There’s no real way of knowing if you will be working on the Dambusters remake, but if you are a Matte Dept. Supervisor, a Matte Painter, a Senior Water TD, a Shader Writer, an FX TD, a Lighting TD or a Water TD then you might want to consider relocating to downtown Wellington in New Zealand. In the last month, Weta Digital has advertised for people to fill all these jobs. Please don’t ask me what the work entails, as I have no idea. Perhaps the ‘Water TDs” will be involved in producing the new CGI versions of the mines exploding against the dams, which are probably the most laughably amateur bits of the 1955 film.
However, you could just end up working on The Hobbit, Halo or Lucifer, all of which Weta also has in the pipeline.
Dam Busters 1955 film
Filming The Dam Busters in Skeggie – bracing enough?
Fascinating account of a day’s filming, sometime in early 1954, on location in bracing Skegness for the famous scene in The Dam Busters where Barnes Wallis watches his mine being dropped for the first time. The article, written by a junior reporter, was published in the Skegness Standard, and the journalist himself writes an afterword, telling how he got an exclusive interview with Richard Todd who drove him back to the town. No luxury trailers or personal drivers in those days!
(NB: A link I posted last May to an earlier version of this article now seems to have vanished.)
Dambusters remake: Fry says 2010, we say 2011
UPDATE, 16 August 2014. We were even wronger! Best guess is now 2016 or 2017.
UPDATE, 24 September 2011. We were wrong! Best guess is now 2013 or 2014.
UPDATE, 16 December 2009: Jackson confirms shooting to start in 2010
While he was recently down under in New Zealand, filming a nature programme for the BBC, Stephen Fry gave an interview to the entertainment section of the Wellington newspaper, the Dominion Post. Most of this was about his travelogue, Stephen Fry in America, which was coming up on air down there, but at the end he spoke briefly about his work on the remake of The Dam Busters.
The article is not available on the interwebnet, but I managed to track it down via a library subscription, so I bring it to you here.
Interviewer: Is it true that you have rewritten The Dam Busters?
SF: Yes, well, I won’t say rewritten. The great New Zealand director, Peter Jackson, asked me if I would be interested in writing a screenplay on The Dam Busters. This was fascinating because – I yield to none my admiration to him as a film-maker; he’s astounding – I had no idea he’d be interested in this story.
It turns out, actually, that it was David Frost who had bought the rights to the Paul Brickhill book The Dam Busters and was desperate to find someone to direct it, and he was told by a friend that Peter Jackson had a huge poster of the original film on his wall in his office and David thought, ‘I’ll call him up’, and the deal was struck. Then Peter got in touch with me. Now the original film is a magnificent film – it genuinely is a masterpiece.
Interviewer: And when will we see your version?
SF: 2010.
Dominion Post, Wellington, NZ, 17 February 2009.
The great man says ‘2010’, but I still think he is being optimistic. IMDB Pro has a few people listed as working on pre-production visuals, but no one else, which would indicate that shooting is still some way away.
The Dam Busters: Patrick McGoohan’s first words on screen
Patrick McGoohan may have reached international stardom as Danger Man and The Prisoner, but his first speaking role on the screen was in 1955, in The Dam Busters. He played the guard on the briefing room door, who turns Gibson’s dog away. Here is the clip on YouTube:
Dambusters remake: 2011 still most likely date
A New Year turns (and a happy one to all readers of this blog) but there is no word yet on how the remake of The Dam Busters is going. Screenplay writer Stephen Fry is currently in New Zealand, but is working on a BBC nature documentary, rather than the movie. All the industry gossip about Peter Jackson’s current workload is to do with his forthcoming film version of Tintin, to the cast of which Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are the latest additions. Christian Rivers who is due, as they say in film circles, to ‘helm’ the Dambusters project is currently working on a film called The Laundry Warrior about an Asian warrior assassin. Where does this leave the remake of Britain’s 11th favourite war movie? As there has been no word at all on a cast, I’m not budging from my prediction that it won’t hit the cinema screens until 2011.
