At the beginning of the movie the pilot does a victory roll,
which the pilots did when they had a successful sortie.
When we made the film, some of the pilots actually did them for us.
They were so romantic to watch, strangely enough.
To see this beautiful aircraft, the Spitfire, which was like a ballet when it rolled over,
it was always a wonderful sight.
It made you feel very proud to be making this film on behalf of those pilots,
many of which died in the Battle of Britain.
They were all aged 20 years plus. Very young men.
This is Bernie Williams.
I was in charge of the aerial sequences, as production manager, on this movie,
Battle of Britain, which was shot and filmed in Spain, England and France,
with studio interiors at Pinewood Studios in England.
We had a main unit,
which filmed mostly the ground scenes with the principal actors.
We had an aerial and second unit, which filmed most of the flying sequences.
There were other units for models and background scenery plates,
for when we were filming the cockpit scenes with the actors.
We had about 11 or 12 actual flying Spitfires.
Many times, when you see planes like on the right of frame here,
those were possibly dummies that were made in the studio,
or they were nonflying Spitfires that we used for backgrounds.
All these actors had to learn how to get in and out of a plane
like the pilots of the Battle of Britain era.
This is the opening sequence pre the main titles of the film.
The planes took off great on the grass, but when it was raining it was a nightmare.
They couldn't take off as easily because they would skid
and not get the grip they needed to elevate themselves into the sky.
Most of the Spitfires were flown by RAF pilots,
from the Royal Air Force in England.
The Messerschmitts, which we'll see later in the film, were flown by Spanish pilots
from Tablada airfield in Spain.
We also had four American pilots from Texas, from the Confederate Air Force,
who would fly all the planes,
whether they were Hurricanes, Spitfires or Messerschmitts.
This scene was shot on a very nice day weatherwise.
Most of the film we suffered so much rain and bad weather.
Those are what we call "mock-up" aeroplanes.
As I say, they were built at Pinewood Studios.
So these planes had to be built four or five months before production started.
These are real Messerschmitts flying over the British airfield.
They were flown and led by a gentleman called Comandante Pedro Santa Cruz,
who was an incredible pilot - not a young man,
but he was very much in control of all his pilots and very disciplined.
Those are what we call "mock-up" aeroplanes.
As I say, they were built at Pinewood Studios.
This is a location,
showing Lord Dowding walking towards his office,
played by Sir Laurence Olivier.
Hi. My name's Guy Hamilton.
I had the privilege of directing Battle of Britain.
Lord Dowding was a handsome man in his sixties in the Battle of Britain,
so 30 years later he was quite an elderly gentleman and not very fit.
He stayed alive for two more years
because he was determined to see Battle of Britain with his boys, as he called them.
Robert Wright, who was his secretary and amanuensis, said
"It's amazing. Once this picture's under way,
he's absolutely determined to be at the premiere."
We gave him a new lease of life.
Larry managed to get some pictures and stills.
Curiously enough, facially, they were very, very similar.
He arranged the haircut, the dyeing of the hair.
He took a lot of trouble
imitating his slightly clipped English diction.
And it's not a flamboyant performance
because Dowding was not a flamboyant man.
Here is the Stuka German aeroplane,
of which there was only one available to us for the entire movie.
We had a Stuka attack on the white cliffs of Dover, which we'll see later in the film,
but these were all models of the aircraft.
So it was remarkable that we had this aircraft in such great condition
22 years after World War II ended,
and was available for the film.
These opening scenes were filmed in Tablada, in southern Spain,
because we wanted to see this whole huge frightening fleet of Heinkel aircraft,
and the Spanish Air Force had 50 of them,
which they were using for training of their pilots in Spain.
They loaned them to us for the entire movie.
So all these scenes had to be shot there as if they were in Germany or France.
This particular scene, being France, was shot in southern Spain.
We had to find these cars and ship them down to the south of Spain.
All these planes had to have German markings on them.
An incredible amount of work had to be done.
All these markings had to be safe, all these swastikas,
because you couldn't have them peeling off during flight.
It would cause a dreadful accident,
so they were permanent paintings on the bodies of these aircraft.
We were only able to have these planes available to us in Spain,
but we needed the Heinkel formations in England
for all the dogfights over the Channel and London.
We were only allowed to take two Heinkels to England for those sequences,
so a lot of the formation of Heinkels flying in the sky for the invasion of England
were actually shot in the skies of Spain.
We had to put them together like a jigsaw of film at the end of the day,
and it looks like they were actually in England.
The main unit spent about four to five weeks in Spain doing all these sequences.
The weather was against us a lot of the time.
This is a lucky day of sunshine for this whole sequence,
which probably took about a week to shoot.
I'm Garth Thomas, controller and assistant director of the aerial sequences.
We see for the first time a row of Heinkels,
which were then used by the Spanish Air Force for parachute jumps and for towing.
We also felt they were there in case the Spanish decided to take Gibraltar back.
They were the only things that flew slow enough not to miss it.
They were wonderful aircraft.
All these soldiers had to have training to look like the real thing.
A lot of our extras were trained days before filming took place.
These scenes were shot in Spain,
so we had to find extras that look like German soldiers and not Spanish people.
A lot of research had to be done so that any extras you see have to look the part,
have their hair cut.
We had to fit them costumewise, and store the costumes with their names.
There's a huge amount of preparation
weeks and months before the scenes are actually filmed.
It's interesting how Guy Hamilton never showed Hitler in these early sequences.
The great thing about this movie is that Guy Hamilton was able to cast
the best of the British actors,
and he also was able to cast the best of the German actors.
We weren't having British actors playing German roles with phoney accents.
So it was very credible by using the real people,
as this film was coming from the point of view of honesty on both sides.
It wasn't just gonna be about England beating Germany or vice versa.
It was what the game was politically,
and what the games were going on between the heads of the air force
and the actual battle itself.
This is an incredible scene
about the playing of politics between two nations at war with each other.
A game of poker, but millions of lives are at risk.
Churchill was playing for time because he needed to rebuild his army,
he had to rebuild his air force.
The British were playing for time.
This is Duxford Airport, which was used during World War II.
