How much of the film is historical fact and how much is fiction?
The whole film comes from factual material that was researched, except for the village scene in Alsace, which actually involved over a hundred soldiers and enormous losses, and that I reduced to a dozen characters. For the rest, each detail, such as the giving out of food, equipment, the fighting, is based on eyewitness accounts from men who took part in these events or army archive reports. I was very worried because the subject had never before been treated in cinema, so each scene had to be right. Using anecdotes, I wanted to leave behind a ‘perfect’ account. But I also wanted to have the freedom not to remain faithful to history. I had the opportunity to work with great actors and they made me feel like a spectator on a voyage. The credits and some images are in black and white. Is this the way you wanted to make the whole film? At one point, I had the idea of wanting to make viewers understand that it is a real historic event. Then I decided to use colour as a way of distancing my
