In an era when most World War II films rely on sweeping CGI battle recreations or painstakingly staged combat sequences to evoke the scale of history, Pressure takes a strikingly different path. Director Anthony Maras and his team grounded the drama of the critical 72 hours before D-Day not in digital spectacle, but in authentic, high-resolution master scans of original 35mm archival footage. The rationale was to create a film that feels both intimate and historically weighty, placing the audience inside the tense meteorological calculations that would decide the fate of the Normandy landings.
The story centres on Group Captain James Stagg (Andrew Scott), the Scottish meteorologist tasked with delivering the most consequential weather forecast of the war, and General Dwight D. Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser), who must decide whether to launch the invasion or risk everything on a delay. Rather than manufacturing the war itself, Maras chose to lean on real archive material to supply the scale and authenticity the drama required.
Drawing direct inspiration from Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old, the production secured rare reels from U.S. government archives and the Imperial War Museum. These were meticulously neg-scanned frame by frame – more than 49 hours of material – then carefully up-res’d, colourised and integrated. The finished sequences carry a visceral sense of presence: real soldiers wading through surf, storm-lashed landing craft and the chaotic energy of June 1944, rendered with a clarity and immediacy that feels startlingly contemporary.
Matching the masters
Cinematographer Jamie D. Ramsay BSC SASC (All of Us Strangers, Living) was brought in to ensure the newly shot material would sit seamlessly alongside these restored masters. The visual approach was deliberately restrained.
“We opted to shoot at a fairly deep stop – about 5.6 on the lens,” Ramsay explains. “The effect of that was having more of the frame in focus than contemporary work. We were basing our overall look largely on the analogue-sourced footage from that period. War photographers generally shot at a very closed stop because they didn’t have the luxury of a focus puller. We wanted more information in the frame that was sharp. So we went for a smaller-sensor camera rather than something like large-format where everything is very shallow. It was an ode to what they would have used at that time.”
The chosen camera was the original ARRI Alexa Mini, paired with Cooke S4/i primes. The decision was reached after extensive testing. “We didn’t try other cameras, but we tried pretty much every single lens set in the gear company,” Ramsay continues. “Ultimately, Anthony wanted something that wasn’t romantic – that didn’t romanticise the image. He wanted something fairly clean, because a lot of the footage in the film is archive stock. We had to be responsible in creating a familial connection between what we shot and what we were using as stock footage.”
Heat, light and continuity
Lighting was shaped by the need to establish a constant, almost oppressive summer heat so that the eventual storm would feel alien and catastrophic. “It was a big mixture of sources,” says Ramsay. “We had to create the sense of London going through this extraordinary summer so that when the storm did arrive it was a huge surprise. There were big lighting setups. One of our main sets – I’d say 30 or 35 per cent of the film occurs in it – was south-facing. We were looking out of the windows and at the mercy of whatever the weather outside was doing, so I had to throw a lot of light at it. That was to create continuity in these sometimes four-page scenes we were shooting over two days, but also this constant sense of penetrating summer sun infiltrating the building, creating a hot claustrophobia that the characters had to work underneath.”
Inside, the predominant fixtures were LED units — Vortexes, Nanluxes and Astera bulbs. The Astera practicals proved particularly useful, allowing precise control of colour temperature and intensity without disturbing the period look. Outside, large ArriMax 18Ks provided the backbone of the daylight, while older 20K Molebeams and tungsten units were introduced for later-day work that needed a warmer, lower angle of light.
Maintaining that illusion of unrelenting summer sun across a nine-week UK shoot proved the greatest practical challenge. “You’re susceptible to four seasons in a day,” Ramsay notes. Large lighting packages and constant vigilance were required to keep both interiors and exteriors consistent.
The principal location was Mentmore Towers in Buckinghamshire, which stood in for Southwick House, the real Allied headquarters. Turning the large Victorian country house into a flexible shooting stage became one of the project’s most valuable lessons. “My biggest learning curve was creating a working space within one location where a huge pre-light had to answer a plethora of tones and scenes – from day work to night work – and allow us to shoot one-take shots that go from room to room,” Ramsay says. “Usually that’s done on a set, but it was basically turning a big Victorian location into a stage.”
The approach demanded close collaboration. The lighting plan had to anticipate long takes moving between rooms, shifting from bright daylight to more intimate night interiors without breaking the flow. Pre-lighting the entire practical location to this level of flexibility required trust and clear communication across the crew.
Looking back, Ramsay is clear about what made the experience possible. “I’d just reiterate the importance and the value of working with a team that believes in your vision, understands you and is ultimately an extension of you creatively and personally.”