The hangars were as they were.
It's situated north of London, near Cambridge, where the universities are.
We had a solid runway at this particular airport,
so we didn't have any major problems regarding
the grass being wet for takeoffs and landings.
In this particular scene he's landing on grass, but...
We used this airfield for different airfields of England at the time.
It cost too much money to fly an air force from one airfield to another airfield,
and moving crew and hotels,
so we converted a lot of the buildings into hotel rooms for the pilots and crew.
So they lived on the base. We had a restaurant and catering.
They were given their evening meals and weekend meals and breakfast.
So they lived on site and we made use of this airfield for many scenes in the movie.
The pilots forever talked about...
It wasn't so much what it was like getting airborne and fighting,
it was the interminable waits which were much more nerve-racking.
Waiting for that terrible phone to ring that was going to say "Scramble".
They found the waiting much more painful than the fighting.
All of them, with the exception possibly of Plummer and even Bob Shaw,
were just too young to have been in the services.
But they, like Fox, would be very much like
the little boy who sees this RAF officer falling out of the sky, and
"He's actually a Battle of Britain pilot and he's landing in my garden",
and would have rushed off and got a silver cigarette case and offered him a cigarette.
The least he could do.
They were well aware of what the Battle of Britain meant.
These planes would have been filmed from a B-25 bomber,
which had cameras at the front and rear of the aircraft and on its belly.
The B-25 was an American bomber,
and was specifically converted for this film.
Its pilot was Jeff Hawke and his copilot was Duane Egli.
When you see a scene, the close-up of a pilot or actor in a cockpit,
then this would have been done in the studio against a rear-projection screen.
We would film separately a background moving picture,
or what we call a "plate",
so that it could be projected behind the actor.
Or made as a composite in the laboratory in postproduction,
where you put the background with the foreground, and it will then look
as if the pilot or the actor is really up in the sky flying.
We would have briefings like this every day on the aerial unit,
with maps of France and England and Germany,
to tell the pilots what the actual scene was about.
Then we'd have our own maps locally of the local area of Duxford,
because of pylons with cables, power lines, buildings, high buildings.
Cos we were working in a limited airspace of about 12 miles.
So we'd have these briefings,
where the squadron leader would tell all the pilots what the plan for each day was,
and they could submit their flight plan to the control tower
for permits to fly at certain altitudes.
Historically, Göring set up shop at the Ritz Hotel in the Place Vendôme in Paris,
and was having all the art dealers in Paris bringing him
half the contents of the Louvre, as far as I can make out,
and send it to so-and-so,
and the Battle of Britain was going on.
I'd got some intercepts, which the French Resistance gave me, which are wonderful.
He speaks to his wife every night, and was lying on a couch in the Ritz saying
"I'm standing on the cliffs,
and I can see Dover. The planes are coming."
"Oh, my darling, be careful. It is very dangerous."
One of the Resistance guys was on the switchboard and got all this thing going.
But he did go to see Der Tag,
where it was meant to be over in 48 hours.
When the Germans were actually at this place in France,
they were only about 20 minutes' flying time from the British coastline,
and 40 minutes' flying time from London.
They were that close.
These scenes which we're watching now would have been filmed in San Sebastián,
which is in northern Spain, as most of the sequences
on the French coastline overlooking the Channel were shot in San Sebastián.
We also used that city for the Berlin streets at night,
and we also used it for beach sequences.
Michael Caine. Harry Saltzman had done a lot for him as well.
He was fond of Harry, so he said "I'll play anything."
"But I'm going to America to do this. I'm only available for so-and-so."
So we quickly go to the board. "Where are we that week?"
"Yes, that would fit. Michael can do that."
Hi. Paul Annett here.
Here's Susannah York, who was one of the most beautiful young actresses,
and incredibly busy during the '60s and into the '70s.
I can remember, she was a charming girl.
Lord Dowding himself came to the airfield at Duxford,
and she was chosen as being the female representative of the cast
to hand him a portfolio of photographs of his tour around the film set
and of things recreated from the past.
It was quite windy on the airfield,
but Dowding was in his wheelchair, and everybody was wheeled out.
She stepped forward, and as she handed this portfolio to him, she dropped it.
All these photographs blew all over Duxford airfield.
I think they're probably still there. I'm not sure they ever got them together again.
A lovely girl and, I think, a tremendous actress.
Christopher Plummer I can remember
not so much in this sequence, but on the takeoff sequence.
The Hurricane aircraft that had been built all had lawnmower engines in them.
And so you could jump into them and start them up,
and these lawnmower engines would chug these recreated aircraft
a certain distance across the takeoff field.
They were warned always to not brake too sharply,
because they were lawnmower engines and it was quite a weight they carried.
Christopher seemed to forget this on several occasions,
and jumped into his aircraft - very dashing - with everybody else,
and roared off in the lawnmower engines in the Hurricanes, put the brakes on,
and the aircraft turned straight up on its nose.
I do believe in Battle of Britain there's a shot of that.
He wasn't best pleased, because no actor likes to look foolish on those occasions.
But, again, a tremendous actor and a very nice person.
The pub, I think, was in Hertfordshire.
I do remember them filming, because that very week that they filmed the sequence -
certainly the pub exteriors - between Susannah and Christopher
was the week that Bobby Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles and died.
Here we have the arrival of a major actor
and a wonderful film star, Mr Trevor Howard.
I remember this sequence. That first shot was done with him taking his helmet off -
I think he played Park -
taking his helmet off and starting to climb out, and then Guy Hamilton cut.
An extra guy or a double then jumped in and became Trevor Howard
and jumped down off the aircraft.
Then we picked up Trevor marching across the field.
I do remember saying to Guy "Why didn't you just get Trevor Howard to do that?"
In my naivety - I was very young.
He said "Because you do not get elderly actors to jump out of elderly aircraft."
So, a lesson learnt.
Here we see Michael Caine, one of the great stars of the cinema, I think,
of the last century and well into this century.
A really terrific guy, and such a professional.
Someone who loves the cinema more than anybody else I've met.
He once said to me, if all the fame went away he'd still work in the film industry.
