First-time feature filmmaker Yann Demange came out of British television and directed one of the most powerful films of the year with ’71, the story of a young British soldier (Jack O’Connell of UNBROKEN and STARRED UP) circa 1971 who is part of a crowd control unit sent the streets of Belfast, Ireland, to break up crowds, when a riot breaks out and he is accidentally left behind to fend for himself. The film is a fascinating look at the place and time, because not everyone in Belfast sided with the militant factions. Some did what they could to help the young soldier, some wanted to capture him as a bargaining chip, and some just wanted him dead.
The film isn’t meant to be political or take sides, but it is indicative of how all sides of a conflict will attempt to take advantage of a mishap like this. It’s also a tense and terrifying war drama, and if you missed it in theaters earlier this year, you have a chance to catch it this week on home video and VOD on July 7. It’s already become a part of the conversation of the best films of the year so far, and you absolutely should not miss is. I had a chance to speak with director Yann Demange back when the film was in theaters; please enjoy…
Yann Demange: Hi, Steve. It’s Yann. How are you doing?
Capone: Good. How are you?
YD: I’m very well, thank you.
Capone: As I was watching ’71, I had assumed it was based on a true story, but I was shocked to find out that it was not.
YD: No, it’s anecdotal, almost, because every detail happened in some way, shape, or form. But this is definitely a fiction film.
Capone: I know [screenwriter] Gregory Burke mostly as a playwright. How did you get involved in this? How did he get involved in this?
YD: Initially, it was Angus Lamont, the producer, had an idea. He wanted to do something about a solider left behind because someone he grew up with went to the Army and was affected by that conflict, shall we say. He doesn’t like talking about it, but it’s really something that he felt emotional and personal about. And he approached Gregory Burke, who really responded to it, and they came to me when they had a draft. I came on last. And when I read the screenplay, I internally responded to it. Thematically, it felt very pertinent to today. I just felt when I read it I was like, “Oh my god, this is contemporary. This could be about Iraq or Afghanistan.” Gregory really managed to identify a pattern in human behavior that unfortunately keeps fucking repeating itself. Thematically, it talked about a lot of things that I had been engaging with in films that I tried to develop and hadn't come off, about children growing up in conflict, about tribalism, the anarchy of it. I just connected on a very personal level to it.
Capone: You immediately wonder when someone does a period film, why did they do this now? And the thing that really struck me—and it strikes me today in modern conflict—is that so often these young soldiers have no idea what’s going on in the place where they’re going. These British soldiers might as well have been sent to another continent, because they’re just as knowledgeable about what might be going on in the Middle East as they are in Northern Ireland, which is not at all. Can you talk a little bit about that aspect of it?
YD: It’s exactly that. There are no noble wars anymore. No one really knows what’s going on. And it felt very contemporary in that respect. It’s a particular kind of conflict, because they all look the same, they spoke the same language, but back then, when you’re 17-, 18-year-old from the north of England, unless your parents are Irish or of Irish decent, you have no clue. You might as well be talking about the Middle East. It’s not like they’re reading local papers or international ones, let alone looking on the internet. So yeah, it’s very contemporary in that respect, and the parallels are very similar.
It’s a pattern that repeats itself. The Army is a lot of boys who are sometimes seeking the paternal, a sense of tribe, a sense of home, a sense of family, a sense of belonging. They join the Army and they’re told, “We’re your family now. We’re looking after you. We’ll take care of you. You don’t need to think for yourselves. You’ve found your tribe.” There’s often a terrible betrayal that takes place with these quick sacrifices of boys lives. And no one can ever look someone in the eye, especially not the parents of someone who’s lost their kids in these conflicts and explain what it was about, let alone the kids themselves.
These kids often have more in common with the kids they’re pitted against than those they’re taking orders from. They have no idea. And when you go to the Middle East and you see a young girl in a burka or you see a kid of a different color, it’s easier to think the divides are wider, but what I found really fascinating with this conflict is they look the same and they sound the same. But the divide, the differences, are just as big. But actually that visual thing of them not looking too dissimilar, the absurdity of it is amplified, because culturally they’re not worlds apart.
Capone: These guys are just the flip side of each other.
YD: Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, it’s reductive to say that, but in many ways, it’s the truth. They’re usually the poor pitted against the poor. Let’s face it. They’re the poorest factions of society pitted against each other. A young boy in the West, a boy from poverty, often chooses the Army who is then sent to fight other young boys in poverty manipulated by some other. There are more complexities at play, but on a base level, there’s a truth to that.
Capone: As much as this story is not just about the troubles in Northern Ireland, it’s very clear to me that you wanted to get the details right. Did you have advisors or experts there, and what did they add to the whole experience?
