On the banks of a dirty, swollen tributary of the Danube, a picnic is under way. Under bamboo parasols and on heavy rugs lie the remains of a sumptuous spread: baguettes, fruit, cheese, cake, lemon barley water and a wine of rather pricey-looking vintage – 1906 Château Les Alberts Bordeaux. But rather than Budapest in the early 21st century, we are in Amiens 101 years earlier.
A callow English textile manufacturer, Stephen Wraysford, played by Eddie Redmayne (My Week with Marilyn), distractedly whittles wood as the river gurgles by. A Frenchwoman, Isabelle Azaire (Clémence Poésy, aka Fleur Delacour in the Harry Potter films), sits poised and erect in the shade. She is the young French wife of Wraysford's host, a local merchant. The honk of geese can be heard through the reeds, although the soundtrack promised by the script ("the hum of bees... wasps feeding hungrily on a tree weighted with overripe pears") is nowhere to be heard. Also not pictured: an "interminable heat". It's a cloudy, overcast day.
"The thing to remember is that in never rains in Hungary in July," a jacketed cameraman wryly notes as crew members scurry around uncoiling cables and replanting foliage. Presently, the rain begins to patter again, pooling mud in walkways. The squelch of boots can be heard all around. Given the story presently being assembled on this film set – one of love, but also the glutinous gore of trench warfare – these conditions are, in a way, crudely apt.
It is summer 2011, and in a wood on the edge of Budapest, it is day 33 of the 43-day shoot for Birdsong. The crew on this BBC/Working Title adaptation of Sebastian Faulks' bestseller set in and around the First World War are working hard to recreate the France of both the narrative strands on which screenwriter Abi Morgan (The Hour, The Iron Lady) has focused: drowsy Amiens in 1910, and the horror of the Western Front in 1916. Morgan opted early on to leave out the novel's third element, a near-contemporary depiction of Wraysford's granddaughter. k
"The modern-day stuff was a brilliant framing device," acknowledges the writer, who is currently attracting fresh acclaim for her script for artist-turned-director Steve McQueen's Oscar-tipped film Shame (reviewed in main paper). "But we decided that for the economy of a TV script, and because we were working within two 90-minute episodes, we wanted to focus on the intensity of before and after the love affair between Stephen and Isabelle."
Hence, "before", we have the elegance of today's picnic scene, all fine food and even finer wardrobes. In her jam-packed trailer, a couple of hundred yards from the Danube, costume designer Charlotte Walter rifles through rail after rail of Edwardian-era clothing, painstakingly sourced in Paris and London, and some recreated from photographs in her own family's albums. "Stephen arrives from England dressed in greys. But soon he's wearing cream suits – a young woman in France can have that effect," she smiles.
Similarly, for "after", when Wraysford is a battle-scarred captain in the infantry, staring down the barrel of the battle that will produce the worst single-day casualties in British military history, the producers worked hard on ensuring the soldiers' uniforms looked the part. Hobnail boots came from Poland, leather-capped officers' wristwatches were fashioned by the props department, and woollen shirts by the dozen were "pre-distressed". Walter applied such volumes of fake gore to the outfits that, "I had so much blood under my fingernails I looked like a mass murderer." Over the course of filming the battle scenes, Redmayne wore through eight uniforms.
Walter also located an original, officer-style greatcoat from Burberry, and was granted access to its archives – a process eased by the fact that Redmayne has modelled for the brand. Advised by military experts, Walter and her small team also created their own regimental insignia, to avoid any criticism from First World War experts and to be sensitive to veterans' groups. Advisers from the Imperial War Museum have offered pointers on soldiers' movements and drill, and medical experts have been on hand "to tell us what 90 per cent burns would look like", says the venture's producer, Lynn Horsford.
With equal attention to detail, trenches were excavated by the production team in a sunflower field a few miles away. The deep spying and attack tunnels dug under the battlefields – in which Faulks sets much of his wartime action – have been ingeniously replicated in a nearby studio.
All of which, it seems, was easier to do in Hungary than France. Yes, concedes Horsford, "It's sad that we're not in France," but as ITV found when they shot Julian Fellowes' upcoming Titanic here the month before the BBC production, "you get a tax break" by filming in the former eastern bloc state. Plus, Horsford adds, some streets in Hungary are time capsules. "It's doubled for [old world] France many times," she says – most recently for the Guy de Maupassant adaptation Bel Ami, starring Robert Pattinson, out in March. Furthermore, director Philip Martin (Wallander and the Bafta-winning Mo, about Mo Mowlam) is on familiar territory: he shot 2008's Einstein and Eddington here with David Tennant.
The scene being filmed today is the moment where Faulks' hero and heroine make their first fleeting, physical contact. In the formal, stuffy, stuffed-shirt atmosphere of the Azaire household, Stephen and Isabelle's growing feelings for each other have hitherto been played out in stolen glances and tremulous gulps. But as they boat along the river in that "interminable heat", their ankles graze together. It's an electrifying and ominous moment, and not just because of the sign we see on the edge of the river: we are in the département de la Somme.
"These scenes between Clémence and Eddie are all about the danger their characters are walking into," offers cinematographer Julian Court. "And by putting them under the trees and using the shadows and having them almost silhouetted, we're trying to visually suggest that jeopardy."
"I want to recalibrate what is sexual," Martin adds. "We want to take the audience back to a time when a touch was an extremely dangerous and provocative and erotic thing."
For Isabelle and Stephen, that touch of skin on skin lets the genie out of the bottle. Their affair is incendiary, entirely based around explosive passion. In one memorable passage in the book, Faulks writes in graphic detail of the "sex act" (to use the normal newspaper euphemism) the Englishman performs on the Frenchwoman.
"As a young man reading the book, for me that was an incredibly erotic scene," chuckles Redmayne between takes. The actor, now 30, was an adolescent at the time he read the 1993 novel, "and a lot of my friends were blown away by it. We have a responsibility to this book, but in some ways doing that scene [properly] is also a massive responsibility."
Poésy had no time to duck that responsibility – she and Redmayne filmed the scene on her first day on set. Was that a deliberate choice on her part? "No, no, no, no," the Parisian actress, 29, says emphatically. "I looked at the schedule and I was, like, 'Really, are we going there already?' But then there was that thought of, OK, well at least it's out of the way. And of course it wasn't – we had to go back to it every single week because we never finished it that day!
"But it needed to be done properly. And it's weird because I try to avoid those scenes. I had a policy against things like that as I had a bad experience." (Aged 18, Poésy appeared in a French film in which, against her better judgement, she shot a topless scene.) "But I think every actress says that, then you grow old, then you really don't give a ****."
, she looks absolutely adorable in all those feminine candy colored dresses, love the color of the Rochas green dress
so sweet!!