The fame's never likely to go away now he's been ennobled as Sir Michael.
The first time I met him...
I'd worked with him when he was playing a tiny part on television years before,
but the first time I met him since he'd become a big star after Alfie and lpcress
was when Harry Saltzman saw a rough-cut of my film,
The Battle for the Battle of Britain,
liked it enormously and turned to me and said "I'm gonna give you a present, kid."
He said "I'm gonna give you Michael Caine
to introduce it and to do the voice-over."
I was about to say "I'd rather have Laurence Olivier" and I shut up.
I realised that wouldn't have been a good thing.
So he said "Michael will be there. Call him up, and he'll do whatever you want."
I did call him up and I said "Can you be in Carnaby Street" -
which was the trendy place in the '60s -
"made up at nine o'clock in the morning at a certain date?"
He was there good as gold, and he introduced our documentary.
A most charming man and so knowledgeable about the industry.
Here we see a rather curious vehicle.
The props department were thrilled when they discovered it.
I think this sequence was one of the air camps near England,
near the north coast, where they hoped to launch Operation Sea Lion from,
which Göring's air force was meant to clear the airs beforehand, and didn't.
The gentleman in the white on the right is, I think, Brustellin.
He was the German adviser, as well as playing a small part in the film.
And very knowledgeable he was. If you think about the '60s when this was made,
he was probably well to the fore in the other side, so to speak, back in 1940.
One thing about him that was really interesting was the fact that -
again, my naivety shows up here -
was that when we had a real Spitfire, the three-prop Spitfire, in one of the airfields,
he rushed over to it and got in it and was looking at it and everything,
and I said to him - quite foolishly, I suppose -
"Why is it you Germans are so interested in seeing inside a Spitfire,
whereas the British aren't at all interested in seeing inside the Messerschmitt?"
He said "Well, of course, you won, and we didn't get the chance."
So, fair enough.
This was all shot in Spain, north coast of Spain, near San Sebastián.
The Kübelwagens.
The art department was thrilled with this, cos they got all these vehicles together.
It was one of the days where our unit had taken a day off to do something else,
and, far from being the usual pest,
which we were to them shooting their stuff, they said the next day
"Where were you when we had all our vehicles? Why weren't you shooting?"
This is a briefing sequence,
instructing the pilots where they'll take off and bomb the lights out of England.
Manston and Biggin Hill, all these places.
An interesting thing is that when I was working on this in Seville,
I went to a very glamorous hotel,
which was like a Warner Brothers '40s wartime epic, where the Germans stayed.
General Galland, who often resigned and then came back on the picture
as the adviser for Germany,
was staying there, and we were going to ask him if he'd do some stuff for us.
I went into this incredible hotel, the name of which escapes me, and it was dark.
All I could see in the lounge was this screen
with all these black-and-white images of Heinkel bombers bombing England.
And I heard these voices, sitting in the darkness, saying
"There's Manston. There's Biggin. Look."
And I realised, for the first time in my young life then,
that I was watching the Germans watching themselves
bombing six dots out of England, instead of the other way round.
Which was a very curious feeling.
You're used to your own people talking about bombing another country,
but to have that happen was most peculiar.
The lights went on and there were all these very old faces.
Their eyes were bright and they were just into the whole thing.
These are real Messerschmitts.
They were used by the Spanish Air Force in southern Spain for training purposes.
They had loaned us 17 of them.
When we were filming there, Hamish Mahaddie, a highly decorated pilot,
purchased about 28 Messerschmitts for us to use in the film.
In order to make them really authentic - these were a later version -
we had to cut about a foot off each wing to make the wing shorter.
They became more dangerous to fly for the pilots.
Here are the Me 109s preparing to take off.
This was a very big sequence and took quite some time to do.
It was very exciting to see all these 109s taxiing out. A lot of them couldn't fly.
One must remember that they were still part of the Spanish Air Force at that time.
Spain flew them over North Africa. I said "What about the swastikas?"
They said "It gives them a shock."
That'll cause a domestic incident. I hope not.
Here we are in England, at Dover,
as the girls, with rather suspiciously looking '60s hairdos,
are preparing to receive information
that they're about to be attacked, on the early radar sequence.
This is a sequence where we see the Stuka bombers coming over,
which was almost a prologue to the Battle of Britain, because that happened before.
Stuka bombers were extraordinary. I don't know that I saw one at all.
They used to make this horrible whining noise and dive down on the targets.
Here is the British war room. There's Trevor Howard.
Robert Flemyng there, another lovely actor, watching all these people.
It looks quite casual and it's building up and building up.
The tension must have been quite extraordinary, waiting for the attack.
At the time Britain really believed that it would be attacked and overrun.
It was a most extraordinary period in history.
And only saved when Hitler turned to bombing London,
and took the heat off the airfields so that we could regroup, repair and fight back.
This is the Stuka sequence.
I hate to say it, because this is where we cheat in films -
there was only one Stuka available, which we saw in earlier scenes.
These are models. And they look great.
This was the attack on the Dover radar facility.
Most of this was a model sequence.
So in addition to the first unit filming with all the actors,
the aerial unit filming all the flying,
we had a second unit filming explosions and planes crashing on the ground.
We also had a model unit working on all these sequences, which took a long time.
These are all radio-controlled models
that had to be filmed on matching weather days.
In England, there's no guarantee because the weather changes every hour.
So those sequences took forever too. Much longer than anyone ever planned.
We used other airstrips in southern England to do these grass takeoffs,
using airfields that were used in World War II, such as Manston.
With aircraft, you could fly down for the day.
With your helicopter and your B-25 and your two or three Spitfires
you could actually go down for a day and come back the same day.
We were always chasing the weather. In some aerial sequences the sky changes.
One minute it's cloudy, the next minute it's blue.
But one's not really aware of that because the flying sequences are so well done.
All these flying scenes with the Spitfires would have been filmed from a B-25,
or from a cameraman hanging by a parachute harness
from underneath a helicopter.
It was easier with a helicopter because it can almost remain stationary in the sky.
Therefore, you had much more advantage of getting the aircraft
to do exactly what you wanted in terms of the camera frame.
