1922 is one of those stories that is of permanent interest. Like the Spanish Civil War, it was a pivotal moment. It reveals how a long struggle for independence was thwarted at its moment of success by a colonial power who, in divesting itself of its empire, still managed to keep its strategic interests in tact. That was the cunning of people like Churchill, Lloyd George, Birkenhead et al. When they were forced into a corner, when it wasn't really in their best interests to keep denying independence, they sought to divide the country and give their support to those in the independence movement who were prepared to allow economic power to stay in the same hands, who, in the time honoured phrase, 'they could do business with'. There is a pattern you see again and again - this kind of manipulation by the ruling power, how different interests will unite in the face of a common oppressor and then ultimately how those contradictions inevitably have to work their way out. I'm sure you can see it in places like Iraq now, where the opposition to the US and Britain brings together a lot of people who will find that they have different interests when the US and the British are finally forced out.

What was possible in 1922? Could the anti-treatyite forces have won, and in what direction would they have they have taken Ireland? It was only five years previously that the 1916 uprising was led by the Marxist socialist James Connolly, whose independence movement was based on class struggle: 'the cause of Ireland is the cause of labour'. In contrast, the malign effects of what was actually agreed in the Treaty stayed with the Irish for decades. Continuing hardship meant that people left in their thousands for England and America. Partition lead inevitably to the war in the North, with it's suppression of civil rights.

I was surprised how familiar the arguments still are in and around Cork where we were filming. Obviously it's very current in the North of Ireland because they're still fighting some of the same battles. I thought in the South it would have faded, but we were always meeting people who had stories to tell. Most people knew the names of the characters involved, of the local Flying Column heroes, and had a knowledge of dates and incidents - 'a tan was chased across that field there, so and so was caught here'. So the memory lingers a lot longer than people think.

At the start there is only a blank sheet of paper and the big historical canvas, and the question is how to distil this into human experience. Then Paul (Laverty) sets out the characters and a narrative which follows them through different conflicts, alliances, and resolutions. If you get that right then the characters are absolutely rooted in their own experience and understanding, but that understanding is necessarily limited. The film's understanding must be separate from all these individual points of view, and be able to see them operating on each other.

When we're making the film we have to trust that we've done this earlier work well enough so that, if the actors are simply true to their characters, then everything else will be implied and revealed. Paul (Laverty) is very good at working out a narrative where everything is implied. Things don't need to be said head on. It should be like a field of turnips really, where you can just see a little bit coming out of the soil, but everything is below the surface. If the script is right, the characters should then be able to be as idiosyncratic as they need to be, and you know that the heart of the story will still be there. Anything that is wrong in the script is rarely resolved after you start filming.

What was a challenge, that I'm not sure we could quite resolve, was finding the balance between period authenticity and keeping the film feeling contemporary and current. So there may be some purists who will draw in their breath at one or two phrases. But in the end I think that's a small price to pay. You can never re-create the past exactly, it's always an approximation, but you try and catch the spirit and avoid any clichés. Older people might notice the language more, because they're closer in time to it. That's a difficult balance - whatever you do is never entirely satisfactory.

What's always extraordinary to me is that films take on a collective character. If you pick the right programme for preparation it sets the context for the whole film and the way the actors will work together (on this there was a week long 'basic training' just before the shoot). So, although that first week was quite physical and tough, the character of the film emerged and that's then what you live off, that collective spirit. If people were turning up on a daily basis and just doing it and going home it wouldn't work - there's got to be a collective consciousness which you can all refer back to. The collective effort always includes running gags, one or two people who are nominated as comics, and there's usually a couple who mysteriously develop injuries which means they can't do the toughest jobs!

There is often a hypocrisy going on in war films, where they claim to be anti-war, but then a large part of the entertainment involves all the explosions and the blood. That doesn't seem very anti-war to me, if you're saying we hate killing but let's enjoy it while it's on screen. There's a long tradition of it going back to Jacobean drama, but without the poetry I think it's a bit cheap. If you see a lot of blood on screen you know that presumably they haven't killed thousands of people, so it becomes a distraction, and takes you out of the film.

