​Our tagline is “If you could have seen”, which is an extrapolation from the sentiment of Dulce Et Decorum Est. It sits well under the title, and underlines Wilfred's desire to experience everything of the War, to dedicate himself to his subject. My original pick was straight from his mentor's pen, which would have been: “Have you forgotten yet?”. The line is taken from Sassoon's postwar masterpiece Aftermath, and far more on the nose. For me it encapsulates what I was trying to achieve with The Burying Party. It's not just meant as a Wilfred Owen film, it's a time capsule.

In the First World War, huge chasms existed between the nations, and the world as they knew it fell before their eyes. Russian Imperialism came to an end, artillery was devastating. On visiting the Reina Sofia Museum in July, I was lucky enough to visit the Russian Dada exhibition. As innovation accelerated with technology, and as the things they knew fell apart, the Dada movement reacted with the same volatility.

Kazimir Malevich is endlessly quotable in this regard, writing “I tell you, you will not see the new beauty and the truth, until you make up your minds to spit.” and “Art no longer cares to serve the state and religion, it no longer wishes to illustrate the history of manners, it wants to have nothing further to do with the object, as such, and believes that it can exist, in and for itself, without "things" (that is, the "time-tested well-spring of life").” 

And so Art went to War. Although far and away from that movement, Wilfred Owen's poetry similarly rids of traditional structure, and his half-rhyme in the phantasmagorical 'Strange Meeting' is case and point in the innovation that happened as a direct result of his surroundings. He wanted to question what was taken for granted: 

“I am the enemy you killed, my friend” 

It took another World War and two treaties, but finally there was multilateralism. It hasn't gone without its problems, and it has been no utopia, but finally fascism was beaten in many countries, finally the Berlin Wall was torn down, finally the U.S had a black President.

Despite everything that was achieved after 100 years later, the world has reverted back to being dualistic. Despite everything we learned in the last century to abandon nationalism and individualism, Trump is President and the UK is leaving the European Union. The rules are being ripped apart again, logic has been abandoned. It's important that those who observed this chaos and inequality are heard again. Timeless poetry such as

“The old lie: Dulce Et Decorum Est, Pro Patria Mori (It is sweet and proper to die for the fatherland)” and,

“Have you forgotten yet?...
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you'll never forget.” 

To invoke Karl Popper, intolerance will not be tolerated.

And looking back on the process, I hadn't spoken to a single cast member who wasn't submerged in this mindset, commited to what we were trying to achieve. To the point that members of our Manchester Regiment helped create a landscape of dead bodies for Benjamin Longthorne to crack Corporal Thompson's disturbing hypervisual monologue, to the point our whole crew helped create a serene environment throughout Owen and Sassoon's final goodbye. At moments, due to the intense research and emotional investment these actors gave, it felt like we were watching history unfold before our eyes. They created a whole world to show what can happen when intolerance reigns, what did happen.

We had a knack of wrapping just before the light faded, and the final day of filming was no different. But somehow we'd always get it done. Near misses, near setbacks, the process of The Burying Party existed on a knife edge - Chasing a steam train through Wales, shooting at sunrise on Calton Hill, flying a drone in a kitchen - but everyone came together to make sure we never fell short. From Sound to Camera, Wardrobe to Makeup, from Principals to Background.

And that is both a testament to everyone involved and the legacy of all the people depicted. Although a Wilfred Owen film, it is also a study of a world that lurks in the shadows, of a world that can be resisted, but works its way through the cracks. These voices are more important now than ever, in order to make sure it is defeated again. It's not absurd to think artists can still make a difference.

The Burying Party premieres on August 23rd, 7pm at the Closeup Centre, London.

There is a particular feeling that accompanies the portrayal of someone who actually lived. It’s difficult to articulate. It isn’t quite so grandiose as to merit the label of “responsibility”, nor should it be cheapened with the label of “challenge” or “thrill”.