If you were suspended at 5,000 feet up in the sky,
you can tell the pilot to fly towards you, and go to the left of you, go to the right.
When you're in a moving aeroplane, like the B-25,
then you've got two vehicles flying at 150mph passing each other,
and it goes so quickly that you lose the filming of the scene.
So a lot of the really good scenes were shot from the helicopter.
We also had cameras inside the cockpits of these aeroplanes,
that the pilot would have to press a button at the appropriate moment.
So we trained them to be cameramen too.
Then we would get the shots where we felt like we're inside the plane,
looking ahead and looking behind.
These models were excellent when you consider they're put up on a huge screen.
They look really incredibly real.
These scenes of all these Heinkels flying in formation were filmed in Spain,
alongside the Messerschmitts.
Any shots of Spitfires coming into the scene would have been shot in England.
So that's how the editor is a craftsman when it comes to editing and using film.
Those are the real cliffs of Dover.
I suspect that they showed the Heinkel formation by playing with the negative,
because we never had that many Heinkels.
I suspect that we probably shot our 50 Heinkels up in the air,
and they moved the negative across the screen so it would look like 150, 200.
The cleverness of making a movie is,
if you have a dozen aeroplanes like we had, a dozen Spitfires,
by shooting different angles, you could make it look as if 40 were taking off.
But, in fact, we only had 12, and all the other ones that are in the background
are either disused cannibalised Spitfires that will never fly again -
they used to stand in front of gates of airfields as mementos of the past -
or they were mock-ups that we built in the studio.
So we'd always get this feeling of many more aircraft than we actually had.
All those planes in the hangar behind there were probably all mock-up planes.
These scenes were filmed at Duxford.
This is before...
This is the sequence where the Germans attack this airfield.
Every day we had to have a plane count.
Every day we were told "This plane can't take off because of an oil problem",
or "It needs a propeller changed", or...
These scenes of dropping the bombs were done over the sea,
because those bombs were really cement and could never be dropped over land.
So they were separate shots
to make it look like they were part of flying over this airfield.
As Guy Hamilton really wanted it to look spectacular,
as if it really was during the war,
we actually blew up this real hangar.
I'm not sure we had a permit at the time, but we blew it up.
It took two days to completely destroy it.
These shots amaze me, because there's so much organisation
gone into these aerial shots of Duxford airfield being blown up.
It's just incredible technical expertise and wonderful organisation by the film crews.
We caused a lot of excitement around Duxford while we made this film,
cos people would come out of their back gardens and see these fires and smoke,
and planes landing and dogfights.
It became like a carnival for the whole summer.
This would be another airfield,
but we used the same airfield to make it look different.
Again, we played with the aeroplanes,
using 10, 12 maximum Spitfires to look like 30, 40.
That was the secret of trying to continue the effect
that we had more planes than we really had
by using mock-ups and cannibalised Spitfires as background set dressing,
none of which took off.
The one you just saw blow up was a mock-up being pulled by a cable.
It was dangerous for our pilots. They were taking off in these smoked-out airfields.
So sometimes they had no visibility,
and the dangers of colliding, because they were not on hard runways.
They were going across a grass field without any markings
and could easily have collided at any time during takeoff or landing.
We also had a twin-seater Spitfire, where the pilot could sit in the back
and the cameraman could sit in the other seat
and photograph points of view through the propellers of dogfights
to give it more realism.
This scene would have been filmed from the back of the B-25,
where the cameraman was exposed to the elements.
He was sitting in a chair at the rear of the aircraft, which was cut off.
He had a camera mounted on the back of the aircraft.
These scenes were probably shot from the dome at the top of the B-25,
where you could look up to the sky above you.
We also had a camera on the front of the B-25, so we could do forward shots.
We had cameras on the belly of the B-25, so that we could film down to the ground.
Then we would have the helicopter
with our famous John Jordan hanging from a parachute harness underneath it,
in a stationary position in the sky, getting the best shots he could.
Every time these aircraft went up we had to maximise our time,
because they were only up there for about 45 minutes.
By the time we'd got them into formation for filming,
we had 45 minutes before they had to return to base, before they ran out of fuel.
The Spits could only go up for two and a half hours before they needed refuelling.
I was aware of the character Dame Felicity Peake,
whose husband was killed in the Battle of Britain.
She was the one who told me about the terrible bollocking that she got
from lighting a cigarette when there was gas everywhere.
And I could so vividly imagine a poor young WAAF being yelled at,
and then for the first time seeing dead bodies and action,
and her own women, her own troops.
The romance - which is not a romance, it's a problem of all servicemen,
particularly the married ones.
We young bachelors did not have that problem.
You had families, a different sense of responsibility.
This was quite tough for all the actors,
that they suddenly stepped in -
you're called, you've got your piece of script, you're on tomorrow at Duxford.
Normally an actor likes to meet the crew, the director, work it in,
and arrives at Duxford and it's like being inducted into the air force.
The whole crew are shouting "You're in that bowser, this is the background."
"Have we got all the uniforms?"
It didn't matter who arrived, there was a war going on.
And then to create a character and have to play, and you've only got very few lines -
maybe some had already done two days' work
and were wearing their Mae West happily -
here they were dressed up for the first time in these things.
It was difficult for them and they went through it manfully.
Not Sherlock Holmes, but the German war room.
It's interesting to look at this now when you've just seen the British war room,
or the British plotting section.
Whereas the British set looks like an early television or radio station,
with everybody peering at a rather primitive table,
you'll notice all the Germans are much more smartly dressed, much more strict,
and they live in a marble-halled place, where their war room clearly was.
I don't know who did the decor, but that clearly was the most distinctive thing -
that the Germans operated from smarter marble palaces
than our poor old British war room.
You see, the distance between the coast of Europe to England was so short
that even with the fairly short range of aircraft in those days
we were so vulnerable all the way around.
Which, of course, made us equally attractive as a jumping-off spot
for when America came into the war
to take planes off from and to launch attacks on Europe.
So really we were very, very strategic, like a much larger Malta, I imagine,
which was equally strategic down in the Mediterranean.
