The Netflix World War I movie All Quiet on the Western Front is a beautifully tragic film that will probably win every award that’s ever been made. Now there’s a documentary about the incredible amount of work that went into the movie.
For the uninitiated, the movie tells the story of Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer), who along with his friends falls prey to a patriotic speech from his school teacher about the need to join the army and the duty to go to war for their country. They are mere schoolboys and are initially excited by the prospect of adventure.
That adventure becomes a living nightmare the second they are introduced to the trenches on the front lines of the war. The movie is nominated for nine Oscars, and the documentary aims to answer practical questions about it such as where it was filmed and how many trenches were actually built for the film.
According to Netflix, the movie’s enormous outdoor set took two months to create, with trenches built by excavators and other heavy-duty equipment. Production designer Christian Goldbeck said just the planning alone took several weeks.
“It was like a jigsaw puzzle,” Goldbeck said. “We spent nearly two months at the drawing board, going through scene by scene, mapping out the layout of the trenches, and creating the right spacing on the battlefield.”
There’s also the matter of the score and those heart-shaking notes that appear intermittently throughout the film. The man responsible for those notes is composer Volker Bertelmann. He said he came up with that little sequence on a refurbished harmonium that belonged to his grandmother.
A harmonium is a reed base piano-like instrument that makes sounds by blowing air through reeds controlled by either a foot or hand pump. Bertelmann’s favorite track on the minimalist soundtrack is the haunting “Remains.”
“It’s the music in the scene where the soldiers are handed their uniforms, put them on, and go off in a euphoric mood, singing while they march to the front. That music represents a lot of what is in the movie,” he said.
The muddy landscape in the film was the size of three soccer fields, and one time cinematographer James Friend got stuck in the mud late at night.
“James once sank into the mud up to his waist. He thought he was going to die because there was no one around and it was already dark,” Berger said in the documentary.
There were also between 800 and 900 extras in the movie, and they all had to be outfitted in era-specific clothing.
Making All Quiet On The Western Front is currently streaming on Netflix.