Darkest Hour: Churchill's War Rooms

Gary Oldman, Lily James and writer Anthony McCarten take us inside Churchill’s War Rooms in the first of an exclusive series of behind the scenes videos for Darkest Hour.
In UK cinemas on January 12th.
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Academy Award nominee and BAFTA Award winner Gary Oldman stars for BAFTA Award-winning director Joe Wright in Darkest Hour, a thrilling account inspired by the true story of Winston Churchill’s first weeks in office during the early days of the Second World War. Academy Award nominee Anthony McCarten’s original screenplay takes a revelatory look at the man behind the icon.
A witty and brilliant statesman, Churchill is a stalwart member of Parliament but at age 65 is an unlikely candidate for Prime Minister; however the situation in Europe is desperate. With Allied nations continuing to fall against Nazi troops, and with the entire British army stranded in France, Churchill is named to the position with urgency on May 10th, 1940.
As the threat of invasion of the UK by Hitler’s forces looms and 300,000 British soldiers cornered in Dunkirk, Churchill finds his own party plotting against him and King George VI (Emmy Award winner Ben Mendelsohn) skeptical that his new Prime Minister can rise to the challenge. He is confronted with the ultimate choice: negotiate a peace treaty with Nazi Germany and save the British people at a terrible cost or fight on against incredible odds.
With the support of his wife of 31 years, Clemmie (Academy Award nominee Kristin Scott Thomas), Churchill looks to the British people to inspire him to stand firm and fight for his nation’s ideals, liberty, and freedom. Putting his power with words to the ultimate test, with the help of his tireless secretary (Lily James), Winston must write and deliver speeches that will rally a nation. As Winston withstands his own darkest hour, he attempts to change the course of world history forever.
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More on the War Rooms:
The actual War Rooms have been preserved as museum pieces and could not be filmed in. The production did have measurements and photographs taken there. Gary Oldman spent hours taking it all in, and was allowed to sit in Churchill’s chair.
For the recreation, months of planning and further research yielded a stunning recreation of the low-ceilinged bunker in which Churchill and his War Cabinet strategized and debated. The set was housed at the UK’s storied Ealing Studios, the world’s oldest film studio, where such classics as The Ladykillers and It Always Rains on Sunday were made. Nothing was left to chance, not even the type and color of the map pins.
Oldman adds, “The pins were in the right places. It was eerily like the actual War Rooms, certainly among the best-designed sets I’ve ever been on.
“The detail was staggeringly good; I opened up a couple of books that were ‘lying around’ and they were remarkable recreations of logs and journals.”
Lily James confirms, “It was amazing. I opened up a drawer, and there were sugar rations as well as pencils ground down from use.”
The art unit had overseen the creation of a living breathing hub of 24-hour activity, teeming with banks of phones, growing piles of paper, maps of Europe, and ruffled sleeping quarters. The overall picture is one of organized chaos, as the unit recreated the progress of the underground space rather than its preserved state.
Greenwood offers, “The War Rooms are like an evolving mess -- from which came Churchill’s foresight of what to do. They were all down there in a bunker underground, burrowing in - in more ways than one. Joe wanted a guiding sense of ‘make do and mend.’
“The dialogue in the script conveys so well their holding explosive knowledge and deciding how much and when to share with the nation.”
James offers, “It’s a bit of a maze down there, and you can see how people might go stir crazy. Joe and Bruno got these great shots of us that will surprise the audience.”
Douglas Urbanski reports, “The art department’s spectacular sets had these thick walls - and yet sometimes the walls could be removed so that Joe could get at a different angle, get closer to the characters with Bruno’s unique palette.”
Wright notes, “Since a good portion of the movie takes place down there, we also wanted this claustrophobic atmosphere, the pressure on the people, but also the sense of perseverance. There’s nothing high-tech about the War Rooms and that is all the more impressive when you think of how people were working with quite basic materials. I find that moving as well.”