But how we weren't beaten really was the most extraordinary thing,
and only by misjudgment and the redirection of forces that we escaped.
And the gallant men who fought the Battle of Britain and flew those aircraft.
These aircraft, obviously we did not have hundreds of Stuka bombers up in the air.
We had a certain number, but they used on this,
I think for the first time in a feature film - I used it subsequently on television -
this front-axial projection. I remember going into a studio at Pinewood -
this is the real stuff because they're doing incredible formations -
but I remember in Pinewood being very impressed,
because this huge stage was hung with Stuka bombers of various sizes.
There was almost a life-sized one.
There they were, scaled down, diminishing against a bluescreen.
It was extraordinary.
The people that they had make these models, the care and dedication.
They got craftsmen from all over England and, I think, all over the world
to come and work on them.
A big difficulty, any director will tell you, about making a film about World War II
is that everybody's wearing these helmets and goggles.
If you have a lot of very highly priced actors playing the leading roles,
you really can't tell who is who.
So very often you see them tearing their goggles off or their oxygen masks off
to give a line and emote so that the audience can identify who was there.
If they'd really done it, they would have passed out and gone in the sea, like that.
All these aerial things were done in so many different locations -
Tablada in Spain, near Seville.
Some of them were done up in northern Spain. Just all over the place.
But, of course, the Heinkel bombers and the Me 109 Messerschmitts
were all part of the Spanish Air Force, which does seem incredible -
that all these World War II aircraft were still being flown by them 30 years later.
The colonel that was the Spanish adviser,
who flew these aircraft, Santa Cruz, and gave all the briefings,
was an extraordinary man.
He was part of the whole rehearsal back in 1936 and flew Messerschmitts then.
These aircraft were gathered together by Group Captain Hamish Mahaddie,
who was a real character, a Scots guy.
He got together this large air force which was assembled for the film.
There's some dispute about which largest it was, but it was very large.
He got them from auctions and goodness knows what from all over Europe,
assembled the whole lot in Spain for the film company to use,
both German and British aircraft.
Mainly the Spanish ones were the German ones,
and then we were at Duxford, where a lot of Spitfires and Hurricanes were.
One of the interesting things about this - and it's shown in my documentary -
is that four of the Messerschmitts, the Me 109s, were flown by the CAF,
which was the Confederate Air Force of America.
There were these four millionaire guys from Texas,
and they bought these aircraft because they truly loved them, and flew them.
They took a year out of their very lucrative businesses to come over.
I think a couple of them were actually in the original conflict, or in World War II,
but a couple of them were much younger.
They came over to Spain and Britain and were with us for the whole film,
flying the Confederate Air Force aircraft, doing the most incredible manoeuvres.
Without them, I think it would have been a duller film.
The sound is what made it. Jimmy Shields was the man.
I had a great week with Jimmy doing just sound -
from the starting up of aircraft, to the...
What is the sound in the air when you're being attacked?
Do you hear the opponent's engine?
When you're doing an aerial ballet, seeing it from the ground, what would you hear?
If you're in the air, would you hear anything?
Is it right to change that slightly?
Do you hear an aircraft as it goes over?
Does it really go "whoosh", like that, as it goes over?
We took the sound equipment up,
and we gave him as much time as we could to get the reality of all of that.
From starting up in the morning - most wonderful sound.
There's no other sound like it. No other aircraft starts like a Merlin.
It's reluctant to start but then it bursts into full glory. It's a wonderful sound.
It can easily go wrong in the start,
and then you've got to flush it all out and start again.
We made it authentic. We recorded the Mark IX, we recorded the XII.
We never showed aircraft which were not authentic in foreground.
We filled in the spaces at the back.
There were nonauthentic aircraft. They were still Spitfires, but not of that mark.
The five-bladed one with the Griffon engine, the five-bladed prop,
was so powerful it had to take off with its tail wheel on the ground.
If it lifted up its tail wheel and ran in a parallel position,
the propeller would lift up the tarmac from the runway with a sort of vacuum,
and it would all get tangled up - in fact, we did it once.
So you more or less trundled forward,
and, with your tail pointing down, opened the throttle, and it bounced into the air.
Then you levelled off and then gave it full cut.
It was very, very powerful.
That prop was only two inches from the turf when you were revving it.
They were the same Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, but they came in many marks.
They started at a low mark and became more and more powerful,
but they were the same shape and the same concept.
They just got bigger and more efficient and supercharged.
It's very much like saying "V8".
They were all V8s, but some V8s go faster than other V8s.
Towards the end, the Spitfires, for example, had five blades on the prop.
Whereas at the beginning, there were one or two test runs with only two, then three.
Some of the early ones were fixed-pitch props. Later on they were variable-pitch.
The final Spitfire,
which we didn't have, had counter-rotating props -
two props, one behind the other, going in different directions.
So there were Spitfires of many sizes of engine.
It's your bog-standard Escort or the souped-up version for the rally.
Some of the aircraft we had were of a later mark than was in the Battle of Britain.
But we put them at the back.
We used the few that were in the Battle of Britain, with different numbers,
to play the foreground scenario.
Their engines were authentic, and each had its own tone.
We recorded each engine in the air.
I even had balloons up in the air with microphones on,
and we shot past the balloons and got these left-to-rights.
We'd put these small barrage balloons up 300 feet, let the Spitfires go past them,
and get that sort of noise, each one of them.
Jimmy Shields identified them all. He did a wonderful job.
A job that he, who became a master of his craft in sound in the British film industry,
and on many famous American films,
he always saw that as his best work and most enjoyable work - and a challenge.
Because the day after you come back from filming,
and you see all the stuff that you've shot in the local cinema, mute, for 25 minutes,
and there's probably two minutes of stuff there that's of any value, your heart sinks.
But when he puts the sound on it, it comes to life. It really comes to life.
And the sound made the difference.
And the sound and the music gave it the glory it deserved.
It really was phenomenal.
Here we see the result of the devastating German attack on the British airfields.
Michael Caine here, looking around frustrated,
knowing that unless these airfields are repaired,
so that planes can be flown in to take off again,
there's no future at all, things are really slipping away.
