When I tell people this they’re often surprised. Isn’t it painful, they ask, to watch film-makers, producers and actors change, rough-handle and manipulate your novel? But, I explain, they haven’t.
No one has done anything to my book. I can see it now on the shelf above my desk. It still exists as I wrote it, with all its flaws and voice and dialogue intact. When a book is turned into a film it is the story that is manipulated, not the novel, and as such I was excited rather than anxious when the film’s director Amit Gupta asked me to co-write the screenplay with him.
We wrote quickly, aided by the fact that I was living in New York and Amit in London. This meant the script was effectively worked on for 36 hours at a time, with me sitting down to my desk there just as Amit was ending his day’s writing here. In what felt like hardly any time at all I was being sent headshots of actors Amit wanted to cast.
Suddenly we were just weeks away from filming. Everything was falling into place.
Everything, that is, except for our leading lady, for whom we were still looking. Then word came through from Sam Jones, our casting director, that Andrea Riseborough – the actress who played Margaret Thatcher to great acclaim in the television drama The Long Walk to Finchley and will soon be seen as Wallis Simpson in Madonna’s new film, WE – might be available. She was, however, about to leave the country for her home in Los Angeles. Amit didn’t waste any time. Driving out to Heathrow to meet her in the departures hall they discussed his aspirations for the film and for the part of Sarah Lewis which we hoped she’d accept.
Sarah is both the central character of the novel and the film. A young farmer’s wife, she wakes one morning a few weeks after the German invasion to discover, along with the other women in her isolated valley, that her husband has disappeared, leaving, she thinks, to join the British Resistance. A month later a patrol of German soldiers arrives in the valley.
Over the course of a harsh winter these two groups, the abandoned women and the stranded soldiers, form a fragile mutual dependency. When the snow thaws everyone must face the consequences of the blurred lines between occupier and occupied, but no one more than Sarah Lewis. As such it was a part for which we needed an actress capable of evoking a great depth of inner struggle while still maintaining a restrained performance. Andrea was the perfect candidate and, as Amit told me later, that last-minute drive to Heathrow turned out to be his most important dash to an airport ever – not to catch a plane but to catch an actress who, thankfully, a few days later, said yes.
Somehow, all through the year of working on the script, I’d never imagined that day when I’d first walk onto the set of our film.
When I did, the pure physicality of it took me by surprise. As vans and lorries unloaded props and the art team dressed the set of Sarah Lewis’s house, I felt as if it was my own imagination that was being unpacked and arranged around those rooms.
Up until then everything – notes, novel, outlines, the script from drafts one to seven – had been words on the page. Now, suddenly, we were in a different world, of things, light, sound, people and animals.
I met Andrea myself at the end of that first day’s filming. The house we were using was high on the slopes of Llanthony valley. She wore a large padded coat over her costume and was playing a guitar on a sofa in the kitchen. It felt like meeting two people at once – our female lead who I didn’t yet know, and a woman I’d dreamt up many years ago who I did.
In watching her other films I’d seen how Andrea often found character through a nuanced awareness of accent. This was the case with her depiction of Sarah in Resistance, too. The film is set in the border country near Hay-on-Wye, in the valleys and hills that often rise in Wales and fall in England. It’s a landscape that’s evolved a particular accent; a Welsh accent, but with the hint of Herefordshire burr. Andrea told me how she often uses the British Library audio archive to find the voice of her characters, not just by listening to the accent of an area, but also to the accent of a time. In the days before we began filming she told me she’d continued this line of preparation by going to aqua aerobics classes at the pool in my old school in Abergavenny.
At first I couldn’t see the link; how, exactly, was treading water and lifting foam weights with the pensioners of my home town preparation for Andrea’s part in our film? But then she started relaying the conversations of those classes in the accents of the women who took them with her, and I understood.
“No, not like that! You gotta lift them right out haven’t you? Tha’s it! There you are now. Lovely.” Suddenly, it was both Andrea Riseborough sitting before me and the old women I’d known growing up in Abergavenny who, 60 years earlier, would have been the same age and had the same voice as Sarah Lewis.
They never lived through a Nazi occupation, of course, but the organisation at the heart of my novel – the Auxiliary Units whose men make up Britain’s Resistance – was very real. I was introduced to the Auxiliary Units by a farmer called George Vater who I’d known when I was growing up in a village outside Abergavenny. In his eighties, George, like other men of a similar age, began talking about a secret they’d kept for most of their lives, about how during the war they’d been recruited by military intelligence officers and trained to be members of the British Resistance.
