We’ve had the star-studded The Longest Day (1962), the restrained British independent movie made with the Imperial War Museum Overlord (1975), the supremely powerful Saving Private Ryan (1998), and TV features such as The Band of Brothers (2001), as well as many other modest movies, all of which focus on D-Day. Added to this now comes Pressure, which is emotionally very powerful and will stand up well alongside these others. But it takes a different perspective on D-Day by looking not at combat heroics but at the story of the weather-forecasting for early 1944, and the decision by Supreme Commander General Dwight D Eisenhower as to whether or not the invasion should go ahead.
The dramatic story of how meteorologists affected the date of the invasion was first told by Eisenhower himself in his memoir Crusade in Europe in 1948. The man at the centre of the story, Group Captain James Stagg, wrote his own memoir – with an extended introduction on the differences between weather-forecasting techniques in north-west Europe and the US – Forecast for Overlord in 1971. Two years later, he appeared in the Thames Television series The World at War. David Haig picked up on this extraordinary story, and after studying the documents and interviewing the Stagg family, wrote a stage play called Pressure, which ran in Edinburgh and in London’s West End in 2014.
Two people who saw the stage production were Joe Naftalin, head of UK film production at StudioCanal, the French production and distribution company, and Lucas Webb, of British film-production company Working Title. Both were fascinated by the human-led story of, as Webb says, ‘an individual who had to find the courage to do his job to the best of his abilities when everybody was saying one thing and he was a lone voice saying “But we have to do another”.’ Naftalin and Webb began discussing a possible film project with Haig, who had always thought his play would adapt powerfully into a movie. The final piece of the production jigsaw came with a visit by Australian film-maker Anthony Maras to London. His film Hotel Mumbai had deeply impressed Naftalin and Webb, and Maras soon became equally obsessed with the D-Day story and its theme of ‘speaking truth to power’ as he later put it. Maras came on board and worked on Haig’s draft script, giving it many of the cinematic elements that were needed in what had started as a stage production.
The flowers of Shanidar