War and Peace, BBC1

17 December, 2015 | By Olly Grant

broadcastnow

At more than 1,400 pages, adapting War And Peace as a six-part drama was not for the fainthearted. Olly Grant meets the director, producer and crew charged with bringing the epic story to life

John Galsworthy called it “the greatest novel ever written”; for the Russian critic Nikolai Strakhov, it was “a complete picture of human life”.

It’s not hard to see why, like moths to an enticingly epic bonfire, filmmakers have been drawn to War And Peace down the generations. After almost 150 years as a cultural byword for extreme length and bravura ambition, Tolstoy’s 1869 novel is the definition of blue-chip drama. But with more than 1,400 pages to draw on, the question is: how do you pull it off?

On a balmy afternoon in late spring, that’s the question that director Tom Harper is trying to answer in a field near Vilnius, Lithuania. We’re in a place called Rumsiskes, a living museum where clumps of sleepy 18th century peasant village are currently filled with extras prepping for the 1812 Battle of Borodino.

There are dozens of troops, rifles and smoking campfires. Hollywood actor Paul Dano (playing hero Pierre Bezukhov) trots past on a horse. A Lithuanian voice shouts “filmuojam!” and a fleet of banner-toting priests walk by, to the booming playback of Russian hymn Kolslaven.

Logistical challenge

“Logistically, it’s partly really exciting, partly very difficult,” says Harper, bravely downplaying the task at hand.

Tomorrow the focus switches to a wolf hunt, with a pack of hounds, two trained ‘wolf dogs’, a fleet of local animal handlers and a hovercam drone.

Not to mention writer Andrew Davies, who is flying in to watch filming. “Every day I have moments of thinking ‘I can’t believe how lucky I am,’ followed by ‘How the hell are we going to get through today, let alone the rest of the week?’” Harper jokes.

The six-part adaptation comes with backing from The Weinstein Company, so is well supported. But even Sergei Bondarchuk’s classic 1966 version – six years in the making, the most expensive Soviet film of all time – balked at the magnitude of Borodino, with its 250,000 troops and 80,000 casualties. (Though, to be fair, they rustled up 13,000 extras for his battle scenes.)

These days, of course, the filmic arsenal includes VFX crowd multiplication and octocopters (Harper is making good use of drones to capture the vast Russian countryside, as much as for birds’ eye battle shots). The rest is old-fashioned camera placement. “It’s about trying to make sure all your background artists are in the right place to fill up the frame,” Harper says. “That’s the difficult bit. You spend a lot of time arranging background rather than getting the shots.”

But then ambition is always going to outstrip means with War And Peace. It’s the nature of the beast, says producer Julia Stannard: “We really wanted this to feel cinematic. We didn’t want it to feel like standard TV drama. And I think that’s probably why it hasn’t been done on British TV since the BBC’s 1972 version. There are so many challenges: the battles, the seasons in Russia, the size of Russia. But these are things you just have to deliver.”

One solution was to be based in the Baltics, partly because of the landscape and architecture. “Our winter battle scenes were shot in forests. That vegetation is very specific to Eastern Europe; you couldn’t shoot it in another part of the world,” says Stannard.

The team also squeezed extra pips from the budget. In Lithuania, they secured the new 20% tax break, then built most of the sets in an old carpet factory, which production designer Chris Roope speedily redressed to cover off multiple interiors. This allowed them to be slightly more expansive with the locations.

There was a cross-border hop to Rundale Palace in Latvia, which provided Tsar-era interior opulence.

And they were able to make hay with Vilnius’ Old Town for various street scenes. This didn’t go unnoticed by locals, particularly when the crew laid fake snow one morning before hosing down for summer scenes after lunch. “They thought we were mad,” Stannard laughs. “We cordoned off several streets but about a thousand people turned up to watch.”

(Incidentally, Vilnius – though not playing itself in the series – has Napoleonic pedigree: the French marched back through the city on their catastrophic retreat from Moscow in 1812, losing some 400,000 men as they went.)

Shooting in Russia

This left room in the kitty for two trips to Russia: one to the 9th century capital Novgorod, the other to St Petersburg, where they spent three days filming in Catherine Palace.

Local fi rm Globus Film, which Stannard knew from the BBC’s 2001 version of Crime And Punishment, provided support once they’d secured sole access to the ballroom for a night shoot, with scores of waltzing extras.

Visually, it’s a calling card for the series, Stannard says. “There’s nowhere like it in the world. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything on television on quite that scale before.”

Wardrobe offers a similar sense of scale. Costume designer Edward Gibbon holed himself up in the carpet factory a few months before filming began. “The first bit was so daunting, but you break it down into little bits,” he explains, amid a jungle of ball gowns and military tunics. “The joy of being here is that we’ve been able to make 90% of our clothes.

It’s a craft-based country and dressmaking is still an important skill. At our peak, we had a workroom of about 10 people sewing, including two male and two female cutters. We’ve made at least 800 costumes to date. The uniforms are being made by Hero in Poland and there are 700 of those as well.”

Costumes provide visual cues to the passage of time. Early on, the fashions follow Parisian tastes; seven years later, all that has gone.  “Anything aristocratic was seen as bad, so they deliberately went for a more natural, less ornamented look,” says Gibbon.

The same eye for historical detail was applied to the battle scenes. Back at Rumsiskes, military adviser Paul Biddiss, a former army sergeant, is running the rule over a line of Russian riflemen. He’s not worried about being slavish.

“No disrespect, but if you sent a re-enactor back to that era, they’d march up to Napoleon and tell him he wasn’t wearing his hat properly,” he jokes.

What he noticed from previous versions of War And Peace was the overdone soldierly slickness.

“They all looked too polished; it wasn’t realistic,” he says – referring to the fighting as much as the clothing.

“At the time, the attrition rate was similar to World War I, so you’d have had mainly inexperienced men at the front with a small number of experienced guys around them.”

To capture that, he organised segregated training. “I had a core of about 100 men and gave them around 200 hours’ training for the summer battles, plus a further 60 hours for the artillery teams. We then dispersed them among guys who had only had the most basic training.”

The result should be a kind of layering of military talent, with the experienced men visibly instructing and cajoling the other soldiers as the scenes play out.

The recent political upheaval in the Baltics had an impact on the recruitment process.

“Usually for something on this scale, the go-to approach would be to work with the local militia and reservists,” Stannard says. “But because of the political unrest in Eastern Europe and Russia when we were beginning, we got the sense that nobody could guarantee the military would be able to commit to us.”

So the 500 or so soldier roles ended up going to civvies. Not that this concerned Biddiss (who appears in the drama himself, as a captain called Tushin), since it gave him a blank canvas. After three weeks of boot camps, his ‘elite corps’ could man cannons, load rifles and even form Napoleonic defensive formations.

“At one point on the storyboard, we had the Russians doing a cavalry attack on the French, and the French were just going to turn to face them,” he recalls. “But I said to Tom: ‘Look, I’ve trained these guys to form defensive squares, which was the tactic of the day.’ So that’s what we did, and it looks perfect, really.”

Back at the battlefront, Harper feels quietly confident. “It feels like a good time for TV at the moment,” he says. “Technology is making it possible to tell stories like this on such a scale. Budgets are going up. And it feels like we can bring something new to this. It feels like the right time to tell the story again.”

For every reader, one passage from War And Peace sticks in the memory: in a brief aside, Bezukhov and Dolokhov go on a bender, tie a policeman to a bear and throw them both in the Moyka river. “We wanted at least to reference the bear because it’s one of those iconic things,” explains producer Julia Stannard. “So we had to find a bear.”

It took a while. “We didn’t want to get into circus bears or animals that might have been maltreated, so we got our welfare people out to help us,” she explains.

The bear they eventually found was ethically sourced, with a track record in performance. It needed to be licensed by the Lithuanian government before they could fi lm with it, and securely quartered once it arrived at the studio. “We had to build a special compound with incredibly sturdy fencing,” says Stannard. “And the noise…”

The seasoned performer proved a bit of a diva. “We’d been told he would only respond if he had a certain type of bread, but discovered we hadn’t got the right kind. We had to keep him in the truck until the right bread arrived and he would come out.”

On reflection, there may have been easier ways to recreate the scene. “We talked about using VFX, but Tom Harper is a director who likes to do everything for real as much as possible,” says Stannard. “I think it paid off in terms of authenticity.”

War And Peace would give some writers an existential wobble. Not Andrew Davies.“I really wasn’t too daunted,” says the veteran screenwriter. “It’s huge, of course. But I told myself, ‘Come on, you’ve done Middlemarch. You’ve done Bleak House. You’ve done some big books…’”

In fact, once the “huge chunks” of Tolstoyan philosophy and military history were removed, he found that the novel peeled apart quite naturally. “With Bleak House, I felt I needed to restructure the whole thing, because Dickens starts off with one group of characters and goes on with them for a big long chapter at a time.

But Tolstoy paces his book very naturally for adapting. He starts by introducing Pierre, then very quickly we’re in Moscow with Natasha. So I pretty much followed his construction.”

If Davies made a surprising choice, it was in the running time. Radio 4’s recent version was 10 parts; the BBC’s 1972 series ran to 20. Why limit this one to six?

“Well, we discussed it and it wasn’t an ultimatum at all,” he says. “I just like things to be tight and economical. “I’m terrified of things going flabby and over-length. It was 20- odd hours last time the BBC did it – and if you try to watch it again, it feels at least that long.

Anthony Hopkins’ performance as Pierre is still wonderful, but everything else seemed very slow and wooden. “Audiences are getting more sophisticated about visual language. You don’t need so long to make your point, as long as you have enough space to let the thing breathe. This feels like the right sort of pace.”