Perhaps the best way to describe it is to reference a child walking in to an antique shop filled with fragile items of a bygone age: intense curiosity accompanied with a sense that if you aren’t careful you might find yourself face to face with a lot of very angry adults.

That feeling was with me throughout my preparation for Siegfried Sassoon in The Burying Party.

The thing is, being overly careful means you are more likely to break something, as the child in the antique store is probably able to confirm, so at a certain point in time you have to let go as a performer and just do your job.

It’s a fine balance to strike, and one that no actor can achieve on their own. As with all productions, there comes a point in time where a leap of faith in to the director’s vision is required. Sometimes that leap of faith is justified, sometimes not, and all the actor can do is their best.

Every so often, a project comes along where the leap of faith happens almost without one noticing, so total is one’s belief in the team of people surrounding you.

The Burying Party is one such experience.

From the first read-through, the sense of apprehension all but vanished, and I was able to enjoy the ride. What a ride.

I am not prone to superstition, but film is not unlike sport in that one can train and prepare for every minute detail, and the ultimate difference between success and failure will be entirely outside of your control. As such, over time one comes to notice the moments of chance during a production, and whether they seem to be aligning in one’s favour or not.

To say they aligned in our favour would be an understatement. It was the sense of every slight bounce and ricochet of the ball going our way. It is hard not to feel as though success is somehow pre-ordained under such circumstances.

It is a joy to be able to say that chance seemed to favour a story in which I have become so invested. These lives mattered. These people and their viewpoints mattered. As I have said before, we are living in alarming times, and turning our eyes to a century ago when the shortsightedness of nationalism led to the decimation of a generation seems advisable.

We know where these roads lead. We have been told by those who have walked them.

​Perhaps we should listen.

- Sid Phoenix

A film production company wouldn't be able to achieve much without the support and hospitality of various external people and organisations. As well as our regular status updates to recognise the help of our kickstarter and crowdfunder donors, we wanted to compile a blog post dedicated to those locations and individuals who have so far helped us along the way in order to accomplish what we wanted. So without further ado, a huge thank you to:

• Sir David Maddison QC, Helen Rudge and the Liverpool Athenaeum
• East 15 Acting School
• Liverpool John Moores Business School
• Liverpool John Moores Screen School
• Kirsty Lambert
• Chris Parry and Ffestiniog and Welsh Highland Railways
• Sean Pugh
• Wirral Globe
• BBC Radio Merseyside
• Khaki Devils
• Christ Church, Port Sunlight
• M. Lionel Chatard and Middlethorpe Hall and Spa
• Ness Gardens
• Lee and Alison Jones
• Les Highton
• Linda and Gerry Miller
• Neil McLennan
• James Pardoe, University of Chester
• Joel Reeves Photography
• John Burthem and West Kirby Sailing Club
• Mike Davies and Bennet's Bar, Edinburgh
• Ambrose Reynolds and the Bombed Out Church
• Andy and Dorothy at Wilfred Owen's childhood home, Elm Grove, Birkenhead
• Bill Devereux
  

In a strange way, it is sad to think that if I had not had the wonderful opportunity to be part of this film, I would now be poorer without the insight into the untold story of an extraordinary human being. Moreover,  before The Burying Party my knowledge about the life of Wilfred Owen consisted of, as I imagine also for a handful of people, a collection of ‘useful quotes’ half - learnt, and in no particular order, hither and thither, the subject matter ultimately crammed in, trimmed at the edges, left colourless and  under a subject heading, WW1. 

My role in The Burying Party was to portray someone who had lived, fought and endured this unimaginable period. I had, as we all did working on this project, a responsibility to truthfully portray the world that surrounded the lives of these remarkable people. It was a true gift to have been given the freedom to research and develop the character as I felt was right. I was only one, small part of Wilfred Owen’s life, but it felt no less important. 

Richard is an incredibly inspiring Director that I feel very lucky to have worked with. To have a Director on board that has devoted endless hours into the research and development of the material, continually taking more and more on board to make a film Worthy of the Life Wilfred Owen had bravely led, had been more than enough evidence for me to know this project is going to be something special.