I wouldn't call this an anti-British film. I'd encourage people to see their loyalties horizontally across national boundaries, so that this isn't a film about the Brits bashing the Irish. People have much more in common with people in the same social position in other countries than they do with, say, those at the top of their own society. You can argue that we have a responsibility to attack the mistakes and brutalities of our leaders, past and present. Far from being unpatriotic it is a duty we cannot ignore. It's interesting that Blair has recently been discussing anti-Americanism. In doing this he wants to substitute the American government for the people, i.e. don't attack the bad things the government are doing, because you're attacking the people. It's a false argument that's been used for a long time.

The British left a terrible legacy in Ireland, and progressive forces suffered huge set-backs after the Treaty. But in spite this, and in spite of the suffering that is depicted, the fact still remains that the British marched out. There is an element of hope in that.

Producer » Rebecca O'Brien

When we made "Hidden Agenda", a thriller about the British "shoot-to-kill" policy in the north of Ireland, it was referred to in Cannes as the 'IRA' entry to the festival. We're hoping that this time the response maybe a little more sophisticated. Times have changed and current events force us to re-assess the past.

With regard to the development process there are several myths which would be good to nail once and for all. The funding begins after I get a very detailed script which has gone through many rigorous drafts. This is a very long process. Paul starts by steeping himself in the world of the story and then offers various options, questions and possibilities - which could be either a rough notion, precise premise, or set of characters - which he and Ken analyse in detail and then open up for discussion. In this particular case there was an enormous amount of research given that it was set in 1920, and in addition, because of the highly contested nature of Irish history. By far the most challenging creative task is to choose the premise, create the characters and then work out the narrative. Paul and Ken do not write together, but work in the closest of collaboration. Paul will write and then they will meet up at regular intervals to discuss. A key figure in this process is script editor Roger Smith who provides some distance. Since he is not so steeped in the material he has a fresh eye which both Paul and Ken find very useful. The writing, the questioning, the examining of possibilities is an ongoing process and can even go on throughout the shoot as it did in this film. While there is always space for improvisation with the actors, (around a scene which has already been carefully crafted) and for the unexpected jewels Ken often uncovers and creates in the shoot, the final script is usually very close to the finished film.

The Irish War of Independence was a guerrilla war - one of the first of its kind - so fortunately we didn't need vast armies of soldiers to portray what took place. This enabled us to keep the production to a certain scale - we couldn't have afforded to do the grand battle - but the history we were exploring didn't need that sort of imagery to give it a powerful effect. That said, this film was on a slightly grander scale than our recent films. The cast and crew soon realised the scale of the production and made a stupendous effort to achieve the film within a seven week schedule. So what could have been a monster just became a challenge with everyone working together to meet it. Unlike Land and Freedom, which was the last period war film we did, we had the advantage of a common language. On a film of this scale it's important to be around the shooting as much as possible just because there are so many more potential problems - especially when you have fire-arms, a large cast and big distances between locations. My presence is just to try and nip those problems in the bud - we couldn't afford too many disasters as we just didn't have the money to solve them. Anyway, it was great to be around.

One of the best things about filmmaking for me is the amount you learn on each production - not just the history but the way the people you work with react to the story and involve themselves with it. People had a great commitment to telling this story. Within the crew there was a core team who we've worked with over a number of productions. That gives you confidence that even the worst problems will find solutions, and there is a real security in that knowledge. That's why our production methods, although unconventional (e.g. shooting in sequence), can seem relaxed and malleable. We had lined up to film in the parish church in Bandon but, despite our pleas to the church council, they decided it would not be a good thing so we were stuck without a big church with only a couple of weeks to go. The following weekend, as luck would have it, the designer Fergus spotted a beautiful church by the coast only a few miles away in Timoleague. It was even better for our purposes than the original and required far less preparation. Somehow I always know these things will work out - maybe because so far they always have.

If you count the six individual investors in the film, altogether there were 21 financiers - many of them partners we have worked with frequently in recent years. There was a five way co-production (Irish, British, Italian, German and Spanish); we had funding from three national subsidy bodies (the UKFC, Irish Film Board and Germany's NRW fund); we made 5 pre-sales (Pathe UK, Diaphana France, Cineart Belgium, Film-Coopi Switzerland and TV3 Ireland); there was a major investment from Oil Flick (a group of equity investors), two national tax break schemes (UK and Irish), a grant from Media's i2i fund and Sixteen Films' own investment. The financing plan looked like an exploded birds nest. But it worked and we managed to scrape together just enough money to meet the budget. The only way for us to maintain control over our own production is to raise finance in this way - hence the complex funding.