Anyway, here's a scene where he gets into his car with his dog,
and he drives off to London, I think.
That's his dog. What was it called? Skipper or Kipper or something.
And he drives. Here he is, like he knows just what he's doing.
He starts the car off,
and the car starts to move off.
And the story is, in fact Michael Caine could not drive at the time at all,
and that car was tugged out of shot by a lot of propmen, because it was heavy,
but Michael gave the impression he could. I said to him "Why don't you drive?"
He said "I always figured that if I could afford a car,
I could afford someone to drive it for me."
And that's what he had, a chauffeur, for many years.
I remember him arriving at Pinewood in his convertible Rolls-Royce Corniche,
beautiful car, but he wasn't driving.
I do believe that subsequently he has learnt to drive.
That's rather immaterial. At the time, he sure didn't drive in that.
But he was always so honest about everything.
That's why I enjoyed his company,
and having him around for a year on our thing doing commentaries.
In fact, in our film you can notice his hair is very many different lengths,
because it was the '70s when everybody wore a sort of shoulder-length bob.
At the beginning, because he's in period, it's short.
But in the introductions he did for me, it got longer, cos he was doing other films.
He was very clever about getting known in America, which is very important.
He told me that he went on lecture tours on the campuses,
and met a lot of young people all over America.
They used to ask him questions about Pinewood, England and filmmaking here.
It was UCLA he went to, and he was going on about Pinewood and the equipment,
and they said "Can we show you our studios?"
These doors opened and there was more equipment in there
than we have in Pinewood, Shepperton and Associated British, as it was then.
But I guess he blagged his way out of that.
The scenes in order to keep the historical flow going is that
the bombs that fell on London were accidental that started the Blitz.
And, yes, it's a bit of licence to take
to say that Susannah York and Christopher Plummer
were spending the night at the Savoy when it was the first night of the Blitz.
But I think that's a perfectly acceptable piece of storytelling.
Hello. Paul Annett here again.
Here we have a recreation of one of Hitler's big rallies.
This was done at Pinewood, on a Sunday, I seem to remember.
And look at the thousands of extras. But don't look too closely,
because this was my first introduction to what is known as matte work.
They had a big group of extras, who probably were just down on the left there,
then they ran the film again and put them on the right, then top right and top left,
so we had four times or eight times the number of extras that were really there.
I wasn't present on the day but I saw the matte work being done. It was fascinating.
The guy playing Hitler, I understand, used to do Hitler impersonations in Germany,
but I'm not sure about that. I can't imagine what an audience would be for that.
But I understand that's what he did.
Anyway, it's amazing when you think of the enormous influence these rallies had.
You hear that, off, he was a rather dreary man,
yet with a microphone and thousands of people there he was so charismatic.
Charisma of evil.
But here we see all the adoring followers standing up, and "Sieg heil."
Thank goodness they had underarm deodorants at that time.
There's not one spot of sweat to be seen, is there?
The profile's great. He looks so like him.
I think the lighting was better than it was in the original. Here is the train pulling in,
and this is our introduction to General Göring, Hitler's right hand,
who threatened to drive all the aircraft out of the skies
and make it very easy for Hitler and his troops to invade Britain,
which he singularly failed to do, as we know. But here he arrives.
He was like a wonderful musical comedy star to look at.
A horrific person, but he loved the uniforms.
He loved to wear pink and blue and all manner of colours.
And the actor playing it, I think his name was Hein Riess,
was actually a musical comedy star in Germany.
He looks as though he's about to launch into some operetta, doesn't he?
He's come to visit Kesselring, in the centre there,
and just reassure everybody that everything is going to plan,
and swish about in a convertible Mercedes and inspect the landing barges
and everything getting ready to take off for Operation Sea Lion,
unfortunately unaware that his promise of defeat in the skies, leaving the way clear,
was not gonna happen.
For the German troops, having Göring dressed in pink and blue in your presence
must have been rather alarming.
Göring went and had one look at all his forces going over,
which we faithfully reproduce,
and then it was back to Paris.
And here we see Göring arriving to inspect the invasion barges.
And here he stands watching Dover through his telescope.
And we see how very, very close Dover is, and how vulnerable Britain appears to be.
Then we hear the aircraft about to come over.
His aircraft, which are going to defeat the British in the air
and bomb all the bejesus out of England.
Bomb they did, but defeat they did not.
This is our formation of Messerschmitts that were flown by the Spanish Air Force
under the command of Comandante Santa Cruz.
We had about 16 Spanish pilots flying all the Messerschmitts,
and four pilots from the Texas Confederate Air Force in Texas.
We had such cooperation that most things fell into place.
Maybe it took a little longer because you had to find the right button to push,
but everybody was basically helpful.
So long as you didn't want to close Piccadilly Circus for five nights,
we had no problems.
As I said, St Katharine's Dock was about to be destroyed, so we did it for them.
And that meant being able to recreate the Blitz happily.
I do remember very clearly a couple of nights in the East End of London,
which now is a very highly priced piece of real estate,
where we actually blew up buildings, tore streets down...
My goodness, when I think of 30 years ago and the things we did in the East End,
and round what is now Canary Wharf, around the Dockland area.
This is now some of the most highly priced real estate in London.
And we set fire to these places and burned them down.
Little Victorian houses, which now people clamour to live in, were being blown up.
It was extraordinary what we were allowed to do,
and what certainly nobody would or should be allowed to do any more.
But for the authenticity of the film, it was an extraordinary event to be present at.
For the East Enders themselves it was so reminiscent,
because so many people of the older generation then, and even middle-aged,
remembered the real event, the incredible hardship,
the loss of life, of family, of possessions, that they went through at that time,
but the incredible bond between the East Enders which brought them all together
and the "I will not give in" spirit.
Casualties were gruesome. People were taken to schools, bodies laid out,
sometimes heads cut off, all sorts of horrible wounds and damage inflicted.
Here we see young lan McShane arriving home to look for his wife and children.
I remember this because he walked across the front of this incredible street
that was blazing away in the background and just went on forever,
and played the scene on the edge of it. I thought that was really nice direction.