The first day on set was a mixture of nerves and anxious excitement to create this vision. We were all in it together, and this camaraderie endured throughout the whole filming period, despite the usual bumps in the road, the spirit was always high. Such a talented cast and crew made the whole experience feel meaningful and always professional. 

The fragility of circumstances when performing in front of a camera, on location and to the attentive eyes of the crew can be a daunting process. I can happily say that on this occasion, this was most definitely, not the case!

It is extremely difficult for an artist of any medium to do justice to the sacrifices and bravery of servicemen and women both past and present.

World War One was one of the bloodiest conflicts ever to have battered our planet and for me there is a distinct lack of understanding of a world so far removed from the comforts and luxuries I take for granted today- in spite of the books I read, the films I watched and places I visited in an effort to research life in the trenches and the impact that had on one’s sanity.

While as an actor I can never truly feel what these people felt, it is so important to me that it is never forgotten and I believe ‘The Burying Party’ supersedes many other films of its kind in portraying that world for how it was- with no romantic or melancholic sentimentality but grittily with the acrimony and trepidation that pervaded the zeitgeist of Britain in the 1910s.

Despite the intensive hours and daunting challenge we had taken on, the process was hugely enjoyable and not only am I immensely proud of the collective effort that has gone in to the project, but I believe at this early stage as though we’ve got something very special on our hands in this film.

- Will Burren, October 29th 2017

You can help us tell the story by clicking on the picture below:

Meurig Marshall (DOP), Richard Weston (Director), Sid Phoenix (Siegfried Sassoon), Matthew Staite (Wilfred Owen), Will Burren (Robert Graves)

It’s funny how things can puzzle you for years, until suddenly, someone else’s point of view provides the missing jigsaw piece. Talking about the forthcoming Wilfred Owen film, The Burying Party, with director Richard Weston, recently gave me a new perspective on one of Owen’s more obscure poems, Six o’clock on Princes Street, which I’ve never previously understood.

It was written a century ago, between June and October 1917 at Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh, where Owen was treated for neurasthenia, or what we’d now call post-traumatic stress. Here it is in full:

In twos and threes they have not far to roam
Crowds that thread eastward, gay of eyes;
Those seek no further than their quiet home,
Wives, walking westward, slow and wise.
 
Neither should I go fooling over clouds
Following gleams, unsafe, untrue,
And tiring after beauty through star-crowds
Dared I go side by side with you.
 
Or be you in the gutter where you stand
Pale rain-flawed phantom of the place,
With news of all the nations in your hand
And all their sorrows in your face.
 
Although Owen was convalescing when he wrote this poem, it was also a period of intense social activity. The Medical Officer responsible for his treatment at Craiglockhart, Dr Arthur Brock, believed in treating the whole patient rather than their individual symptoms, and encouraged patients to ‘reconnect’ with society and the environment. During his four months at Craiglockhart, Owen was fully occupied; he delivered botany lectures to his fellow patients, edited the hospital magazine and performed in a play.

But at the same time he wrote this poem whose opening lines show us a man standing alone. He’s observing the scene, the crowds jostling past him, but not really part of it. As we move into the second stanza, we gain a deeper insight into his state of mind. His thoughts are elsewhere, lost in the world of his imagination – he’s “tiring after beauty through star-crowds”. But then he turns, in that characteristic Owen way, to address his reader directly – whoever the poem is intended for – saying he’d happily give all that up, if only he could be with them.

That beautiful, wistful line – “Dared I go side by side with you” - has always made my heart ache. It’s that universal longing to make a connection with someone unattainable, captured in flawless iambic meter with the single-syllable words beating out the emphasis. Suddenly it’s not the daydreams that matter any more. It’s you.  