Probably best known as…
The recent demise of Reg Varney saw another rash of newspaper articles recalling someone half-remembered from way back when. Even though he had been the star of at least two well known TV series (not just the awful On the Buses but also the earlier, and funnier, The Rag Trade) the obituaries still had to remind many of us as to who exactly he was, falling back on the old clichés: ’15 minutes of fame …’, ‘probably best known as …’. Happily still around, even if not acting any more, is Mr Jon Dixon whose 90 seconds of fame played a significant part in the way in which the Dambusters have come to define Britishness. I hope the repeat fees from all those ‘100 Best TV Ads’ documentaries are some sort of compensation.
Gibbo’s four legged friend
Last weekend’s Sunday Telegraph had a bit of a scoop which probably confirmed the worst suspicions of some Dam Buster film enthusiasts. Sir David Frost, who is producing the new film with Peter Jackson, told the newspaper’s diary writer, Mandrake, that they had reached a compromise on the name of Guy Gibson’s dog. The remake is unlikely to appear before 2011, and it will be called Nidge.
In the course of writing this blog I have spent a lot of time over the last six months reading various bulletin boards and discussion forums. In almost every thread that has been started about the remake of The Dam Busters someone raises the name of the dog within the first ten posts. A range of ‘jobsworths’ and ‘do-gooders’ are cited as being the people who won’t allow the original name to be used, with ‘the PC Brigade’ being the favourite culprit.
Well, if the decision has been made, it’s made. Time for everyone to move on, I think.
Two Peter Jacksons – there are only two Peter Jacksons…
Dambuster aficionados know full well that the scheduled remake of the 1955 film is in the (we hope safe) hands of Mr Peter Jackson, with the multi-talented Mr Stephen Fry providing the words. (Can he improve on the beautifully understated script of R C Sherriff?) But football fans know that there is another Peter Jackson closely associated with events in the so-called Bomber County. This is the bearded one’s namesake, the manager of Lincoln City FC, the mighty Imps, who have just finished a middling season by coming 15th in League Two (what in the old days we used to call the Fourth Division). And, it turns out, this Mr Jackson has recently returned to his post after a skirmish with throat cancer. We wish him well and hope the fans greet him with a blast of their favourite tune (you know – the Eric Coates one) on the first game of next season.
The bombsight used to break the Möhne Dam
I’ve only had this blog up and running for about a week, but I’ve noticed that I already get many more hits on it than on the companion site devoted to my book. So with that in mind, I thought that I would draw the attention of my blog readers to the remarkable picture of an original Dambusters bombsight which recently came into my attention. This is thought to be the only original wooden bombsight still in existence, and it was used by Plt Off John Fort, the bomb aimer in David Maltby’s crew. Some time in mid 1943 it was given by David to his father (my grandfather) Ettrick Maltby. The full story is told here.
There has been a certain amount of scepticism as to whether any of the 617 Squadron bomb aimers actually used the bombsight (devised by Wg Cdr Dann) on the Dams Raid (Operation Chastise). Some of them certainly preferred their own makeshift sights and used chinagraph marks and tape on their Perspex blisters. But this artifact would seem to prove that at least one bomb aimer used the type that later became famous through the 1955 film. And he was the one that dropped the bomb which finally broke the Möhne Dam!
Wartime newsreels
This has been on Youtube for several months, but there may be people who haven’t seen it.
It is a compilation of two newsreels from 1943 and one from 1955. The first two show King George VI and the Queen visiting 617 Squadron at RAF Scampton after the Dams Raid. The second shows the aircrew who were decorated for their part in the raid, outside Buckingham Palace after receiving their medals.
The postwar section shows original aircrew mingling with actors and people from the film industry at a reception to mark the premiere of the 1955 film.
Dambusters Blog 