Now the film is finished I feel we've had an opportunity here to put the best of our skills on the screen. If it doesn't work we can only blame ourselves.

Writer » Paul Laverty

After months of reading, it was the character of Peggy, (the Grandmother who owns the farm, played by Mary O'Riordan), that started growing in my mind first. Sense of memory in Ireland struck me as very acute. I imagined someone like Peggy as a child, experiencing eviction during the famine, and then again in her 30's during the agricultural depression of the 1870's, perhaps with children. The famine had such a catastrophic effect, and was in many ways the product of Ireland being a colony - even as the Irish starved the British continued to export food. Peggy has lived through so much injustice and pain she is a rebel to her marrow. She is absolutely opposed to British rule and under no circumstances will she allow herself to be evicted for a third time.

As memory was passed from one generation to another Peggy was the key to finding the other characters. From her, her daughter Bernadette (played by Mary Murphy) and granddaughter Sinead (played by Orla Fitzgerald), we could get a sense of the role played by the local population in the war, particularly the women, which had to be integral to the script. It was important to emphasise that this was a guerrilla war - and that the volunteers could only take on the might of the British Empire because they had the support of the local population. They provided safe houses, hid guns (punishable by death) and played a key role in the IRA's intelligence network. So Peggy's farmhouse, and the three generation of women who live there, became the root of the story.

Because the War of Independence was a David and Goliath situation, it's easy to fall into a romantic view of the struggle. In 1920, there'd be something like 3,500 rifles in the whole country, and in Cork only 200 - 300 men in the Flying Column - against a British force some 10,000 strong in the form of the Black & Tans, the Auxiliaries, the police and various British Army regiments. Having vivid memories of war close up in Central America, especially El Salvador and Guatemala in the eighties, I remember how terrifying it is when the security forces had licence to operate with absolute impunity. I met people who never slept twice in the same house, trade unionists and human rights activists who were on the run. I met people with children kidnapped, or who had relatives tortured and murdered. There's nothing romantic about that life - it was terrifying and devastating. Although there is camaraderie in any resistance which generates a sense of excitement, there is also a tremendous fear. To be shot at, and to kill, is a very traumatic experience and it damages peoples' psyches. It's no surprise that people who have lived through wars just don't want to talk about it. So, I was really keen that we didn't romanticise the inevitable violence that takes place.

The courage of the local people, despite the odds, really struck me. Ordinary peoples' capacity for resistance is always something that the occupying forces underestimate, and assume they can crush. Most of the volunteers were very young. They had to be. To hide out in the countryside for months took tremendous stamina. Many of them actually came through the GAA sports clubs and so there was already a sense of commitment towards each other and organisation which transferred into politics, and then into the war itself. Deciding to set the film within the flying column was a key decision and gave us tremendous advantages from a story point of view - it's dynamic and dramatic, it's about young people making very radical choices in their lives; it's about courage, fear, betrayal; the excitement of the struggle for independence and also the terror of the war.

We were very keen to keep the characters fictional, although very rooted and informed by the reality. Otherwise you end up getting crucified by the detail and it cuts down your freedom to examine broader ideas that were in the air at the time. It was a challenge to create a range of characters who could reflect that rich complex mix of the times, but try to make them real, three dimensional personalities. Obviously Damien and Teddy were key. A farm labourer is going to have a different outlook to the farmer's son, whom he fights alongside, and they will both differ from the young men from the city. There are characters like Steady Boy (played by Aidan O'Hare), who has lived through the First World War as a British soldier. He was a professional who then brought his experience with the British army to fight the same army in the War of Independence - he's seen so much bloodshed already. Then there's someone like Ned (played by Shane Nott), who is a young farmhand for whom the idea of fighting against the British was actually very exciting. Dan, played by Liam Cunningham, was another key figure. He had been marked by the Dublin lock-out of 1913, and will never forget Irish businessmen like William Martin Murphy, owner of the Irish Independent, who called for the execution of Connolly. Ingrained in his mind too would be leading Republicans like Griffiths, leader of Sinn Fein, who had supported the employers in the lockout as working families starved. In other words, lots of contradictions are under the surface.