But who’s he talking to? Some commentaries suggest that he’s addressing the throng on Princes Street, reaching out, wanting to be part of the crowd.  My problem with that interpretation is that in the first stanza he’s talking about rather than to the crowd – he uses ‘they’, ‘their’ and ‘those’. That emphatic ‘you’ at the end of the second stanza comes out of nowhere, and – for me, personally – it contrasts too sharply with the previous stanza to accept that he’s now addressing the crowd directly.

 So, is it a specific, singular ‘you’? Of course, we’ll never know for sure. What we do know is that while Owen wrote this poem, he was plucking up the courage to knock on the bedroom door of fellow Craiglockhart patient, Second Lieutenant Siegfried Sassoon. This was the man who would have a profound influence on his life and poetry, to whom Wilfred would refer later that year as “Keats + Christ + Elijah + my Colonel + my father-confessor”. It’s difficult to believe that Owen, writing longingly about someone unattainable in the summer of 1917, didn’t have the tall, talented ‘Mad Jack’ Sassoon at least partly in mind.

The final stanza doesn’t back up that theory though. The focus suddenly shifts again, and is now addressing, presumably, a young newspaper seller, standing sadly in the gutter, hawking the bad news from the front line. Here, Owen seems to be saying that he wants to stand alongside, to totally identify himself, with the sorrowful figure – the “pale rain-flawed phantom” who presumably represents the common man.

It’s not one of Owen’s best; it has some evocative lines but it’s disjointed and the meaning isn’t clear. You can imagine that Sassoon might have frowned and tactfully put it to one side, moving on with relief to Anthem for Doomed Youth. It’s one that’s always puzzled me. But shortly after Richard Weston and I met up to talk about The Burying Party, I found myself going back to Six o’clock on Princes Street, with one of those “oh, right” moments of clarity.

The comment Richard made, which stuck in my mind, was that for Owen, “being a poet was synonymous with being a soldier”. And if we accept that duality, then the ambiguity of Six o’clock on Princes Street immediately resolves itself. It’s not a choice between whether Owen is either dreaming of being an acclaimed poet like Sassoon, or wanting to connect with ordinary people in the crowd. It’s both.

The Burying Party presents the final year of Owen’s life as a time when he grows into himself, both as a poet and a soldier. It was a year during which he wrote his finest poems and finally proved himself in combat, and the film’s premise is that neither of those things could have happened without the other.

Prior to enlisting in October 1915, Owen had been working as a private tutor in Bordeaux, devoting his free time to writing poetry. The roughness of army life came as a shock to him; in an early letter from France he complains not entirely facetiously to his doting mother that the mud has entered “that holy of holies, my pyjamas” and refers to the troops on various occasions as “expressionless lumps” and “as dull and dogged as November”. But his friendship with Sassoon and his time at Craiglockhart was to change all that, giving him the confidence and inspiration to fulfil his potential.

Owen’s final letters from the front line in 1918 resonate with a sense of purpose and toughness that his earlier letters lacked. The young man who grumbled about mud on his pyjamas is gone, replaced by someone who assures his anxious mother that his nerves are “in perfect order” and sarcastically jokes to Sassoon that he’s taken cover from five machine guns behind a poppy stalk. He’s where he needs to be; as a poet and as soldier, writing to Susan Owen a month before his death: “I came out to help these boys, directly by leading them as well as an officer can, indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can. I have done the first.”

In his last letter, written to his mother at the end of October 1918, four days before he was killed at the Sambre-Oise canal, Owen truly is ‘side by side’ with his fellow soldiers, as he writes:

“Kellett, a delightful servant of A Coy. … radiates joy and contentment from pink cheeks and baby eyes. He laughs with a signaller to whose left ear is glued the Receiver, but whose eyes rolling with gaiety show that he is listening with his right ear to a merry corporal who appears … nothing but a gleam of white teeth and a wheeze of jokes. Splashing my hand, an old soldier with a walrus moustache peels & drops potatoes into the pot. By him, Keyes, my cook, chops wood; another feeds the smoke with damp wood. It is a great life… of this I am certain you could not be visited by a band of friends half so fine as surround me here.”