YD: It’s very important to get the period detail right. For me, you pop straight out of a film if the details aren’t right. You’re creating a world and you’re only as strong as your weakest link. It’s the same with extras, it’s the same with all these details. you’ve got to pay attention to the small details that cumulatively built the world. Otherwise, people will pop out. I’m really bad like that when I’m watching something. If a period details isn’t right or I get a sense that someone’s wearing a wig, I’m out of the movie in seconds. There’s nothing I hate more than wigs in period films, for instance. These things matter.
Capone: It struck me that Jack O’Connell doesn’t have a lot of dialogue as Gary. He’s mostly reacting and running away and just being in a lot of pain and scared. But Jack O’Connell has a really expressive face, and he says a lot with just a lot of looks here. How did you find him?
YD: No, I cast him before those films. I cast him before STARRED UP. In fact, he had been wanting to do STARRED UP, and because ours was a monster to prep, and theirs was light on its feet, and we had the same investors, my producers and their producers got together, and they decided they should move their shoot forward and I brought my shoot back a little bit to accommodate him doing both films.
What can I say? You just said it yourself. He’s wonderfully expressive. He’s a star. What does that mean? It’s a nebulous concept, but in this instance, I’d say he’s a real screen star because he knows how to hold a silent moment. He knows how to communicate an idea. You know what he’s thinking and feeling without him trying to sign post it for you. You feel an intimacy from him, and that’s a quality that not many actors have, but when they have it, you empathize, you know he’s got edges, he’s a complicated human being, and he’s got this raw masculinity that you don’t see a lot of nowadays in his generation.
He’s the person people are forever writing about and writing parts for, but ultimately in this industry they’re always fucking scared of it. You end up with young boys doing a proximity of masculinity, but he just has it. It’s not affected; it’s real. It doesn’t mean he’s difficult; it means he’s raw. He grew up wanting to play soccer or be in the Army, and he stumbled into acting, and he’s absolutely smashing it. I’m in his corner and I’m rooting for him and I can’t wait to see what he does next.
Capone: Let’s hope he never figures that out, that it just happens naturally over the next few years.
YD: I think he won’t figure it out. What’s wonderful about him is he decides not to be self-conscious. He really is in the moment; it’s almost Zen-like without the pretensions of having read the self-help books. He doesn’t think about it, he just reacts to what’s going on. He’s very honest. If he’s not feeling something, he won’t do it. I saw him recently, and we talked about how he’s choosing what projects to do next, because the biggest problem he has now is about choice. He’s got good instincts, man. And as long as he keeps good people around him, he’ll be okay.
Capone: I want to talk about two very specific scenes, and actually they’re one right after the other. The riot scene is incredible. The way you escalate the tension in that scene—there’s a rhythm to it. How did you achieve that? Did you have to storyboard that?
YD: Yeah, I did storyboards, but storyboards are a way to communicate with a team what’s going on, especially with sequences like that when you have so many people working on it. Storyboards are good anchors to the whole team on one end, to let you know the beats you’re capturing, but I’ve never stuck to a storyboarded frame in my life. Personally, I don’t like to create a blueprint that I just go off an execute. I create a plan, and then I just hope I get better ideas in the moment, and if I don’t then I revert back to the plan. Whenever I revert back to the plan, it’s a bit flat.
Capone: But something like that feels like it had to be perfect.
YD: It’s meticulously planned. I had built a model of the street, and me and the DP choreographed it with Lego characters and models. It was meticulously planned in that sense of how the riot should play out. And then the way I shot it, I didn’t break it down into coverage, because I have 150 extras, 80 percent of which had never been on a film set before because I wanted the faces to feel real. You’ve got 70-year-old people who responded to a newspaper article. So I spent the first eight hours of the three days I had to shoot it just directing the extras. I didn’t turn over for eight hours. Everyone was a bit scared. I was like, “Look, once it’s up and running, we’ll shoot fast.” That’s what happened.
We spent eight hours on the extras choreographing the riot, and then just let it play out in long takes. Each time we do a take, it was like 10 minutes, 8 minutes; we shot the whole thing from beginning to end, and then we changed the points of view from where we were covering it. But what happened is we created a riot that was happening in real time in front of us, and then we plunged the characters and cameras into it. Once the riot was like a living, breathing organism almost, and they knew what they were up to, and it was anchored, that gave Jack O’Connell and the principles something to react to. I wasn’t breaking it into coverage: “Now I’m going for your reaction shot.” It was happening. Every time I did it, I was changing where the camera was and I knew where it was. It was just grabbing moments, and you were thrown in the middle of it.
Capone: So you shot it like a documentary?
YD: I absolutely did that like a documentary. But unlike a documentary, you’re not on the outside looking in, you’re immersed. And I used different techniques for the rest of the film.
Capone: Right after that you have this amazing foot chase that is one of the best I’ve seen in recent memory. Again, how do you plan that? Where do you shoot that?