What really helped me as I wrote were childhood memories of my Uncle Pat's farm in West Limerick. As a ten year old I remember this remarkable man in his mid-twenties surrounded by his friends. They were physically so strong, and I suspect that same vitality and the spark about them was something the young men in the flying column had in abundance. I remembered my grandmother, who actually looked like Peggy. My cousins' grandfather also used to tell us stories about the Black and Tans. Being steeped in Catholicism through my parents, I could understand what the role of the Church meant and how important religion was in those communities. After the film was made I discovered my Grandfather as a lad had worked closely with the volunteers in Limerick trenching roads, cutting trees and running messages for them on a horse.

All of these things seeped into the preparation, the reading (contradictory accounts), personal letters, the songs, poetry and literature of the times. I spoke to sons of men who were actually in the flying column in West Cork. Looking at their photographs and reading their accounts, sometimes in their own words, sometimes in academic studies gave me a feel for it, and gave me the confidence to try and build an imaginary flying column.

Production Designer » Fergus Clegg

There's a massive amount of material from the period - including a very good picture library in Dublin. I spent a lot of time there, looking for images of the conflict, but also images of the towns and villages of the time. There is a good collection from the period around the turn of the century, including pictures of Bandon - which turned out to be one of the locations that we ended up using.

My concern with the exteriors, the town scenes, was of course the amount of money and time we had. If you have a big budget you can just move into a location and do the whole street - paint it all different colours, put different windows in, take all the roof aerials down, change the railings-neither of which we had much of. So Ken and I were always having discussions about where the resources were best spent. Ken has a very clear idea of what he wants - it's about getting things as accurate as possible, carefully documenting the period, and trying to copy it as closely as possible within our resources.

The locations were a really big challenge - 21st century Ireland has changed such a lot from 1920's Ireland. The challenge was getting away from the modern, painted look in all the small towns, where many of the streets consist of long lines of multicoloured houses. We had to paint them all, and then had to paint them all back again after the shoot. What also became apparent was that the locations weren't localised - they were all over the place, which made planning and organisation a real challenge.

This film was my first design job - but because I've known Ken so long it's been a very gradual thing. I'd worked for Ken's designer, Martin Johnson, for years. He would have loved it here - the challenge of the big job, being in Ireland, and being on the coast. We've all missed him. I think I've inherited his methodology of 'keep it simple'. His ethos was to look at a location, see what was needed, draw it and get it made.

Because a lot of the filming is in West Cork, there's a particular look to the area - the colours that are prevalent in the landscape, and what happens to the stonework. Everything has a kind of lichen growing on it, because it's by the sea, and there's a lot of rain. The challenge with the look of the film is how to keep true to these muted tones of the West Cork landscape and the colours they would have used at the time. Eimer (the costume designer) and I liaised a lot on the colours. Earlier in the year when there was no green, the landscape was amazing - that was the kind of look we felt was right. It lets the action come to the fore - it means you're not fighting bright colours, and all that sort of distraction in the background. It's about letting the actors have the stage.

Deciding on where to place the world of the Anglo-Irish Hamilton (played by Roger Allam) was interesting and a challenge: the locations we found that were appropriate weren't the really high scale mansions that the true aristocrats had, but more the big houses of the landed gentry. Of the two houses that were our top choices one was architecturally much more interesting, but the other one, which we ended up using, had something magical about it. You could tell when you walked in that there was something that you could never reproduce anywhere else. The family had been on that spot for over a thousand years. My head was telling me we should use the other place, but I kept coming back to this house - and Ken felt the same. Sure enough when we started to work on it, it suddenly came to life.

Because it took a lot longer than we thought to find the locations that we wanted, that impacted on the design time - which made it a challenge for the team. But nine times out of ten the first drawings were spot on, so we managed to keep up. I spent a lot of time on set, checking the detail - in this film where the historical accuracy is so important, the look of the film would be really compromised if the details weren't right. So, it was all hands on deck - a busy shoot, but a good one.

Director of Photography » Barry Ackroyd

The Irish weather is of course what really affects the light, which is very soft with lots of cloud and humidity in the air, and it was usually either raining or very damp. When we had reasonably sunny weather, the sunshine was never strong - so it kept the look within the soft tones. It somehow worked out that those warmer days suited the scenes we were doing, and at other times the endless drizzle gave the right mood for the more dramatic scenes. Whenever we had to shoot over a day or more on a scene, we had consistently rainy weather - so that was lucky! Certainly the way Ken works you've got to have a degree of luck - because it's not a question of trying to control the elements, or trying to beat nature. It's more to try and go with nature. If it rains, it never stops us from filming. Obviously the film cameras are so beautifully designed, that they aren't affected by the humidity. Ken is also very good at working out how to shoot with the weather, so for example you can always shoot back-lit. One day was particularly misty and we decided to do a shot with the volunteers walking up to us in the mist. But when we couldn't see them for ages, we decided they would sing as they were approaching. You just get the sound before you see them, which is pretty eerie. It's about learning how not to see things as a problem, and instead just work with them.

