Total Film UK
April 2001
By Garth Pearce

Stalingrad, 1942: A city besieged, two snipers, one love triangle, a battle of wills - Jude Law, Joseph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz share mud, sweat and tears ends

Jude Law didn't know where to start when he hit the shower after his first day on Enemy At The Gates. The Mud coated his hair, clogged his pores and worked its way under his nails. He stood under the water for half an hour. It didn't make any difference. "It taught me two things," Law says. "First, the real seige must have been a living hell. Second, I wasn't going to be clean for the next five months."

Law is living in a world of shit and mud for the World War Two epic, in which he plays real life sniper Vassili Zaitsev. The renowned Soviet marksman notched up an astounding 149 kills, camped out amid the rubble during the Nazis' brutal 180 day siege of Stalingrad. For Law, last seen baking in the Tuscan sun as rich and spoilt Dickie Greenleaf in The Talented Mr Ripley, its a distinct switch of pace. Enemy at the Gates marks his first stab at action-man heroics in an eight year old movie career kickstarted by the feeble Britsh car jack flick Shopping.

"It was terrifying to think of living like that and being shot or starved everyday" says Law of the shoot in Germany. "Yes, it was freezing cold and my hands and feet were numb everyday, but I could still get a warm cup of coffee, and its not like I was being shot or starved everyday. I stopped trying to get dirt off after a couple of weeks. I showered, went to bed and was up at five in the morning still looking filthy. It was just the way it was....remarkable."

Director Jean-Jacques Annaud - who hired Law after a meeting in London on the strength of an early cut of The Talented Mr Ripley" - ensured his trio of Brit Pack stars would know what suffering was during the shoot. Law, Joseph Fiennes (cast as Russian political officer Danilov) and Rachel Weisz (who plays Tania, the student turned soldier the two men fall for) were dispatched to the SAS training camp at Hereford. There they worked with stunt coordinator( and former SAS man) Jim Dowdall, learning the ins and outs of handling weaponry and crawling through small spaces.

"I had never even picked up a gun before" says Law. "Once I learned control of it, I have to confess it gave me a thrill. Being in control of such power is exciting. It was also an integral part of my character, this man who regarded his gun as an extension of himself. Jim taught me to strip the rifle, clean it and carry it. He sent me home with one to eat with it, sleep with it, everything with it. But nothing could prepare me fully for the filming itself..."

The Cogs of War

To recreate a war torn city, Annaud called in 600 extras and 300 crew members, using seven cameras to capture the scale and detail of the battle. Even before production began in eastern Germany, "Enemy at the Gates" had been tagged as the most expensive film shot in Europe, with a budget around the $85 million mark. It's a sum easily spent when, during five months of filming, 17.000 German and Russian uniforms had to be hauled through the mud. Joseph Fiennes admits he was overwhelmed by the films size.

"Every day there were new faces, new machinery and a bigger crew working on set ups," he says. "It looked as if the whole of Stalingrad was being rebuilt and about half the Russian and Nazi armies were being recruited. I would go to sleep each night with my head reeling from it and think: 'How did people survive?'"

But Annaud knew that there had to be a human element in such an epic re-telling of the siege - so he added a love affair between Law's young shepherd and a female Soviet soldier (Weisz) to the existing plot of the infamous duel between two snipers (Law and Ed Harris' German nobleman), adapted from William Craig's book.

"I wanted to intimate the film at the heart of a battle of epic proportions," the Gallic helmer explains. "As a Frenchman I have a reaction against small movies done in tiny rooms with tiny actors saying tiny things. But here was a way of integrating a love story into the frame of an epic movie. What was so different about Russian women during the war - as opposed, say to English or Americans - is that they were encouraged to fight on the front. They drove tanks, were pilots, gunners and snipers."

It's here that Rachel Weisz's character comes to life. "There was alot of physical training, but, for me, what was most useful were the photographs," says Weisz. "There were some incredible photographs. One that really stayed in my mind was of a woman, a Russian soldier, lying asleep on her rifle. I had lots of images like that to feed my imagination."