The difference between these letters and the lonely outsider who wrote Six o’clock on Princes Street the previous summer gives a sense of how far he’d travelled in that year. In that short space of time he became one of the most important poets of the twentieth century, and you can only wonder what he might have achieved if he’d lived to write more.
​
Find out more about The Burying Party a short film about Wilfred Owen here. #wilfredowenfilm

This article first appeared at Kirsty Lambert's blog and is published by special permission.

One of our sponsors, Linda Miller is a script writer for The BBC and has kindly written this commentary on one of her favourite poems, Futility by Wilfred Owen and an audio reading too which can be found on our The Burying Party Facebook Page.

​`FUTILITY’ BY WILFRED OWEN
​
`Futility’ is a lament for a dead or dying man, written by a poet at the height of his powers.   It is deftly constructed in two stanzas.   A subtle, unobtrusive rhyme scheme serves to frame and contain heartfelt, searing emotion.   The dramatist in me can visualize it being performed on stage at the climax of a play.  A loyal lieutenant and comrades make one last desperate attempt to save the life of their lord or king.  A playwright of Shakespeare’s calibre would not have been ashamed of these lines.  
 
Of course, Lieutenant Wilfred Owen of the 2nd Battalion Manchester Regiment was a real soldier, who looked death in the face and killed people in the line of duty.    In spite of this, as this poem so clearly illustrates, he never lost his respect for the sanctity of life - those limbs `so dear-achieved’.    
 
The poem begins with an urgent command `Move him into the sun-‘.   Owen often addresses the reader directly.  Here, though, I feel I am part of the action and everything is taking place in the heat of a moment.   I am helping to move the soldier’s body into the sunlight.  Lieutenant Owen is telling me not to give up hope, urging me to believe that the `kind old sun’ `that wakes the seeds’ and once `the clays of a cold star’ can heal this man.   Perhaps he wants to believe this because he knows the soldier?  Perhaps it is because, against all the odds, he is `still warm’?   Perhaps Owen , quite simply, believes in miracles?    The truth is, most of us do when we are in a crisis situation.     In fact, this poem travels beyond the battlefield and touches our hearts on a very personal, emotional level.   If you have sat by the bed of a loved one, knowing they can’t recover, but still urging them to open their eyes and get better,  you will understand how Owen felt. 
 
However, the soldier is dead.  The `fatuous’ sun has failed to bring him back.   What is the point?  Everything is futile.   The final, two-line cry of anger and frustration is grief talking and we know that, too.    For me, `Futility’ is a desperately sad poem, but one which contains a kernel of hope for humanity.   In the midst of the utmost devastation and squalor, bodies scattered like garbage, someone urged a dying man to live and wrote a beautiful poem about it.  That, in itself, is a miracle.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1375078667/the-burying-party
#wilfredowenfilm
 
 
Linda Thompson
1 August 2017

So, Sid, tell us a little bit about Siegfried Sassoon and his role in the film.

S: Sassoon, by the time we meet him is already a fairly well established poet, and has a reputation both as a writer and a soldier. He represents someone that Wilfred Owen looks up to and wants to engage
with, but he has a different set of beliefs on the nature of war and specifically the war that they are engaged in. A lot of the story we’re telling is how those ideals come to influence Owen’s view on war and other young men's roles in it.

Is there anything in particular that enticed you about the film and compelled you to take part?

S: A few things actually. I think that it’s tragic that we look at the nationalism that gave rise to both the world wars, and after which we had about a century of thinking we had overcome it. Now see that on the rise again.

I remember speaking to one of my other European friends because I’m in London and work in London because I’m an EU National. The morning after Brexit, I spoke to another EU National, another actor and we sat there and he just turned to me and said, “We couldn’t even make it a hundred years.” And I… I don’t necessarily agree with that completely. I don’t think another World War One is about to happen but I think that it’s worth re-examining what happened a hundred years ago and looking at what the people who lived through it had to say about it. And really going over that again and seeing if there’s more to be gleaned. Whether we take what they intended us to take from it or whether it’s been bastardised or lost in translation, and exploring those elements again.

