Ian Freer:After escaping a collapsing bunker,
Schofield and Blake come upon an abandoned
farm while a dogfight is happening in the skies
above. The German plane crashes into the
farmhouse and the two soldiers rush to save the
pilot. As the camera follows Schofield going for
water, the pilot stabs Blake (off-screen).
Sam Mendes:It was very clear to both me
and Krysty that we were going to take two men
on this journey and one of them was going to
die. So then the job became to subtly suggest
if either of the two of them were to die, it would
be the other one. Schofield is the one without
a brother so I suppose lazily an audience might
❯2 THE PLANE
think, “If a guy’s going to die, it’s not going to
be the guy with a brother.” And we were both
aware of that. I wanted it to be a moment of
chance. In an awful irony, the German soldier
who they rescue from a burning plane pulls out
his bayonet and stabs Blake, in fear more than
anything else.Krysty Wilson-Cairns: There are formulas
in screenwriting about when things should
happen and I think it’s all horseshit. I always
think you should let the story dictate itself. It
should feel real. So I picked a moment where
it feels natural for the two characters — it was
time to separate them and also a moment wherethe audience wouldn’t be traditionally told to
expect it. It was really harrowing to write.Sam Mendes: I guess of all the things I did in
the movie it was the most diffi cult scene. It was
a very delicate camera move. The camera is not
static; it circles them a number of times. And
that’s unusual in this fi lm because we tend not
to move the camera in an unmotivated way,
but here it seems to be illustrating or helping us
understand the emotion of the scene. These are
the things you can achieve with a single shot
— this sort of horror-movie idea of being locked
in and stuck in a single perspective, which might
seem coy in a conventional fi lm.Ian Freer:After Schofieldlays
Blake to rest, he is picked up by
a passing British unit in a truck.
As well as involving seamless
jiggery-pokery to get the
camera on board the vehicle,
the scene is remarkable for the
juxtaposition of banter between
soldiers with Schofield’s
shell-shocked grief.Krysty Wilson-Cairns:The
truck scene was the hardest
scene to write. There are
probably 150 versions of the
that scene. During the second
draft, Sam was on Broadway
and I was in New York with
him. We would meet in the
mornings to batter and batter
the scene trying to find
something, because it had to
unlock Schofield’s grief. It was
never right because Schofield3 THE TRUCK
Top: The stricken
German plane
comes in to land.
Left: A quietly
devastated
Schofi eld is
picked up.isn’t a shouter, he is not angry.
He internalises everything. We
came up with the idea that he
would sink into the background
and you would let the noise
all around him become Blake
— they are young, they are
idealistic, they are having a
laugh, they are telling stories.
So you let the audience into
the grief by playing everything
around it, which is tricky, harder
to pull it off.Sam Mendes: The delayed
emotion of it felt real to me. It’s
only then he begins to realise
what has happened to him. He
misses his friend and he misses
him even more, because he is
surrounded by other men who
are chatting blindly to each
other without knowing what
he has been through.DO NOT CROSS HERE IF SPOILERS OFFEND
DO NOT CROSS HERE IF SPOILERS OFFEND
DO NOT CROSS H
END
WA R N I N G!
I L E R S! S P O I L E R S! S P O I L E R S! S P O I L E
UPLOADED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws