What was your inspiration for creating The Great Martian War? Why tell this story?

A deep lifelong interest in World War One and a love of the way Sci-Fi has, since its very beginnings, been used as a means to examine complex social, political and historical subjects within a fictional narrative.

Whether it is ‘Invasion of The Body Snatchers’ looking at McCarthyite witch hunts and Communist infiltration, ‘Cloverfield’ looking at the events of 9/11 or HG Wells himself using ‘War of The Worlds’ pre WW1 to express his deep and well founded fears of what a great war would be like in the industrial age, sci-fi has always been a powerful means to hold up a mirror to the real world. Even ‘Lord of The Rings’ can be seen as an attempt to fantastically fictionalise the epic, bloody war Tolkien witnessed first hand as an officer on the Western Front.

Orson Welles, arguably, took that one step further 75 years ago when he used the style of a breaking radio news story to dramatise ‘The War of The Worlds’. Some listeners misinterpreted the Mercury Theatre broadcast as a report from a real unfolding event, what he did was a key inspiration for ‘The Great Martian War’.

What would happen if we made a centenary documentary telling the story of The First Martian Invasion in 1913 as an absolutely straight Specialist Factual History Documentary, using all the language of that genre and found factual broadcast partners willing to include it in their schedule alongside all of their ‘real’ output?

We all agreed it could only work and be worthwhile if the story we set out to tell honoured the experience of the people who really lived through the horrors of the WWI era and in some way used convincing science-fiction as the way to tell some truths about the nature of the war, the enslavement of mankind by the machinery of war and its terrible and lasting consequences.

WWI is rightly a preciously guarded, hugely important part of our history and as we reach the centenary of the start of the conflict that set the future course of human history, ‘The Great Martian War’ tries to look at the events and effects of the real cataclysm of 1914-18 through a fantastical fiction.

Why a Martian invasion?

What better way to frame a convincing allegory about WWI than to build it within a story world and against an enemy that would have been familiar to the men and women who fought the 14-18 war? War of the Worlds was a famous story to the WWI generation and how else would the people of 1913 have sought to label an Alien Invasion than to have pointed the finger of suspicion at the mysterious Red Planet.

This desire to create a war between worlds that feels like one the people of 1913 would have recognized extends to the look of the film and fake archive. Our Alien machines and the Alien technologies that are thrown against mankind in our documentary are heavy, steam shrouded, earth bound, mechanistic and grinding, just like the huge industrial weapons of WWI. It was important that the look of those Alien machines echoed contemporary Edwardian visions of what an Alien invasion would look like, anything else would have sat very unconvincingly among the archive of WWI.

Rather than approaching our sci-fi elements from the perspective of the here-and-now, it felt right to take inspiration from the great writers of the period, the true pioneers of the genre like H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs and, a little later, H.P. Lovecraft. Their perception of life beyond planet Earth and extra-terrestrial visitations from outer space was our jump-off point, and the Red Planet is of course an iconic part of that. Of course, whether the Aliens did in fact originate from Mars, or were mistakenly christened Martians by the people of 1913 eager to give a name to the enemy, is one of the things we find out in the film.

There are some obvious parallels with WWI and your fictional The Great Martian War, can you explain what they are?

These parallels lie right at the heart of the show and there are far too many in number to mention them all but it was very important to us that every single element of our fiction, whether major incident or minor detail, should be borne out of the real events of World War One i.e. The United States, unaffected by an Alien landing in the heart of Europe, remains neutral for much of the war, men volunteer in their thousands to serve at the Martian Front, women throw themselves into the construction of munitions… We have parallels to the Christmas truce and the Angel of Mons, the sinking of the Lusitania and the bloody battles of the Somme and Verdun, and have a twisted version of the Spanish Flu feature at the climax of the global conflict.

Throughout we try to ground our outcomes to these major events in the Martian War in the true history of WWI.

So every moment of our war, from the Aliens’ arrival in 1913 to the war’s shocking conclusion in 1917, has a real-world 1914-18 parallel. And it’s also true of our story’s themes: the nature of the Alien enemy, the terrible strategy they use against us, the reasons they came to Earth in the first place, and the threat that their invasion still poses 100 years later. All these things grew out of what we felt were central truths about the nature of WWI.

The technological and social benefits of WWI are countless but these are heavily outweighed by the horror of the war and its aftermath. This is also true of the fictional Great Martian War.

And there are also some big differences between the two wars, what are they?

Given that our aim was to draw parallels to WWI and honour rather than exploit its memory, the differences are all really just surface-level circumstance. In the end our tale of far-fetched Alien horrors and unimaginable losses is only serving to highlight the frankly, unbelievable but true man-made horrors and losses over the years 1914-18.

Perhaps the central difference is that we’re all on the same side! In our story humanity demonstrates its impressive yet elusive ability to patch up formerly intractable differences the moment a greater threat suddenly presents itself. Until the Martians come crashing down on Earth, Europe is seemingly destined for a terrible, continent wide conflict. But once the Martians show themselves, the decade long tension and knife-edge hostility that’s been gathering between the nations disappears overnight and for the first time in history we see Europe genuinely united. We were keen to depict this continent-wide hatchet-burying as it picks at that nasty-yet-hopeful truth that all wars are, in the end, relative and circumstantial; and all enemies might be potential allies… if they’re able to see a bigger picture.

President Ronald Reagan, of all people, at the height of the US/ Soviet endgame repeatedly held up in his speeches the idea that an Alien invasion would throw into focus the madness of the Cold War… we’d all be friends under those circumstances…

Do you think The Great Martian War can reach out to those who aren’t familiar with WWI?