Like Law, Weisz underwent extensive training under the stern eye of Jim Dowdall. "We were using real ex-war Russian rifles and they weighed a ton," she continues." They were very unweildly and we had to carry them round all day. It was shoking at first. We weren't even allowed to call it a gun. Jim said: No, no, no, this' - and he pointed down to his crotch - 'is a gun. A gun is for fun, a rifle is for killing.'"

Welcome To Hell

The finished film is likely to shock anyone bloated from the likes of Saving Private Ryan and U-571, and their implications that America won World War Two all on its own. But Annaud is bullish: "For ages, I have been attracted to the Eastern European soul. I am always touched by how people are prepared to get drunk with you, tell their intimate stories, share their pain. There is also no doubt that the turning point for Nazi Germany was Stalingrad. They lost the biggest battle of the war and suffered their most humiliating defeat."

As a hardened veteran of filming in sub zero temperatures - he directed Sean Connery in The Name Of The Rose and Brad Pitt in Seven Years In Tibet - Annaud felt that the cast and crew on Enemy at the Gates should suffer the same reality. With a twist of irony, he decided that Stalingrad of the early 1940's should be recreated in the Germany of 2000. After a country-by-country search which took place in Russia, Romania, Poland, Hungary and England, he opted for three locations in the former East Germany.

All were chilling in appearance. The river Volga location was matched by open-pit mines near the Polish border. There was a derelict factory in the industrial town of Rudersdorf, chosen as the site for a showdown between Law's sniper and german sharpshooter Major Konig (played by Ed Harris), picked by the Nazis to eliminate this Soviet scourge. A deserted military barracks, badly polluted by 47 years of military use, doubled as Stalingrad's Red Square. More than 10.000 litres of water was pumped in daily to create all thay glorious mud.

"The sheer scale of it affected us all" says Law. "It looked like the sort of place which has rats in every corner and where people might die from cold or starvation. I read books on the siege and watched old propaganda films. These people lived and died in the awful conditions that we were trying to recreate. I am not saying that you have to live like a character to make him work on screen, but this certainly helped. And I never, ever complained."

Of course no matter how hard Annaud and his crew tried, filming could never capture the extreme conditions that really existed in Stalingrad. At the time of the German attack, it was a major industrial centre of 500,000 on the volga River. By the time the battle ended in February 1943, only 1,000 stragglers remained in the city, the rest had fled or been slaughtered. Both Adolf Hitler and Russian leader Josef Stalin, had ordered their troops to fight to the last. Soviet security forces regularly executed thousands of deserters. The combined death toll of the lost Nazi campaign in Russia came to two million.

It was while on the set that the impact of the siege finally hit home, when Law was able to meet many extras who knew who Vassili was and what Stalingrad meant to the Russian people. "Alot of youngsters around me were Russians whose grandfathers had worn the same coats and hats and had done what they were acting out," he says. "They also told stories about Vassili and it was clear that he was a hero. It became a large responsibility."

Weisz adds: "When the extras were running across the battlefield, screaming, they acted in a way I've never seen extras act before. They were Russian and that meant they had incredibly strong feelings."

In Love And War

By contrast, the cast also acted out the more desperate, even farcical aspects of wartime life. Among the battle sequences, the film includes a muted sex scene in which Vassili and Tania make love while fully clothed and surrounded by sleeping soldiers. Joseph Fiennes calls it "probably the most erotic scene I've seen in a film - furtive, hurried sex at its best." Law is more brutal. "Rachel and I had to work it out, while surrounded by extras who spent the day burping or farting," he laughs "But that is how any sexual relationship would have taken place in that situation."

Given that Law sees Vasilli as "a salt of the earth character", its clear Annaud has tried to make "Enemy at the Gates" much more than mere spectacle. The depth is there in a speech delivered by Fiennes, on the duel between the Russian hero and his cultered German rival: "A nobleman from Bavaria, who hunts stags, against a shepherd boy from the Urals, who poaches wolves. It is more than a confrontation between two nations. It is the essence of the class struggle."

Annaud chooses a similar line. "I have a fascination in human nature," he explains. "I take a plane trip at least twice a week and often wonder: 'What would happen if the plane was crashing? Who would step on the others to try and get out? Which ones would stay and help? War, with all its extreme things, reveals exactly who you are. In the emotional chaos that war brings, you learn alot."