How Canada contributed to Oscars frontrunner 1917

Sam Mendes's First World War epic1917 started life as a series of stories told to him by his grandfather, Alfred Mendes, as the Trinidadian-born soldiercrisscrossed European borders with the British forces.

The production that came out of it about two infantrymen tasked with reachinganother division to warn themof a German ambush is no slouch. It's won sevenBAFTAS, earned 10Oscars nominations, and made over $250 million US so far at the global box office. It's a fully British success storywith a (mostly) British cast to match.

But behind the scenes, not everything was made in Britain.The film relied significantly on Canadian contributions for its historical accuracy, and the technique that allowed it through complex planning, editing and camera work to masquerade asone continuous, unedited shot.

Gord Beck, a map specialist at McMaster University in Hamilton, was one of those contributors. Hidden in a low-ceilinged, brightly lit back room of Mills Memorial Library,he managesthe university's substantialonline collection of maps from the First and Second World Wars.

'That's super cool'

The collectionincludesaerial photos,topographic and trench maps straight from the areas and battles they diagram, sometimes marked in bullet holes, mud and blood.

And one of them more than 100 years old and lying on the table in front of Beck played a significant role in Mendes's movie.

"That's super cool," he said, describing what it was like after he finally saw1917. "Just the fact that you're touching this map ... and then you see somebody on the other side of the ocean, a famous person, actually using it in a film."

McMaster map specialist on their contribution to 1917

5 years ago

Duration 1:25

Gord Beck, map specialist at McMaster University, details the map that eventually ended up in the hands of Colin Firth on the set of Oscars frontrunner 1917.

The mapis a British one. Dated April 23, 1917 at 6p.m., it outlines France'sWestern Front near the end of the First World Wararound cities and villages likecoust-St. -Mein, Arrasand Croisilles. They're also all areas 1917's two protagonists must pass through, which led the film's production team to repurpose it.

Map collection's many uses

Printed off from McMaster'sdigital collection, it is visible in an opening scene as actor Colin Firth outlines the path Lance-Cpl. Tom Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Lance-Cpl. William Schofield (George MacKay) must take to warn a division of soldiers of a Germanambush.

Beck says members of the film's production team contacted him in early 2019 asking to use the map. They found it in McMaster's online catalogue of more than 5,500 digitized images, which has becomean important resource for historical productions and period pieces.

"Right now we have the largest First and Second World War collection of maps and air photos in the world online," Beck said. "We've been called by multiple movie production companies to use our material."

McMaster purchased its core collection from European auctions in the late '60s. Most of the university's World War maps arrived in 2009, when the university received a grantfrom the Canadian Heritage ministry. Library staff began digitizing the collection in 2012for inclusion in a free-to-use online catalogue.

It wasmostly intended for academic and archeological work. Acompany in France uses the maps in conjunction with ground-penetrating radar to avoid subways or shopping malls being built overburied World War dugouts.

Pieces from the collection have also been featured in aVimy Ridge Heritage Minute by Historica Canada, the Dan AykroyddocumentaryDrawn to Victory, and 2014'sFury,starring Brad Pitt. Another upcomingFirth production,Operation Mincemeat, hasalso asked McMaster for permission to use 20 of their Second World War maps, Beck said.

Canadian production designer behind1917's look

1917's unique,single-shot look also directly relied on the efforts of another Canadian: Vancouver-born production designer Dennis Gassner.

The seven-time Academy Award nominee built kilometres of trenches, towns and farms for the movie. He spent four months simply "walking" out the dialogue on location to measure the character's movementbefore even beginning to plan the sets.

"We knew it was going to be kind of inch by inch planning, and that's basically how we did it," Gassner, 71, said in an interview.

"We had to measure it, we had to create it, and we had to draw it. We had to model it, we had to build it and then we had to shoot it."

1917marksGassner'sfifth collaboration with Mendes. They collaboratedonRoad to Perdition andJarhead, as well as Bond filmsSpectreandSkyfall.Gassner actually passed on the opportunity to work on the next Bond offering,No Time to Die,in order to develop1917.

Inspiration for the continuous shotcame fromSpectre's opening Day of the Deadscene, which used similar editing techniques for the four-minute sequence.

That inspiration led to hisOscarnomination for production design,which heshares with set decorator Lee Sandales. But Gassner said it was something else that inspired him while working on the film.

As they were scouting locations in France, Gassner said he ended up on a tour at the Somme, the site of a historic First World War battle that saw casualties of more than24,000 Canadian soldiers. He described hearing a familiar accent, pulling a young woman to the side and asking if she was Canadian.

She told him she was. She had visited the site because of its connection to Canadian history.

"All of a sudden, my DNA kind of stepped up into this realm of 'I'm invested now,'" Gassner said."And I understand now why I had to do this filmbecause of my history.

"I needed to have something that was grounding for me, and that was one of the bases of that."