The reason that these specific characters and people are so important in doing that is because they are all exceptionally eloquent masters of language. As someone who adores language itself and thinks very verbally and very linguistically –in case you couldn’t tell!– I felt immediately drawn to that and the script for the film is adept at showing people who love language and are trying to find a way to express their feelings on a subject, and imbuing them with humanity and the reality.

These people are well spoken but they don’t just turn to each other and speak with prepared diatribes. There’s sense that these are young people trying to discover how to best express their inner selves in dire circumstances and that’s inherently a fascinating thing to explore, and an important story to tell; completely separate from the political ramifications of what the story itself might mean, that’s human beings under extreme stress told with empathy and honesty and that’s to my mind, what my job should be – is doing whatever I can to tell those stories.

Is there a challenge in portraying someone who’s so eloquent with language and so anti-war, but who has also fought and killed so many people?

S: I think… I mean, yes there’s a challenge there because, I think any time that you’re becoming… that you’re trying to see another human being's experience, there’s a challenge inherent in that but I don’t think it’s any more or less than anyone else. Every person’s way of thinking and being is as removed from me as every other’s.

I think that his life experience was particularly challenging, in that this was not someone who was in any way raised to go to war. This is someone who came from a huge amount or privilege, generations of privilege, was an intellectual, and abhorred unnecessary violence. And at the same time, to be in a situation that you can’t really escape from does have a sort of quasi-animalistic strength, and depending on your point of view, viciousness in attempting to survive. Unless you take to point of view that he was actually trying to die, which was also possible! I don’t think anyone, least of all him, could answer which of those two it was.

There is that element to him. The temptation when telling stories about people who clearly have a lot of emotion underneath the surface but didn’t necessarily show it, the immediate instinct is to go ‘look at everything that was going on underneath’. And I don’t think that’s true to them and in a way, I think that’s almost a disservice to their memory. My job is to know what was going on underneath but it isn’t to show that, it’s to allow the story to show that. It's to allow the audience to see that or not.

I think that because Sassoon is such a larger than life character, both as an individual and in terms of the, what he represents culturally, along with [Wilfred] Owen and the others is, it’s difficult not to go ‘This is who I thought Siegfried Sassoon was’ and I think a big part of my responsibility is to not do that, and to just be the man named Siegfried Sassoon, rather than to put forward a theory on who I think Sassoon was. To create something that allows people to form their own opinions of who Sassoon was rather than tell them who I think he was.

Just one last question. Why do you think this film should be made? Or do you think this film should be made?!

S: Umm, I do! Clearly I do!

I think it does come back to the questions of… we are members of a generation who have never lived through the threat of war. We’ve never lived through it. Unless we choose to sign up for an army, and even in that situation, it’s entirely possible that we would never see combat. The threat and possibility of war simply do not exist for us. We have different threats, we have different fears, we have different problems, but the idea of being at war isn’t present and I think that that the fact that war doesn’t feel like it’s a possibility, the fact that our being on a battle ground doesn’t feel like a possibility has lead to, in no small part, what is often mistakenly described as apathy amongst our generation.

I don’t think it is apathy... people care but the sense of urgency isn’t necessarily there. But I think that looking at people who were our age at a time that war was just a constant possibility and reality, and exploring those same conversations we have now, under those circumstances, is incredibly important, because in my estimation, misguided nationalism and the mistaken belief that geographical coincidence is the same thing as cultural identity are the main drivers that lead to war.

So when I see a indisputable rise in those ways of thinking on the global political stage, I can’t help but feel that all story-tellers, and all artists have a responsibility to ask as many questions of that as possible, because it’s all we do at this point.
​
It’s all we really have. Stories.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1375078667/the-burying-party
#wilfredowenfilm