Hopefully the wealth of programs about WWI that will be shown over the next few years of anniversaries will all help to do that. I think where our show may be useful is in reaching people who might not normally tune into more conventional History documentaries, or more broadly, people who might feel that history ‘isn’t for them’. I hope our show can draw them in, and seeing as it’s all based closely on historical reality spark an interest in engaging with that.

I think science fiction has historically played a valuable role in holding up a dark mirror to the real world and help us recognize some truths about it, that along with providing an entertaining 90 minutes, is the most we can hope our film will do with WWI.

You’ve used original black and white footage from the period, but how did you decide what footage to use? How complex was the process of superimposing Martians onto the archive footage?

We made the decision from the start not to use WWI archive footage that showed real casualties or troops fighting. Though we strongly believe our show honours the veterans of WWI and seeks to look at the war afresh through a science fiction story we recognised the need to be sensitive to the original archive material and the people in it.

As well as the untreated period archive that illustrates our story we had in some cases to insert realistic computer graphics into that archive. That was a complex process of creating super realistic Alien war machines animating and rendering them then match compositing them into archive that was often hugely distressed and degraded. The modern animated elements then had to be similarly degraded so that they bedded into the period archive. No two pieces of original archive are alike so each shot presented a very complex set of issues for the teams involved.

On top of that we created a number of shots using live action of extras in detailed period costume on a purpose built trench system, (the same one used for the WWI scenes in 'Downton Abbey'!), and on location. Our Aliens were then composited into this footage and the whole thing retro treated with pops, scratches, grain and distress to sit alongside original war footage, hopefully invisibly.

We also co-opted real archive from the years around the war and re-interpreted it to help illustrate our story. We don't pretend to bring to our fake documentary the kind of rigour necessary in real documentary. We needed to re-interpret archive to tell our fictional story. So for instance our footage of riots around the Whitehouse is real but took place after WWI... And in a world where Germany, France and Britain fought on the same side against a single Alien invader our uniforms and kit do not always strictly chronologically match the timeline of the real war!

Much of the available 'real' archive WWI footage of frontline 'combat' was actually reconstructed during and after the war well away from the front line for propaganda and dramatic purpose, but where we had any doubt we avoided that archive and made our own. We did this from scratch, painstakingly constructing our shots with reference to photos and footage from the war and deliberately tried to confine ourselves to angles and camera technology available in 1913- 17. Cameras then were hand cranked at an irregular frame rate locked onto a tripod and rarely mounted in anything moving.

The programme also features interviews with ‘survivors’ from the war, as well as modern day experts, how did you find and film these people?

One of our great pleasures making the film was finding and working with our cast. All but two are professional actors (you’ll never spot the two non-pros because they give such terrific performances!) In many cases we were also blessed to find people whose passion for the history of WWI matched our own. In the case of our ‘Historian’ characters, this brought a vital authority and veracity to their performances, and in the case of our ‘Veteran’ characters, an added poignancy and emotional depth. I’ll be honest – we were pretty nervous going into the casting stage of the project. But we didn’t need to be, every single one of our cast did us proud.

The ‘survivors’ and the modern day ‘experts’ are all acting. The casting and audition process was rigorous and their choice dependent on the individual’s ability to be absolutely convincing that they were not ‘acting’ but truly relating their experiences in these terrible and dramatic world events. We were blessed in finding a band of actors who understood the idea of the project and threw themselves into it. Many of our older contributors- playing the veterans- have themselves experienced war first and second hand and brought that to their performances.

We filmed at length letting our 'veterans' and 'experts' improvise around the detailed script to make their delivery seem as natural as possible.

Once we had captured that footage, it too had to be treated to look as though it had been filmed a various points over the last 50 years. As with WWI there are no surviving veterans of The Great Martian War in 2013 so our 'archive' interviews would have to have been captured by various forms of camera over previous years.

As well as being plausibly expert on the subject of a war that never happened our Historians had on some occasions to also successfully describe and interact with exhibits in museums that did not exist and that we're put into the shots months later using Computer Graphics.

The whole style of The Great Martian War is strictly Specialist Factual Documentary. A mixture of archive, onscreen expert analysis and survivor testimony linked together using narration. We all recognised that the minute the illusion that working within that style gives us was broken and didn’t feel real then the show would stop functioning - Just as if every five minutes Orson Welles would have halted his radio broadcast to remind the audience it was only a play then it too would never have had any impact.

What do you hope that people will take away from watching The Great Martian War?

I think the audience for this film will essentially divide into two groups: firstly those who already have an interest in WWI; secondly those who don’t, but are drawn to watch, probably because of the sci-fi.

For those with a knowledge of WWI, I hope they will be engaged and stimulated by all the history hidden within the fiction. But more importantly I hope they will feel we’ve honoured the conflict, and served this precious period of history well.

In terms of those currently unfamiliar with WWI, I hope they find themselves powerfully caught up in our fiction and then even more powerfully drawn to engage with the real thing.

A big influence behind the film was a poem written by front line officer Gilbert Frankau in 1916 at the height of WWI. 'We are the guns' is a brutal lament on the war told in the words of a sentient weapon which has enslaved mankind. That is in effect the story we tell. In the end WWI was a war not just fought between nation states but between humanity and the vast military and technological machine which grew out of the race to achieve some kind of 'victory' and ground up human beings in their millions in the process. In our story the Alien 'guns' are metaphorically sentient and the technological advancement that all war brings is both a blessing and a curse.