In the lighting you try and be truthful to the period, so there was no electric light - we tried to make all our lights look like gas light. I think the natural soft light, combined with the palette in the production and wardrobe design, produced something really nice. The costumes were all made with those colourful, natural dyes - greens, browns and bluish tints - which just seem to work with the actors. I think Eimer (costume designer) has done a beautiful job. The way in which the characters are picked out in the details of the costume really helps when you've got a big ensemble of actors. You might recognise a certain hat, and you might recognise the colours, so you can keep track of them in a group by those associations - like Damien's waistcoat and hat.

What makes filming the ensemble exciting is that you're never just on one person, you're always looking out for what's happening in the group. It's like watching a football match - having a camera follow each individual wouldn't tell you what the whole game was like. So it's about the passing of the dialogue and the movement of the characters. Sometimes what happens by chance is often even better than if you'd designed it. That element of chance is what makes it exciting. You feel you're not tied to learning a rhythm of dialogue, because you know that rhythm won't be the same twice. You just have to empty your mind as you know what's going to happen more or less - and then you don't think about it and let the camera just follow the action.

The techniques we use stay pretty much the same even on a larger, more action driven story. Whereas other films would have been story boarded, for example on the whole ambush sequence, and would have the camera changing for every movement, with Ken it all flows from the simple positioning of the camera. The shots are usually very long. He looks for the logic of where the action takes place and subsequently where the camera should be, very precisely. Actually the military advisors on the film commented on the precision with which Ken was choosing certain locations. Of course, that is a basic principal of filming - both action and non-action-once you've found the right place to put the camera, it never stops telling the story.

There's always a beauty to reality, and I think it's fair to say that none of us on a Ken film would ever try to alter things to make them look more beautiful than they actually are. There's nothing like the real beauty. There's the odd shot of the landscape that is spectacularly beautiful. But these shots are always full of story, and it's not the whole landscape, it's just a tiny part of it. I hope you'll come out from the film thinking you've seen much more of the landscape than you actually have, which works if you've got the right shot in the right place. We've done things using the mist and the light that give a feel for the place, that you wouldn't get unless you were there, that are specific to this place. That's the benefit of sticking to one region - you can see it and feel it.

Costume Designer » Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh

I knew from the start that the colours would be muted and the design would be very natural. The really interesting challenge is to try and get some subtleties across while still staying natural. I started by finding out about the backgrounds to the different characters. I've tried to keep Teddy a bit smarter, to put across his sense of discipline. With Damien, we brought his costume back a bit. I wanted to make sure it still had a bit of edge, while reflecting his ability to listen to people. I think being a doctor he is more concerned with the living conditions of the ordinary people etc., and we wanted something which reflected that humanity.

The really important thing overall was to try and make the cast work as a group. You've got different volunteers coming in and out all the time, and while it's a group of individuals, you have to believe that these are people who move in each other's circle. So you've got to make sure that nobody really sticks out like a sore thumb, but at the same time, you need to be able to get an idea of individual backgrounds, in a subtle way.

What makes a period film work is attention to detail, but then you have to remember that this is a film about ordinary people, and it's not a romanticised vision. It's about making people look real, and things look lived in - rather than something that looks like it's just come from the workroom where someone spent the whole night beading it!

Working with all the extras, most of whom are not actors, has been one of the nicest things about working in Cork. Here, the people are on the film because they are really interested, and the history is still so alive. People come up to you at the end of the day, and tell you that they've had such a great experience, and they're so happy to be involved. Being surrounded by people who are emotionally involved and who are excited to be taking part, really rubs off. It gives you a bit of extra faith in why you're doing what you do.

