julian_craster

Overlord is re-released to cinemas on February 1, and released on R2 DVD (UK, Europe) on March 3 2008. It is also on a R1 DVD (US) from Criterion.


A camera instead of a rifle
Combining real and staged footage, Overlord is a remarkable account of
D-Day. Director Stuart Cooper explains his debt to the film-makers who
followed soldiers into battle

Friday January 18, 2008
The Guardian
http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,2242356,00.html

In a storage box that has seen several London houses, a home in north
Africa, and a number of places in California, I recently discovered a file
labelled "Overlord correspondence". What is Overlord, you may ask? Apart
from being the code-name for the D-Day landings, it's also the title of a
feature film I made in the mid-1970s and which is, I'm delighted to say, now
being re-released following a screening at the Telluride film festival.

Two documents caught my attention. The first was a contract dated July 11
1972, from James Quinn, the former head of the British Film Institute and
producer of Don Levy's 60s experimental film Herostratus. This, headed
"Films For The Imperial War Museum", engaged me as writer and director of a
short documentary film of about 20 minutes long on the subject of an
embroidery that depicted the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944. The
Overlord Embroidery was commissioned in 1968 by Lord Dulverton as a
permanent memorial to the Allied forces that liberated Europe in the second
world war; in many ways, it's the modern counterpart of the 11th-century
Bayeux tapestry, and is the largest work of its kind in existence. I never
made the documentary; Quinn finished it off himself a few years later.
But it did lead directly to making another, much longer film: an 89-minute,
black-and-white feature that combined live action and archive footage from
the Imperial War Museum. The second document, a memorandum dated February
16, 1978, from the National Film Finance Corporation, established the final
certified cost of Overlord: £89,951. Not a large budget, even in the 1970s,
but without the participation of the museum, the budget would have increased
tenfold. If memory serves, this sum included a show print and posters for
the film's premiere at the Berlin film festival in the summer of 1975, where
it received the special jury prize.

That came later. Back in June 1971, still working on the Embroidery
documentary, I filmed scenes of it being woven at the Royal School of
Needlework before beginning research in the film archive of the Imperial War
Museum. This is where "the path less travelled" comes to play. The museum
had approximately 39m feet of archive film concerned with the second world
war and a further 14m feet on the first. The majority of the archive was on
nitrate film. Viewing it meant sitting in a cell - literally, bearing in
mind that the Imperial War Museum was on the site of the Bedlam hospital -
at a Steenbeck projection system with a bucket of sand on the floor in case
the film burst into flames. On average, 25 to 30 reels awaited me daily to
look through and make copious notes.

Before starting research, I was introduced to the museum's very patient
keeper of film, Anne Fleming, who politely asked me: "What portion of the
archive would you like to view?" Knowing little about it, I remember saying:
"As I am here, I might as well look at the entire collection." "Fine,"
responded Fleming, "will you come Monday through Friday?" "Yes," I
responded. "Very good, Mr Cooper, if you view Monday through Friday, nine to
four daily, you might get through the collection in about nine years." She
suggested the card catalogue to narrow the field.

The 5x8 card catalogue was a huge, rather chaotic system that took days to
weed through and make reference notes. While much of the archive is made up
of newsreels, compilation films and captured German footage, a great portion
of it is raw, mute footage filmed by the army, navy and air force cameramen,
trained as soldiers but who carried a camera instead of a rifle. This
footage was often the source material for the propaganda films of the war.
Anyone interested might want to dig out a documentary in the Imperial War
Museum's vaults entitled Cameramen at War, which was produced by the British
Ministry of Information in 1943.

I spent approximately 3,000 hours in that dark cell between 1971 and 1975,
briefly interrupted by a couple of other projects. It was during the
archival research that I developed the idea of a dramatised feature film
about an English soldier who sees his first action on D-Day, interweaving
the archive footage to expand and tell the story. More research in the
museum's document section - reading letters and unpublished diaries of
ordinary soldiers who saw action in the first wave of D-Day - refined the
concept.

A writer, Christopher Hudson, then came aboard to continue the research and
co-write the screenplay. What became apparent about the writing process was
that until we knew what the film archive would support in narrative form, we
could not write the screenplay. In other words, the film archive controlled
what historical events our soldier's story would encompass. Once that was
established, Hudson was able to dramatise some wonderful and totally
original scenes extracted from diaries and letters of real servicemen.

Ironically, the only rival we had in the museum's archive was The World at
War, the now-legendary 26-episode TV documentary series. Overlord is the
antithesis of The World at War, as it was to all other war films of the
period. Overlord is not about military heroics; on the contrary, it is about
the bleakness of sacrifice. The interweaving of the archive creates an
authenticity not achieved anywhere else.

A major concern for my cinematographer, John Alcott, was how to match the
texture of the archive footage. In an unprecedented move, the museum granted
us access to the original nitrate negatives. The quality of the original
nitrate negatives was pristine. After Alcott examined them, we decided to
film Overlord on period lenses. Alcott scoured England and found two sets of
1936 and 1938 German Goetz and Schneider lenses. Alcott then applied a
lighting style in keeping with the war photography, seamlessly blending the
archive and dramatised story. Seventy per cent of the film is live action,
which was completed in 10 days of filming.

None of it would have been possible without the help of the Imperial War
Museum. It connected us to the Ministry of Defence, which became involved
with our endeavour. Overlord's actors were trained by the Royal Marines; we
used their landing craft; old 1940 barracks were opened to use as locations
and the last operational Lancaster bomber was flown over the Bristol coast
for us to film. Military costumes, weapons and props came from the basement
of the museum. The production and costume design was created by museum
curators. Their historical knowledge was invaluable.

In spite of Overlord's festival success, it never gained distribution in the
US - which I suspect hurt its chances of being properly remembered. It may
also have been because it was made during the tail-end of the Vietnam war,
as well as being a black-and-white film with a very British story. The only
airing the film received in the US was on Jerry Harvey's Z Channel in 1982,
a forerunner to US cable stations. Twenty-two years later Xan Cassavetes,
John Cassavetes' daughter, included several clips of Overlord in her 2004
documentary Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession. As a result, Overlord was
invited to the Telluride film festival, where it was a surprise success.
Shortly afterwards it was belatedly picked up for US distribution.

A year after Overlord came out, John Alcott won a cinematography Oscar for
Barry Lyndon. Kubrick asked Alcott to bring me in for a meeting as he had
just seen Overlord. We talked mechanics. He was interested in the archive,
the lenses and how we blended the footage. At the end he said, "You know
Stu, I've got one problem with the film." Oh, what's that Stanley? I asked.
He smiled. "The only thing wrong with Overlord is it's an hour and a half
too short."

julian_craster

NOTE: This film is on BBC4 tv on Monday next as part of the war films season......

More on the film:
Overlord Stuart Cooper

julian_craster

On BBC4 tv tonight !

Aenima

I thought this was stunning. Very simple, very effective. Really mad I didn't record it. Hope those who watched it enjoyed it too.

Cheers,

A

I'll 'av 'arf

winsfordtown

Nicholas Ball looked very young

penfold

I was at work, and didn't catch the advance notices....from what I saw, I'll be seeking out the DVD.

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

wayshway

Cool.