Pressure: “Art Imitating Life, Imitating Art”: Edith Bowman Meets Anthony Maras
Interview with Edith Bowman
In an exclusive conversation for Be In The Scene, Edith Bowman talks to director Anthony Maras about Pressure: his obsession with one world-changing decision, why every wall had to be real, the map made in secret by toy makers, and the storm that hit exactly on cue.
Anthony Maras uses the word “obsessed,” and having spent an hour with him, I believe it. The director, co-writer and editor of Pressure did not simply take on a WWII project. He fell down a rabbit hole and stayed there for years. “I was majorly obsessed with this untold, peculiar story,” he tells me, “of one decision that basically changed the world.” The decision, in the end, came down to a single question that no general could answer for himself: “is a storm front going to come through.”
The hook
What captivated Maras was the strangeness of the angle. Everybody knows the invasion; almost nobody knows how close it came to being launched on the wrong day, or that the deciding factor was a weather forecast. “I was just completely captivated by this unknown story of these unsung heroes whose work really was pivotal in winning World War II,” he says. “It was the biggest invasion in human history, and it was all contingent ultimately on one thing. Can we go on June 5th or can’t we?” Had they gone then, he points out, “it would have been an absolute utter catastrophe.”
He is careful, though, that the film should never feel like a lecture. His ambition was for something with two engines running at once: “a propulsive, edge-of-your-seat, nail-biting thriller about characters dealing with unimaginable problems and stakes,” and, at the same time, “a very immersive and intimate character study of how people deal with the unknown and with uncertainty.” Underneath the ticking clock, he says, it is really about “how you come to the toughest decisions of your life when the way is not clear.”
There was a contemporary charge to that for Maras, who developed the film through the pandemic years. Many of the same tensions surfaced then, he notes: questions about who to trust, how to read expert advice, and how to hold your nerve when the data is frightening and incomplete. The story was eighty years old and felt like the morning news.
Every wall had to be real
If there is a single principle that shaped how Pressure looks, it is Maras’s insistence on real spaces. “I wanted my characters to walk out of one real room through a real corridor into another real room,” he says. That conviction sent him on an epic search for the Allied headquarters. He scouted, by his count, more than 100 buildings.
The obvious answer, the real Southwick House near Portsmouth where Operation Overlord was actually run, turned out to be impossible. It remains an active military base, hemmed in by decades of later construction. “You couldn’t turn your camera anywhere and not see modernity,” Maras says, the buildings of the fifties, sixties and eighties crowding every angle. So he kept looking, and eventually fell for Mentmore Towers, a 19th-century Rothschild country house that was, in his lovely phrase, “grand and opulent in its bones but run down enough to look commandeered.” It had the scale of a headquarters and the tiredness of a nation at war, and he rewrote scenes to make the most of it. “From the first time I saw Mentmore,” he says, “I knew it would feel like cinema, not a play.”
This obsession with the tangible is something Maras traces back to an earlier film, a short set in 1974 Cyprus that he shot on the actual UN green line, among real bullet holes and sandbags. The lesson stuck with him. “Your actors feed off that,” he says. Give performers a real world to stand in, and they give you something you cannot fake.
The map made by toy makers
Nowhere is that philosophy more beautifully expressed than in the giant map of Overlord that dominates the Operations Room, and the story Maras tells about it is my favourite of the whole conversation. Working with production designer Daniel Taylor, the team recreated the real Southwick wall map to within about two millimetres of the original.
But the truly remarkable part is in the history of the real thing. For security, the original top-secret map was not made in one place. It was farmed out to toy makers across England, each of them building a component “none knowing which piece” they were making, or what the whole would become. That is why the finished map has slightly mismatched wood grain and colours, and Maras and Taylor faithfully reproduced those imperfections. They even sourced paper from the same mill, Maras says, “so when you held it up to the light it would look the same.” Once filming wrapped, the recreation was donated to a museum, an object accurate enough to belong to history.
The storm that arrived on cue
For all his control over sets and props, the one thing Maras could not direct was the sky, and in the film’s most extraordinary twist, the sky decided to write the ending itself. The Normandy landings and the doomed rehearsal, Exercise Tiger, were both shot at Camber Sands, and the plan was to film the big beach sequence on a Monday, the very day the real D-Day had first been set for.
Then history repeated itself, almost to the letter. Meteorologists warned of fifty-knot winds and six-foot waves for that Monday. The storm duly arrived, and it was fierce enough, Maras says, that it “washed all our production design gear away.” Daniel Taylor’s team went back out and re-dressed the entire beach at three in the morning. And then, exactly as it had in 1944, the weather broke. They shot on the Tuesday as the clouds parted and got what they needed. “Art imitating life, imitating art,” Maras says, still slightly amazed by it.
The battle work was punishing in other ways too. Maras reveals that the production had only five days to capture all of the battle sequences, where, by comparison, a Saving Private Ryan stunt team had once had six or seven weeks. That constraint became a creative catalyst, pushing him to lean harder on one of the film’s boldest ideas: the interplay with real archival footage.
Bringing the archive back to life
Maras never originally intended to use archive film, wary of anything that might make Pressure look “like the History Channel.” But, inspired by Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old, he found a way to weave in real 35mm period footage, painstakingly colourised so that it stops feeling like the past. “It stops looking like history and starts looking like someone you’d pass on the street,” he says, “the bags under their eyes, the sunburn, the windburn.” He and his editors went through some 46 hours of footage, and in a coincidence almost too neat to be true, one of the assistant editors turned out to be James Stagg’s grandson, also named James Stagg.
The right people to play the impossible
Casting, for Maras, was about finding actors who could carry contradiction. In Stagg he needed “someone who had a really keen intelligence but also an accessibility,” a man whose “head is quite literally in the clouds” and who has “the courage of his convictions.” He could not think of anyone better than Andrew Scott, and offers perhaps the highest compliment in the film’s whole press campaign: “What Stagg was to the field of meteorology, Andrew is to acting. They’re both masters.”
For Eisenhower, he wanted to look past the statue and find “a leader who was plagued by doubt, who was played by fear of failure,” and saw in Brendan Fraser the ability to bring “a true complexity and a vulnerability to a leader who was more multi-dimensional than the press clippings.” In Kay Summersby he found a woman “quite ahead of her time,” an ambulance driver during the Blitz who “was there when history was getting made,” and cast Kerry Condon for her “keen intelligence, but also a warmth and accessibility.”
Running through all of it, Maras insists, is a streak of “dark, sardonic humour,” the gallows wit of exhausted people in an absurd, high-pressure environment who know that the wrong call could cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
That, in the end, is the Anthony Maras signature: the real room, the real map, the real weather, and underneath it all, real people making an impossible choice. He went looking for the truth of a story almost no one had told, and the weather gods, fittingly, met him halfway.