Casting » Oonagh Kearney

The first priority was to find the Flying Column. It always felt like it was going to be made up of about 15 - 20 people, focusing on certain key characters. I had to start thinking of all the Cork actors, either living here or elsewhere, who would be in the right age-group. Immediately lots of people sprung to mind, and I was able to get names and numbers quite quickly through the theatre scene in Cork. Then we planned castings in Cork, and in London. Because there was so much interest, it actually really helped that we were specifically looking for people from Cork-we could limit the search a bit. As time went on we started to get in contact with the agents. We also went to schools and to Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) clubs, and we ended up being spoilt for choice. Ken was generous with his time. He wanted to see everyone who might fit the bill, because he'd say 'well, you never know'. Because he's so experienced at finding actors in unlikely situations, he knows you might see 20 people and find just one who is perfect, and it will have been a really worthwhile casting session. It took us the full four months to cast the Flying Column.

The Flying Column is a mix of professional actors and non-professionals. The very earliest sessions were just to meet people. Often Ken would meet two people together, and just have a chat with them, and get a sense of who they were. Then as time went on, especially for call back sessions, he'd ask them to do little improvisations, or 'conversations' as he'd call them. This usually involved taking contemporary situations and seeing how people would naturally respond in a certain circumstance. It's also a very useful way of seeing whether they can think on their feet, and be good at getting their point across.

When we had a rough idea of the locations we concentrated our castings in those areas. Even if we didn't cast anyone on a particular day, we knew which people would be good for the crowd scenes and smaller parts. For example, in the scene in the Cinema where they watch the newsreel of the Treaty signing in London, we put people in the audience who we knew had an interest in, and a sense of the importance of, that moment in Irish history. You could also place people with different points of view in scenes where you wanted them to spark off each other. Ken has a great memory for characters - he'd ring and say, 'you remember in the Cinema scene there was a guy sitting second row from the back who was really interested and who contributed really well, let's get him in to the Treaty scene'.

There was a sense of excitement among people, that they would have a chance to talk about something that so many of them have a personal connection with. The posters we put up weren't big, 'screaming' movie posters - they were a bit more subtle - but it meant that people who came to castings actually had a real interest in the subject.

Editor » Jonathan Morris

When Ken gets back from filming we start from the beginning, we don't do an assembly, we just go straight into a first cut. The most exciting time on the whole film (I think for Ken as well), is the first viewing - which only Ken, myself and Anthony (assistant editor) are at. That's usually a very long and rambling cut - but it's always the best time to see it, there's nothing like that! We've done so much together, and we've seen it on the Steinbeck, so usually by this time we're excited and hopeful. Then hopefully by the next cut we have taken masses out. I think we're much more aware of length these days - much more rigorous. Maybe that's about old age and growing impatient. The fact that there's nothing worse than putting people in a position where they feel resentful because they're not interested, or entertained. Sometimes attempts to keep the film moving are hampered by practical constraints. In the past we may have had actors speaking English when it wasn't their mother tongue, so the pace of the dialogue can be slower. Sometimes there's a complicated plot which takes quite a bit of explaining. Also in the past we used to stick more closely to the rules of social realism, whereas now we might cut in or out earlier, instead of having a scene in its entirety. I felt there was nothing really on this film that held us up, so we could keep it moving along nicely.

But there's a delicate balance always between this and finding enough room for people to breathe. I hope we achieve this by lengthening the odd shot here and there, and by leaving space for the music - which is something we were particularly conscious of this time round. We'd look at a particular point (for example when the volunteers are leading Chris and Hamilton, the land owner, through the landscape) and know that George Fenton (composer) could do something really good here. It's just giving the audience a chance to enjoy what they're looking at, and to reflect.

Generally the action scenes are the straight forward scenes to cut on Ken's films, and the dialogue scenes are harder - there's usually so much material, and a lot of points to get across. But the performances across the board on this were really professional, so that made the ensemble scenes much easier to work with. The challenge was in the way the guys spoke, and we had to try and cut out language that didn't belong to the period. Ken gives the actors free rein, and particularly in the discussions where there are a lot of people speaking and they're all sparking off each other, it's quite tricky trying to keep the idiom as period as possible without limiting the performance.

The way Ken and I work together is instinctive - I know what he wants, and I know what I want and usually that's the same thing. Unusually, we edit on film. I this because you have moments of downtime while the film is rewinding, or you're changing reels. On Avid everything is instant, and your brain can become a bit addled after a non-stop day. A little reflection is no bad thing!

Cast Notes »