Around 350 underground bunkers were built by the Royal Engineers all over Britain, and around 4,000 men and women were recruited. The Auxiliary Units were to be Churchill’s last-ditch defence; a controversial and, in terms of international conventions, illegal government-funded civilian insurgency. Given the strategic importance of the area, and the possibility of an invasion via the Bristol Channel, there was a particular concentration of Auxiliary Unit bunkers in south Wales. In coalmines above Port Talbot, in the woods above Newport, on top of the Blorenge outside Abergavenny, around the village of Usk and, I’d heard rumoured, in the valleys south of Hay-on-Wye.
In Resistance, the story of the Auxiliary Units is experienced through the character of George Bowen, a young man (based upon the real George Vater) played by Iwan Rheon. George is recruited as a spy, just as George Vater was, by a mysterious intelligence officer called “Tommy Atkins”, played by Michael Sheen.
Given this narrative, Michael dropped into filming in a particularly suitable way, arriving for an intense two days of shooting with Iwan before, just as his character does in the film, leaving and abandoning the young man to the consequences of his duty. A further energy was added to these scenes by the fact that Iwan had long admired Michael as an actor and relished the opportunity of acting opposite his theatrical hero.
Before we embarked on writing the script for Resistance, Amit and I always knew that however much circumstances might influence the filming process there were two stipulations on which we wouldn’t be willing to compromise. The first was that our patrol of German soldiers should speak German rather than English with German accents.
Resistance is a story of occupation. Once uniforms are replaced by civilian clothes then language becomes the most manifest form of occupation. As film-makers, the juxtaposition of a wartime setting, German words and Welsh hills, was exactly the kind of emotional and thematic shorthand we needed.
The second stipulation was that Resistance be filmed in the landscape in which the original story is set, the Black Mountain valleys south and west of Hay-on-Wye. It was this landscape that first inspired the novel and which, we hoped, would lend the filming of it a unique charge. What I hadn’t appreciated was how practically useful filming on home turf would be.
Time and again we were saved by the generosity of local people and local knowledge when, often last minute, we found ourselves needing everything from three leather dog collars (from my parents’ neighbours), to a horse (an old friend of mine), to a vintage car (offered by the dentist when I bumped into him in the pub one night).
When we required over 200 extras for the filming of the country show, I found myself calling on the services of family friends and old school teachers, all of whom willingly showed up to have their hair cut and be dressed in Forties clothes at 5am on a cold autumn morning.
The filming of that show was a day when the story of our film felt as if it had, for a few hours, punched right through to an uncomfortable reality. Many of the extras on that day could still remember the Second World War and the real fear of a possible German invasion. One of them was the owner of a Third Reich birth certificate. Another’s grandfather and great uncle had been members of a local Auxiliary Unit Resistance patrol. One of the vintage-car owners we had approached was the grandson of the vicar who would have operated the wireless network of the Resistance in the area around my own village.
When, halfway through the day, a high-ranking Nazi officer was driven around the show ring and greeted with “Heil Hitler” salutes beneath those swastika banners, the chill that ran through the watching crowds felt remarkably genuine and sinister.
But it was on a filming day towards the end of our shoot that the translation of my story from page to screen really came full circle. The scene was the capture of an Auxiliary Unit bunker by Wehrmacht soldiers. Young local boys and old men being dragged out, beaten and shot. What made it feel like a return to the beginning of my journey with Resistance was that we were filming this scene on the site of a real Auxiliary Unit bunker outside Usk. At some point during the Second World War real farmers and gamekeepers from this area, many as young as 17, would have trained in this bunker, preparing to conduct their acts of sabotage regardless of the fact they’d been told their life expectancy was no more than two weeks. For me, watching the extras and actors film this scene provoked a double-layered sensation.
I had, by that point in our shoot, become familiar with seeing events I’d created at my desk made manifest on set. With the filming of the show I’d got a glimpse of the wider alternative world I’d created for Resistance. But with this more intimate scene, taking place on the very same ground where that alternative history would have happened (and which for those young recruited farmers was an all too possible reality) the merging of imagination, fact and recreation was invested with an even greater voltage.
The scene was, too, a potent reminder of why I’d sat down to write Resistance. I wanted to write an anti-war novel that used an alternative Second World War to bring questions of sacrifice, collaboration and occupation close to home. To create a story which tried to use that narrative as a lens through which to view and question all wars.
I hope that in translating those aspirations of the novel into a film the cast and crew of Resistance have found yet another way to keep that most crucial of questions resonant and alive.
Owen Sheers will be discussing ‘Resistance’ and showing clips from the film with Francine Stock at 7pm on Sunday May 29 and with Peter Florence at 9am on Monday May 30
For details and tickets see the Hay Festival programme
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