What a marvellous shot that is, now, to see.
Nothing in the studio at all. All done in authentic East End settings.
And, as I say, it brought back so many memories to so many of the people,
who were employed to play extras in it.
This is a church hall, I think, where a lot of the victims had been taken.
The children, the old people. A lot of these people were genuine East End people.
This is an actor, obviously, but a lot of the extras were genuine East End people.
And they were made to put up in this church hall,
not knowing what they'd find when they got out, if indeed they got out.
There was a tremendous loss of life in that period, from all the generations.
It really was emotionally very disturbing to talk to some of these older people
and find out the hardships that they went through and the losses they went through.
This brought it back to them. A couple of them were shivering at the sight of it again
and thinking "My goodness, please, not again."
But I think it's very good for the younger generation to see these films and realise
that only 50, 60 years ago this actually happened in this country,
and without the combination of forces that were subsequently in the conflict
we could easily have been defeated.
Without the courage of all the pilots and the planning people on the ground.
It's a miracle England wasn't defeated and overrun,
as I'm afraid a lot of people thought it would be.
Including Senator Joseph Kennedy, who thought Britain was finished.
It wasn't finished, was it?
We did tight close shots on the pilots.
We had a 109 cockpit, a Messerschmitt cockpit, a Heinkel, et cetera.
Bluescreen was just beginning, didn't even exist really.
Bluescreen was just starting.
We had two flats - grey, blue, pale blue, dark blue, black -
and you just put them...
Occasionally a bit of smoke. Freddy Young would say "Run smoke through."
But for the length of the shot it worked great as far as I'm concerned,
because you should be looking at the actor, and it's so tight.
And most of the time there are flames or those sorts of effects going on.
This is a sequence taken at Bentley Priory,
where the great Lord Dowding worked from.
His assessment in the speech that's about to happen
really puts the whole thing into a proper perspective.
The amount of fuel left over London leaving them vulnerable for return,
and giving us time to regroup
and see what the "Big Wing" can do in retaliation.
Here we see the Hurricanes up in the air preparing for retaliation.
It's an extraordinary concept, this film, to think that
people would think about making a major cinema film about this,
and gathering all these ancient aircraft, which even then were 30 years old.
But they did, and Benjamin S Fisz was, I think, very instrumental in this
because I believe he was a pilot during the actual conflict.
He was Polish, and very, very keen to get this picture made.
And Harry Saltzman, of course, had nothing but success with James Bond.
I liked Harry very much. He was a very dynamic, mogul-Iooking character.
The first time I saw him was on the airfield at Tablada, in Spain, near Seville,
when we went down to start filming there at the very beginning.
We were at a memorial thing at eight in the morning on this freezing cold airfield,
dedicated to the memory of a pilot for the film who had crashed and killed himself.
But he was very impressive and very decisive.
A good guy, I think.
This is the beginning of the Battle of Britain over London.
It involved all the aircraft we could gather.
All the Heinkels, the Messerschmitts, the Spitfires.
So the aerial sequence, we recreated actual dogfights.
So these aircraft are flying at incredible speeds - 120, 150mph.
The whole sequence was choreographed by using storyboards,
by using little model aeroplanes, that we used to have briefings on.
It's dangerous. You have planes making it look like they're attacking each other.
They're flying out of the sun, causing the same problems that the movie depicts.
They're flying in smoke from the effects people, showing the planes were on fire.
They're flying in and out of cloud, where planes get lost.
We're also flying ourselves, as a camera ship, which is a B-25 bomber
which has five cameras mounted front, aft, underbelly and a canopy above.
We have a photographer inside that aircraft shooting photographs.
We have cameras mounted inside these aircraft
so that the pilots at a given moment, for example when a plane emits smoke,
they talk to each other and he says "I'm pressing the button to start the smoke."
And the plane following it has to switch on his camera at the same time,
because these were 100ft rolls, which last only a matter of a minute.
And then we had another camera suspended under a helicopter
hovering in a specific place in the sky. The pilots all knew he was there.
So you have aeroplanes flying towards each other, which is 120, 150mph,
you have a B-25 bomber flying around,
and you have a lot of smoke, you have fire, and it is dangerous.
I can't imagine a film company would do this today.
They would find a way around it by using digital effects.
Even for a pilot to jump out of an aircraft,
we did that with the twin-engined Spitfire, where we could keep a pilot in the plane
and have a dummy or a real person parachute out of an aircraft.
It was very dangerous because a lot of pilots were killed in the real war
because the tailplane would just cut their bodies in half or knock them out.
So these were scenes we didn't like to do too often.
Also, these planes were on constant maintenance.
Their parts were running out, because the planes hadn't been used for 20 years.
They were either in museums or private collections.
Some of the shots here were probably models.
It was very cleverly done, because these sequences took months to film.
You'd end up with a sequence of three or four minutes on the screen
and it looks like it was shot in one day, but it took months.
Because every time we went up we would only get about 45 minutes of filming time,
because it would take at least two hours to get the planes off the ground,
in a safe zone, a safe corridor which the ministry would allow us to film in,
then get the planes in position, rehearse, make sure the effects were gonna work.
And you'd probably get one or two takes for each cut.
We call them cuts, they're specific shots.
And these kind of sequences consist of probably three or four hundred shots.
Things did not work out as he expected,
and he did go and gave a right bollocking to the forces that be,
including Adolf Galland, who was there. And Galland, more or less...
It's quite well known, because Osterkamp
and all the senior Luftwaffe people involved were all there,
and Göring was laying it on thick.
He'd been a distinguished pilot in the First World War,
so he knew a little bit about what he was talking about.
But tactics had changed, obviously, since 1914,
so these experienced senior pilots,
including Galland, who'd learnt his trade in the Spanish Civil War,
were getting pretty pissed off with Göring laying down the law.
And that is why, when he went too far and said "You must all fly with them" -
"But we will be sitting ducks" - he realises he's made a mistake
so he says to Galland "What would you like?"
And Galland did say "I'd like a Spitfire."
He was either gonna have his head cut off, or Göring had enough sense to let him be.