YD: Thank you. That was really tricky because you don't have the locations. I looked at all my favorite chase films. Obviously at that point when you talk about foot chases, you have to match Katherine Bigelow’s POINT BREAK. I remember when I first saw that as a child—I was maybe six—and I still watch that now as I’ve aged. She’s a wonderful filmmaker. Even in the beginning of STRANGE DAYS—that viscera that she can put in a sequence.
So I looked at all my favorite chasing sequences, and I was like, you know what? In my favorite ones, I noticed one thing: they burn through a lot of locations. You need a lot of spaces. So I ended up shooting that scene over three or four different scenes, spread over a month or six weeks. It was an eight-week shoot, and I carried shots from that chase all the way through. I’d be like, “This afternoon, we’re doing two hours of the chase.” That took a lot of planning. I created a route, spread over three different cities. If people actually knew the locations, they’d be like, “Wait a minute, that’s Liverpool. That’s Sheffield.” I was all over the place.
Capone: There’s an image in that part of the film of a child grabbing a gun, and it gave me a chill. Are you aware of the power of that image?
YD: I’m looking at the image now. One of the big things I wanted to convey is children growing up in conflict, and that’s something that me and the DP brought to it. The writer only said “Two soldiers get left behind,” but it didn’t quite ring true how we did it. So we came up with—using the model and the little LEGO figurines we were playing with—the idea of the child, and seeing a child running with a machine gun. And for me, it summed up this thing. We introduced this idea of the younger brother, and the image of him running after a kid who could be his brother, holding a machine gun; or the image of holding a kid in an explosion that could be his younger brother. We were playing with this imagery, absolutely consciously.
Capone: The film is not an exercise in pointing fingers or answering questions about this conflict. It’s just dropping us into this guy’s life for a day and then pulling us out. But in a way, it defines the era. Was it tough keeping your point of view more or less neutral?
YD: Making sure we trode the shades of grey was hard. First of all, as an outsider, I’m not Anglo-Saxon; I’m not Celtic. I could not feel comfortable with taking sides, and as you say, it’s not about that. In many ways, I felt quite free because there’d be many wonderful movies about the troubles—from HUNGER, BLOODY SUNDAY, HIDDEN AGENDA to Alan Clarke’s ELEPHANT [a 1989 short], which I think is a masterpiece. You have all these films that have tackled it, so it took a lot of the responsibility away from that. I felt comfortable going, “I’m not going to try and give people a history lesson. I’m going to try and create something quite immersive, experiential, and craft a sense of the anarchy and what it might feel like to be on the ground in one of these things, and not have an overview, but not be able to see the wolf through the trees just like the character, so you could be wedded to his experience and point of view.”
We were constantly trying to make sure that we were engaging with the shades of grey and humanizing it and not taking sides or pointing fingers or, like you say, offering answers. That’s not my job. I don’t feel comfortable doing that I’m not bright enough to do that anyway. I’m just trying to connect with the human beings.
Capone: I read somewhere that you had—and I’ve heard of other people doing this—a tone book? What was in that?
YD: I’m obsessed with tone books. I’m creating one right now for another film I’m developing. You’re creating a world. I learned very early on, on a short film I worked on that I hadn’t done that, halfway through the process I realized that we were all trying to make our own version of the film. And what’s most important is we’re all invested. It’s not me dictating to everybody else. We’re all together. It’s all the imaginations together. We’re all working towards one end, trying to make the same film. And what a tone book does is it creates this world, it creates something tangible that we can all talk about and refer to and all the heads of departments can contribute to.
It’s like the bible of what we are trying to do. In the deepest, darkest moments, where me might loose our nerve later on and try and grab for the easy idea, if we refer back to this tone document, it’s the mission statement of what we’re trying to create. I think it’s very important to share images, to share film clips, to talk openly about things like POINT BREAK, BATTLE OF ALGIERS, HUNGER—the cinema that has existed, things we know are out there, we reference them very openly and talk about what we like, what we think, what we want to include, what we don’t.
People are talking about Caravaggio in one scene, or photographs of Bill Henson, and how we want the blacks of the street lights to look on skin tone, and looking at Walter Hill’s WARRIORS and Carpenter’s ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK. All these movies washing over me, but they’re in the tone document, and what we like about it, and how they’re relatable to this film, and in what way, and why we want the lighting to behave in a certain way at certain points of the story and how the mise en scene affects the tone. And yes, it’s like realism and documentary, but as soon as the sun goes down, the film takes on a mystic quality and becomes more impressionistic at times. The language, the grammar of the film behaves in a different way.
Capone: It literally keeps everyone on the same page, literally.
YD: Exactly. It keeps everyone on the same page, but also it keeps everyone invested, because I invite everyone to give me a playlist—give me 10 tracks this film makes you think of. It’s not a test. Just share. And bit by bit, we start collating bits that create the world. So it’s making sure everyone sees from the same image sheet, but it also makes sure everyone’s invested, so they play a part in the creation of this.
Capone: Yann, thank you so much for your time. Best of luck.
