How D-Day Drama ‘Pressure’ Managed To Step Out ‘Saving Private Ryan’s Shadow

Production still from director Anthony Maras’ PRESSURE, a Focus Features release.

Courtesy of Alex Bailey/Focus Features/STUDIOCANAL

If you’re a filmmaker looking to recreate the events of D-Day, there’s just no escaping the impact of Saving Private Ryan.

Steven Spielberg’s depiction of the Allied invasion of Normandy was so raw and visceral, that it literally triggered PTSD in veterans who had landed on the beaches that fateful day in June 1944.

In other words, it set the standard for every World War II movie that came after.

“It’s how the world knows D-Day,” director Anthony Maras (Hotel Mumbai) told me over Zoom as we discussed his new war drama, Pressure. “At least how the Western world knows D-Day.”

Adapted by David Haig from his stage play of the same name, the film mainly revolves around the military decision-makers (like Brendan Fraser’s General Dwight “Ike” D. Eisenhower and Damian Lewis’s General “Monty” Montgomery) in the tense days leading up to the amphibious assault that ultimately turned the tide of the conflict in Europe. That said, the story does culminate with soldiers disembarking off the boats onto the French coast and into enemy fire.

“I think Saving Private Ryan is inherently different, in that it is very much from the point-of-view of the soldiers in the boats, the grunts who are going to lose their flesh and blood in this battle,” posited Maras. “There is a palpable terror and humanity in what these poor young guys are going to go through.”

He continued: “With Pressure, it’s the inverse of that. Even though we are in the teeth of the beach landings, psychologically, I’ve tried to construct that sequence in a way that our hearts are really with the people who have the responsibility for having sent these men in and are now in this horrifically difficult position of being powerless and having to sit there and listen to see if the decision they made was right, or if it’s going to mean horrific bloodshed.”

To further set it apart from Spielberg’s Oscar-winning film, Maras incorporated colorized archival footage of the D-Day landings (much of it shot by Hollywood cinematographers drafted into the war effort) and taken from original negatives provided by the American and British governments.

“Many lost their lives, and there’s a big responsibility that comes with using that footage,” the director explained. “There’s also an opportunity to try and directly show the audience what these people were going through all those years ago. With the technology that we have now, we’re able to up-res and colorize it in a way that I think looks more like real life than history. Had we not been able to do that technically, I wouldn’t have included black and white footage, because you’d constantly be thinking, ‘Okay, now we’re looking at history.’ But colorizing it allows that climax to be different in some ways to what’s come before it.”

But the main antagonist of the film is not Nazis—not at first, anyway.

No, what Ike and his people are up against is that mercurial atmospheric phenomenon we so often take for granted: weather. The Allied Expeditionary Force could not get troops onto Continental Europe if Mother Nature was feeling tempestuous. The waves couldn’t be too big, visibility not too foggy.

“They needed to get the tides right because if the tides were way out, then suddenly they had a lot further to run whilst getting shot at,” said Maras. “What they did back then was bloody incredible. And what they did without phones, without email, without communication systems like we have today…how they managed to move that amount of people under enemy fire was crazy.”

As you’ve probably deduced by now, Pressure’s title not only refers to the nerve-shredding time crunch in which the Allies found themselves, but also the fluctuations in air that dictate weather. Maras started developing the project in 2020 after seeing just how fickle our planet’s natural environment can be during the wildfires in California and his native Australia.

“I was like, ‘Wow, this happened so long ago and yet, many of the same themes and problems they encountered then we’re encountering today, but in a different way,’” he recalled. “That kind of made it feel very relevant to now … It feels like a lot of the biggest challenges that we face collectively as people are things that we’re not really designed by nature to fear. They’re complex, systemic things, which are difficult to fear because it’s difficult to understand them.”

To ensure conditions would be ideal—or at least as close to ideal as possible—the planners of D-Day bring in renowned British meteorologist Dr. James Stagg (played by Andrew Scott), who could be described as quiet force of nature himself. Obstinate and fiercely precise, Stagg butts heads with the generals and other meteorologists as they plan to go ahead with the original invasion date of Monday, June 5.

“To use the weather as a metaphor,” mused Maras, “he comes in like a stormfront.”

After so much success in the North African campaign, cocky and self-assured American weatherman Irving P. Krick (Chris Messina) gives the green-light. Stagg heavily disagrees, forecasting a storm with up-to-the-minute data.

His prediction turned out to be true.

“What attracted me was that it was in the war room, and not on the battlefield,” Maras said of his desire to bring something new to the WWII genre. “It’s this pressure cooker, ticking-clock thriller, which is all good stuff to basically get broader audiences to see it. But it’s actually telling a very unique kind of story in a way, where the protagonist is like Cassandra from ancient mythology. He’s at the top of the mountain, he can see what’s coming, and all these other people back here can’t see it. He’s got to try and warn them, but they don’t want to listen.”

General Eisenhower is already on edge because of the manmade disaster that was Exercise Tiger, the little-known dress rehearsal for D-Day that resulted in the accidental deaths of nearly 800 American servicemen just six weeks before the actual event took place.

“[It’s] this dark cloud effect that hangs over the heads of everyone in those rooms, most particularly Eisenhower, and, to an extent, Stagg,” Maras noted. “It kind of charges their discussions about weather with a kind of seriousness.”

Casting Fraser as Ike “brought a vulnerability” to the character, whom the director wanted to feel genuinely human and fallible. A man who fully understands how the winds of fortune could so quickly blow out of their favor. A man who wrote two letters (one commending the troops and another blaming himself) depending on whether the invasion was successful or not.

A far cry from “the iconic figure he later became as president and war hero,” the director shared. “We were more interested in the Ike that was smoking four to six packs of cigarettes a day, drinking over 20 cups of coffee,” the filmmaker added. “His body itself was breaking down, he had an open wound, an ulcer on his back from the stress. How do you get an actor who can bring that kind of life to the film? Who can have a fear of failure in his eyes in his private moments that adds to the pressure?”

Scott, meanwhile, was chosen to play Stagg because, “Andrew has a way of moving his body, a way of being where he reveals a lot by seemingly doing little,” which was needed for a man “whose anxiety is very internalized, because he’s got this pressure on him.”

Yes, he can be abrasive and inscrutable at times, but underneath the stark professionalism, he’s still a human being.

“You see the clouds parting a little bit and see the sunlight, the humanity within him, at certain moments,” noted Maras. “When he’s speaking to [Kay Summersby, Ike’s aide played by Kerry Kondon] at one particular point in the film about why he loves the natural world, and, later on, when he’s on the phone to someone about his wife. Having those two different sides, a multifaceted character, is something that Andrew was uniquely poised to bring to the screen as James Stagg.”

Based on Stagg’s recommendation, D-Day was delayed to the morning of Tuesday, June 6 when a small gap opened in the inclement weather conditions.

Fittingly enough, the same thing happened in the run-up to Pressure’s own landing sequence. Shooting was scheduled to begin at Rye Beach (along the shores of the English Channel) on a Monday, but the production’s resident meteorologists and marine biologists warned a nasty storm was on its way. Time was of the essence due to oncoming winter.

“On the weekend, our meteorologists came back and said, ‘We think there might be a window. We’re not sure, but it might come on Tuesday morning,’” remembered Maras. “A storm hit on Monday, knocked out all our production design that we’d spent a lot of time putting together. Our production design team reset all that stuff, and, on Tuesday morning, the gap in the weather came, we rolled in with our trucks and our crew and got the weather we needed. So, it was definitely an art imitating life scenario—and we did it in four days.”

Pressure is now in theaters