Because Göring went back onto his train -
he had a train which he rode around in,
and it consisted of a luxurious compartment for himself,
a kitchen,
and communications.
And then at either end there were just flat-beds with ack-ack guns,
so that he was fairly safe and could move quickly.
And in a bad temper, having finished that scene,
he climbed onto the train and said "Back to Paris."
And his ADC said "Sir, we shall be half an hour because we've got to disconnect."
Because from the communications truck,
all the cabling went out through the stationmaster's window
and into the nearest electric light plugs that they could have.
It was a big movement.
"Don't give me a hard time. Go immediately."
"But, sir, we can't." "Do what you're ordered to do."
And he said "All right, fuck it, tell the stationmaster."
And the train pulled out, and as he pulled out
hundreds of yards of spaghetti were pulling out
all the contraptions inside the stationmaster's office.
They were pulling out plugs...
And the train sailed with yards and yards of communication cables behind it.
You couldn't film that, people wouldn't take it seriously.
I didn't dare shoot the sequence to that, but it happened.
A British pilot landing in a domestic situation - inside a greenhouse, in fact.
And what springs to the young boy's mind, first of all,
is to come out and offer him a cigarette.
Nowadays that would be so politically incorrect,
that having survived the parachute jump
to then take a white stick and stick it in your mouth and smoke would be the end.
Here we see Göring again, fed up with what he has seen and his defeat,
that they haven't annihilated Britain, getting back on the train.
It's fascinating to watch the pictures of Göring when he was huge.
In the newsreel of him at Nuremberg he's thin and the huge uniforms hang off him.
Here we see the inclusion in the cast of a non-actor,
but a survivor of the Battle of Britain, and someone who was dreadfully burned,
who was the most charming man, and brave.
It was a wonderful inclusion to have this.
I think it brought home to the audiences what did happen to these people.
They were scarred for life but they made a life and went on to do tremendous things.
But how terrible to have that happen when you're 20 - at any time, but so young.
The big aerial ballet is the pride and joy of the editor.
He put it together out of the bits that were left over.
We tried. We got a lot of good stuff, and it is authentic stuff, but it's too far away.
To see 50 aircraft you had to be so far away you don't see what they're doing.
You've got to keep going in.
The solution was to find bits that intercut, of stuff we'd done, and intercutting them.
We worked at it for a very long time. We would start an average sequence
by having the RAF on the left-hand side and the He's on this side.
We'd shout "action" and they'd fly through each other, one or two firing smokes.
So you'd see people diving together, on each other, and then breaking away.
We didn't encourage individual acts of showmanship in those sort of things.
It was planned.
That wide shot is the He's diving from the bomber cover onto the Spitfires.
So there are the bombers, there are the He's. Cue the action, they'd peel down.
We'd go with them and they'd descend onto the Spitfires, who would break.
That would be a sequence, but out of that sequence Skeets never stopped filming.
Anything going on after that - reforming into line, all sorts of things like that -
he was always shooting, and a lot of that stuff became part of the aerial ballet.
But everything in the aerial ballet was a sequence.
It's difficult to be able to see it start,
then cut to individuals having a go at each other, then cut back to the master again,
cos it's all changed. So there is no sense of continuity in it.
There's just aircraft all over the place. People chasing people, smoke...
We fitted 50 per cent of them with white smoke,
which was cooking oil pumped through the exhaust manifold,
and it just cooked and went out white, and we could control that pretty well.
And black smoke, which were cartridges, which we couldn't control as well.
They weren't as good. I preferred the glycol, the white smoke.
All of those aircraft had liquid-cooled engines.
They were very vulnerable to a bullet hitting the radiator.
They'd immediately heat up and seize up.
The white coming out of them is glycol, which is the antifreeze cooling liquid.
So as you're watching this sequence, you're seeing, as the smoke comes out,
cooking oil being forced into the exhaust manifold
and special-effects smoke pots going off, which, once they start, you can't stop.
Our job, when they let them off on cue,
was to follow them as far as we could and let them disappear into the distance.
And then Special Effects, on film later on, put a flash where they hit the ground.
But there are very, very few model shots other than the Stukas, which don't exist.
And when you see the film, I'm afraid, nowadays,
audiences are more sophisticated.
You recognise the models straight away when they hit each other.
But 95 per cent of it was real, as it happened, in your face.
And when you see an aircraft up close,
all you see is a shot that's so wide that it's the nose and half the wing on either side,
that's him 12ft away from the back of our aircraft, doing 300mph.
I think it was wonderful teamwork to make this movie, when you consider that
there was no rivalry between the Spanish, the American and the English pilots.
They worked as a wonderful team, they cared about each other.
And we had great support from the German technical advisers and the RAF.
It was a huge undertaking, an incredible organisation,
and took tremendous courage by Harry Saltzman and Benjamin Fisz
to mount this kind of movie.
And they stayed with it throughout all the days of losing time because of weather,
the complications of flying and the budget overruns,
and they deserve all the praise that they deserve for making this fine movie.
Battle of Britain is a tribute to the RAF.
It's a period of the war which I knew not from the RAF side but from the naval side.
And I felt that it was an honour to be entrusted to try and make
a documentary which is entertaining and at the same time truthful.
Curiously enough, during the Battle of Britain I was 17 and a half years old,
I was in London, allegedly fire watching at night on top of a roof somewhere,
but I had been to the movies in Leicester Square
and had seen Gone with the Wind, which I thought was absolutely fabulous.
And I walked out at about nine o'clock at night
and much to my surprise, looking out in Leicester Square towards the East End,
the whole sky was red, red, red.
Amazing. It was exactly like the red sky over Atlanta that I had just left,
with the burning of Atlanta. Absolutely the same colours. It was stunning.
This was the first night of the Blitz.
And I went on for a couple of months doing my fire watching.
Quite a few bombs fell around.
ARP, you know, blackout. This was the...
And as my 18th birthday approached I went and joined the Navy,
and I had a very interesting war in the Navy.
So at least I felt I had an understanding
of what the Battle of Britain meant to the people of England,
and, in fact, I'd lived through an important part of history.
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