Pressure: “The Fault Is Mine and Mine Alone”: Edith Bowman Meets Brendan Fraser
Interview with Edith Bowman
In an exclusive conversation for Be In The Scene, Edith Bowman talks to Brendan Fraser about becoming Dwight D. Eisenhower for Pressure: the weight of one man’s conscience, two letters written for two possible futures, and a rusty staple that brought history to life.
Brendan Fraser has a way of talking about Dwight D. Eisenhower that makes it sound less like a role and more like a responsibility he was asked to carry for a while. When we sit down to talk about Pressure, Anthony Maras’s thriller about the 72 hours before D-Day, what he keeps returning to is not strategy or spectacle but conscience: the almost unbearable weight of a decision, and the man who refused to hand that weight to anyone else.
The scale of the thing
Fraser is refreshingly honest that, like a lot of us, he did not know the half of it. He knew “I Like Ike,” and not much beyond. What the script opened up was the sheer scale of what came down to those few days, and the fact that the weather very nearly undid all of it. D-Day was set for Monday 5 June, and then the forecast forced a choice almost too large to picture. As Fraser puts it, the question was whether to “reroute or delay 300,000 troops,” in what he calls “the largest amphibious assault in human history.”
Hanging over Eisenhower the whole time was a catastrophe that had already happened. Fraser talks with real feeling about Exercise Tiger, the rehearsal for the landings held off the Devon coast. “749 army and navy soldiers died on the beaches of Slapton Sands in Devon,” he says, on a stretch of coast that “emulates almost perfectly the conditions of Utah Beach.” Live ammunition, a frequency miscommunication, German E-boats slipping in among the cargo vessels: it was a disaster in rehearsal, and it was fresh in Eisenhower’s mind. “I can only imagine the conscience Eisenhower had to have had,” Fraser says.
That, for him, is the engine of the character. In the film, Fraser explains, Stagg has to appeal to Eisenhower’s sense of humanity precisely because Eisenhower cared so deeply about the men. He was not among those who could think of soldiers as numbers. “They were all his sons,” Fraser says, “as far as he was concerned.” There is a grim piece of arithmetic in the story too, a metric that assumed heavy losses and planned for them by bringing five times as much of everything, soldiers, bullets, meals. Carrying that math, and the human cost baked into it, is what Fraser plays.
The general who was never shot at
What fascinated Fraser most is the paradox at the centre of the man. Eisenhower graduated from West Point at the top of his class and rose to become a five-star general and one of the most popular American presidents in history, and yet, Fraser points out, he “never fired a shot in anger and was never fired at in anger once in his entire military career.” He was not a battlefield warrior. He was the man in the room where the impossible calls were made, and he took supreme responsibility for all of it anyway.
Nothing captures that better than the two letters, which Fraser describes with something close to awe. Before the invasion, Eisenhower wrote two statements for two possible futures. One was to be read in the event of success, and it credited the troops. The other was to be read in the event of failure, and it took the blame entirely on himself. “If there’s any reason this did not succeed,” it read, “the fault is mine and mine alone.” The failure letter was never needed. It ended up folded in a coat pocket, and later surfaced in a biography, a small piece of paper carrying the whole moral weight of the war.
“I don’t know how he wasn’t a glory hound,” Fraser says, turning the idea over. Eisenhower “had an ability to hear everyone out. He was fallible, he didn’t always make the correct decisions, but when he made a mistake he owned it.” For Fraser, that is the heart of what Pressure is about, and he ties it directly back to Stagg and his forecasters. They “were the voices of truth as they spoke it to power,” he says, “no matter what the power wanted or did not want to hear.”
Holding history in his hands
Fraser is a famously diligent researcher, and for Pressure the homework had a physical dimension he clearly treasures. He and Damian Lewis visited the Imperial War Museum, where he was given access to the archives, and for a few hours he held a real copy of the Operation Overlord playbook, cover to cover, as thick as a Hollywood script, every page stamped top secret. What stayed with him was the smallest of details. “The staples were rusty,” he says. It is the kind of thing no amount of imagination supplies, the tiny, corroded evidence that this was real, that men held these same pages and did not know how it would end.
He brought the same appetite for detail to the set, and found it waiting for him there. He praises the period accuracy of the production down to the ink and the shape of the pen nibs in the map rooms, and lights up describing Eisenhower’s desk, with its coloured telephones and a hotline straight to the White House. Sitting at it, he says, “I felt like a little kid at daddy’s desk,” awed by “the gravity that came with seeing his hotline.” The costume told the same story: from the fittings, Fraser found himself standing like Ike, hands clasped behind his back, a pose that came partly from Eisenhower’s bad back, and he shaved his head to get as close to the man as he could.
He is generous, too, about how Maras let the pressure become real in the room. The director’s habit of running long, repeated takes built a fatigue and exasperation in the cast that Fraser calls “organic,” the exhaustion of the story seeping into the making of it.
A leader learned from 1944
Weather forecasting in 1944 was, in Fraser’s telling, a wonderfully analogue business, and he reels off the methods with obvious relish: balloons carrying transponders, triangulated to see how high they rose and how far they blew off course; weather ships stationed off Nova Scotia in the North Atlantic, easy prey for U-boats; Air Force flights; and, sometimes, simply calling someone up to ask what it was like on the Isle of Man. It is a reminder of how thin the thread was, how much rested on scraps of information gathered by hand.
Fraser is warm about the ensemble he did it with. Andrew Scott, he says, has “moves to spare,” playing Stagg less as a man imploring than one demanding every scrap of accurate data he can get, “the heart of a poet in him.” Damian Lewis is “mercurial,” finding the humanity behind Montgomery rather than the caricature. Kerry Condon, whom he first met on the awards circuit years ago when he was nominated for The Whale and she for The Banshees of Inisherin, filled Kay Summersby’s role “with panache” and “a great deal of courage.” Chris Messina’s charm, he says, is “instantaneous.”
The man behind the poster
What comes through most in talking to Fraser is how much he wanted to rescue Eisenhower from his own iconography. History remembers a winner, but Pressure is interested in the man before the outcome was known, the one plagued by doubt and fear of failure, for whom victory “wasn’t written in stone.” “He wanted to make choices that were fundamentally the best thing to do,” Fraser says, “ethically and morally.”
It is a strikingly gentle way to describe supreme command, and it may be exactly why Fraser was cast. Eisenhower, as Maras has said, was someone America loved and trusted, and Fraser is someone the world loves and trusts. Watching him talk about those rusty staples and that folded letter, you understand that he did not just study the man. For a while, he carried him.
