"A ground-breaking documentary directed and produced by Peter Jackson" comes They Shall Not Grow Old. This World War I documentary film directed and produced by Jackson. Using state-of-the-art technology and materials from the BBC and Imperial War Museum, Jackson allows the story of World War I to be told by the men who were there. Life on the front is explored through the voices of the soldiers, who discuss their feelings about the conflict, the food they ate, the friends they made and their dreams of the future. The title was inspired by the line "They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old" from the 1914 poem For the Fallen by Laurence Binyon, famous for being used in the Ode of Remembrance.
In 2015, Jackson was first approached about working on the film by 14-18 NOW and Imperial War Museums in association with the BBC. Jackson was allowed unlimited access to the IWM film archives, as well as the BBC's film and TV library. He was told he could do whatever he wanted with the project just as long as it was respectful and interesting. This would mark Jackson's first documentary since the mockumentary Forgotten Silver in 1995, and the West Memphis Three documentary West of Memphis in 2012. Jackson intended for the film to be an immersive experience of "what it was like to be a soldier" rather than a story or a recount of events. Jackson commented: "This is not a story of the First World War, it is not a historical story, it may not even be entirely accurate but it's the memories of the men who fought - they're just giving their impressions of what it was like to be a soldier." Jackson's own paternal grandfather, Sgt. William Jackson, to whom the film is dedicated, was British and fought in World War I; Peter grew up with his father telling him his grandfather's war stories. Jackson stated that after making the film, he now had "a greater understanding of what my grandfather would have gone through." Jackson considers this his most personal film, due to his lifelong fascination with WWI and the resonance he felt through his grandfather who died before his birth due to war injuries. Such was his interest in the subject that when production on the documentary began he already had a large personal collection in storage of WW1 uniforms and weapons to be used for reference.
The film was created using original footage of World War I from the IWM's archives, most of it previously unseen, alongside audio from BBC and IWM interviews of British servicemen who fought in the conflict. Most of the footage has been colourized and transformed with modern production techniques, with the addition of sound effects and voice acting to be more evocative and feel closer to the soldiers' actual experiences. According to Jackson, the crew reviewed 600 hours of interviews from the BBC and the IWM, and 100 hours of original film footage from the IWM to make the film. Jackson claimed a full year was spent just reviewing the material "just to get their archive in better shape". All the footage was originally shot in monochrome and was colourized by Jackson's Wingnut Films. The original footage was shot back in the 1910's before the ability to synchronize sound and pictures had been invented. Experiments in colour motion picture photography go back about ten years before the first world war began and some WW1 colour footage made in an early process called 'Kinecolor' was known to have been made but is not used in this film. Details such as grass and dirt proved to be the most challenging items to colorize. Some of the actual locations were identified, and Jackson went there himself and shot thousands of photos to use as reference. Asides from the impressive computer augmented colourization of the monochrome film, one of the things Jackson wanted to sort out was for the film to play at a normal speed so the action seen appeared normal and not jerky and jarring. At the time, the film was advanced by the cameraman turning handle at a roughly constant speed. This was also accomplished by a sophisticated computer algorithm, that surprised even Jackson with how well it did its job when the film was being scanned. As for sound, it was synchronized with a constant-speed clockwork or electric motor. Consequently, every single sound effect was added later. It was a deliberate choice not to identify the soldiers or battlegrounds as that would ground the film in too many facts and slow it down. Instead, the desire was to make this about the experience of being a soldier. The interviews came from 200 veterans, with the audio from 120 of them being used in the film. After receiving the footage, Jackson decided that the movie would not feature traditional narration, and that it would instead only feature audio excerpts of the soldiers talking about their war memories, in order to make the film about the soldiers themselves; for the same reason, it barely features any dates or named locations. Voices of the soldiers in the restored footage were added by professionally reading their lips, and then (for the sake of accuracy) hiring voice actors from the same area of Great Britain that the soldiers had hailed from. One bit of footage that had been used often in prior documentaries, of an officer reading a statement to his troops, would not yield to this method (likely because of the officer's mustache), but Jackson was able to find the text of a candidate statement in the archives of the regiment involved. He recorded it at various speeds himself, and it proved to match the footage. Jackson did not receive any fee for the making of the film.
Quite aside from being perhaps the most extraordinary technical achievement in Jackson's career to date, They Shall Not Grow Old is a brilliant piece of moviemaking. It will surely be as elusive to find it in a cinema near you as any undervalued gem is, but if you can see it, do see it.
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