Real to Reel - Tim Bevan
The thing about a lot of films about war is that the directors tend to hijack them, because every film director that I've ever come across wants to make a war movie, and they want to get the hardware and they want to do the explosions, and they want to do all the rest of it. So when you're actually producing a film that depicts war the producers' job is really to hold to what the film's meant to be about. And it's hard; Atonement a is a literary conceit about a little girl who tells a lie, and the devastating effect that that has on her that those around her. And that you need to make sure that the war is only being used to support that. And in fact that the the strongest image in Atonement came about, the war image, came about because of the budgetary consideration. Is that the director wanted, got sort of seduced by, the whole idea of redoing the Second World War, as it were, and we said listen you can't do that, and he said well can I use all of the resources that we've got and spend them in a day? And that's where the big shot that is at the heart of the war depicted in Atonement came from. So it's an interesting story that one.
The challenging thing is to ensure that the emotion of whatever the film is that you're trying to make, is still it... the problem is is just so much stuff in a war film because there's guns, there's cars, there's tanks, there's planes, there's people, there's blood, there's this, there's that, and it's very easy for that to crush whatever you're trying to make the movie about, so the producers... the real challenge is to make sure that the emotion that you're going for, whatever that is, is at the front and center of whatever you're doing. And one of the things that, I was thinking about this the other day, is one of the... because you can never really lay on a war, as it were, you never it's ever gonna actually feel like that, so that an interpretation of it was really important, and quite often the single shot is a really an interesting way of doing it. And if you look at Private Ryan, you look at Paths of Glory, you look at actually images in The Deer Hunter, it's quite often where all, everything's contained inside a single shot, that there's some sort of pressure that takes place there. So it's about interpreting like anything. And in many ways because you're not really going towards, like it's like a lot of cinema, it's magic realism and it's how do you go about doing that?
Yeah, I think you need to it's like any movie you need to get, is especially when it's based on real events, is you can never totally recreate real events, you know, but what you're aiming for is to get the tone of it absolutely right, and if you get the tone of it absolutely right, on the whole people who've been associated with those events will forgive you.
Interestingly because of what's going on in the world, is that there is much more interesting to make films about Brexit or about Trump, to be quite honest, because I think the real conflict zone is actually in civilian life rather than the military life. And that in the next four or five years, and I think you're going to see some whatever, I think you're going to see some very interesting creative projects coming out of what's going on at the moment.
Producer Tim Bevan may have had a hand in war films including Atonement, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Birdsong but he thinks a new kind of conflict could come to dominate cinema in the near future.
While there will always be a place for the human stories told by war films Tim Bevan, who is co-founder of production company Working Title, is watching another arena for signs of a struggle with the potential to capture the imagination of emerging filmmakers.
'I think that, with what’s happening in the world, over the next four years we will be seeing a lot of conflict in civilian life,' he said. 'It might be more interesting to make films about Trump and Brexit, and whatever happens, you’re going to see some very creative projects coming out of what’s happening at the moment.'
Bevan, who is currently working on a film based on the 1976 hostage rescue mission carried out at Entebbe Airport, is no stranger to creating films in challenging circumstances.
'When we were filming Atonement, the greatest shot came out of necessity, 'he said. 'The director essentially wanted to recreate all of WWII on screen and we had to tell him "No, you can’t do that on the budget we have". So he came up with the idea of taking all that money and ploughing it into one scene [a five-minute tracking shot of the beaches at Dunkirk] and that really became the heart of the film.'
Speaking at IWM’s Conflict and Creative License event, which saw filmmakers discuss the appeal of war films, Bevan was clear about his approach to communicating the experience of real-life stories of war in his work.
'You’re never going to capture what it’s like to really be there,' he said. 'But if you strive to get the tone right, then by and large, the people who have been through that experience of war will forgive you.'
