Telegraph UK
4 November, 2000
By Antony Beevor

It was the tuning point of the Second World War and Germany's biggest military defeat. Now the Battle of Stalingrad is the subject of Jean-Jacques Annaud's latest film. Historian Antony Beevor, author of the best-selling "Stalingrad", reports from the set of "Enemy at the Gates".

Germany is very unlike America. History lurks in the background, even in the most unexpected surroundings. There was nothing impressive about Rüdersdorf, a small town in east Germany, and yet the name rang a distinct bell.

We turned off the road down a potholed track which ran alongside a filthy little stream. It led to an abandoned phosphates factory from the Communist era. A column of black smoke rose from the far side. This, explained Alisa Tager - the American executive producer of Enemy at the Gates - was to be the factory district of Stalingrad. Great quantities of rubble had been shipped in to make it look shelled to pieces. Slogans in Cyrillic, such as "Death to Fascists!" had been daubed across the walls by Russian signwriters. There were also bullet-ridden Soviet posters on the walls. I almost tripped over a corpse, a dummy with hideous wounds straight out of the chamber of horrors.

On the far side of the factory a scene was being prepared for shooting. A mass of Russian corpses - both dummies and live extras - lay sprawled among the rubble. Make-up assistants were crouching down to smear more cosmetic blood on faces and hands. All around was the detritus of war, smashed field guns, ammunition cases, signal cable and all. Behind the cameras, the crew waited for the next take. Assistant directors with long hair and leather jeans communicated through head mikes, directing the extras in their rough Second World War uniforms. Instructions were shouted in a variety of languages, as well as German. Almost all the Red Army soldiers were played by Russians, recruited from the huge population of former Soviet citizens living in various degrees of legality around Berlin.

Jean-Jacques Annaud, the director, was standing near one of the cameras. With his white curly hair and rimless spectacles, he looks like a cuddlier version of the French prime minister, Lionel Jospin. Most of his best-known films have been based on well-known books: Seven Years in Tibet, Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and Marguerite Duras's The Lover.

Annaud's Gallic charm and wit camouflaged the tension. They were having a terrible day. The sun was covered by clouds at one moment, then shining forth again the next, wrecking the continuity. With occasional glances at the uncooperative clouds, Annaud told me why he had chosen to shoot the film in Germany, rather than in Russia, where he had been taken to a vehicle park with around 100 T34 tanks from the period. "How many work?" he had asked. "Most have engines," came the less-than-reassuring reply.

In Minsk, where the studios had the greatest wealth of military equipment and props, they had been asked, "What sort of film are you making? TV, 16mm, 35mm?"

"Thirty-five," Annaud had answered. "It's a feature film."

"Then, we do everything here for $300,000. Men, weapons, everything." On the surface it might have appeared a temptingly cheap offer, but Annaud and his colleagues sensed only too clearly that they would rapidly lose all control. Everyone, from bureaucrats to the local mafia, would have tried to get in on the act. Germany might be a lot more expensive, but it was dependable, and thus in the long run, almost certainly cheaper.

Rachel Weisz, who plays the part of a female soldier, came up to say hello, and Jude Law waved from behind. I did not recognise him at first. Apart from being incredibly dirty in his dun-coloured Red Army uniform, he was unbelievably thin and pale. Law plays Zaitsev, and Weisz his lover, Tania. Joseph Fiennes is the commissar, Danilov, who is also in love with her.

Annaud and his writing partner, Alain Godard, had produced a script "inspired by an anecdote" in William Craig's book, Enemy at the Gates, published nearly 30 years ago. It is the tale of a duel between Zaitsev and Major Koenig, the commandant of a sniper school in Germany brought in to hunt him down. It is a great love story, beloved of Soviet propaganda. General Chuikov, the commander of the army at Stalingrad, recounted it in his memoirs, but there is absolutely no trace of it in the relevant reports at the time. The story probably stemmed from a brief "battle of wits" between Zaitsev and a German sniper, but all the trimming added subsequently - especially the Koenig figure and the love story brought in by Craig - are pure fiction. Annaud, however, argues that the idea was to look at the story as a study of propaganda and myth-making, and Koenig, who is played by Ed Harris, would be kept as a rather shadowy character.

After one more take, Annaud announced a break for lunch. I went with Alisa Tager and the others to the canteen, a huge concrete hall in the factory's abandoned administration block. Crew members wearing jeans and parkas and actors with horrible prosthetic wounds, still in their Red Army uniforms, swirled around. In the queue, we helped ourselves from the vast array of salads and pasta. The stars mixed in with everyone else. We sat at one of the trestle tables with Jude Law and Rachel Weisz. Then an unshaven Joseph Fiennes turned up, having just returned from a break in Prague. There was much embracing.

The actors fired off so many questions about the reality of Stalingrad that there was hardly time to eat. Weisz asked me about female snipers in Stalingrad. I told her that there had not been any. Craig interviewed a woman called Tania Chernova who claimed to have been Zaitsev's fellow sniper and lover. He should never have believed her utterly improbably account. Weisz's eyebrows went up for a moment. It did not matter because her Tania has been changed. Annaud has very sensibly converted her role to that of a woman soldier attached to help the sniper group.

I showed them a packet of the latest Russian cigarettes which I had just brought back from Moscow. The brand was called Prima Nostalgia. It had Stalin's portrait on the front alongside the order of 1492, Ni shagu nazad, threatening execution to anyone who retreated. Law wanted to try one. I warned him that, living up to the promise on the pack, it would blow his head off. He was still game. He lit it, stood up, took a couple puffs and then swayed. He decided to put it out. I was rather relieved as I did not want to be accused of sabotaging a star, who already looked convincingly emaciated. I asked him if he had gone on a Stalingrad diet. He replied he had lost two stone. "I've also got a Stalingrad manicure," he laughed, showing me his hands. The nails were ingrained with dirt and the hands caked with dried blood.

One of them introduced me to Ed Harris as he was leaving the canteen. He looked alarmingly Aryan and seemed in no mood to chat. Apparently, he was "in method mode" as Major Koenig. Perhaps I should have clicked my heels instead and said "Guten Tag, Herr Major!" From what I heard later, Harris and all the stars on the film were liked. Many crew members had terrible stories from other films. Some stars had "no-eye-contact" clauses in contracts, whereby technicians had to pass them with averted eyes, like servants in the 18th century.

I wandered back to the factory block where the two snipers in the film confront each other. Annaud had already shot the sequence, so I did not tell him that snipers tried to avoid fighting inside buildings, however large. The first rule of sniper warfare was always to have a hidden exit. Walking around the set, it was almost impossible to stop myself looking for historical faults. Making movies, I reminded myself, was not writing history. The trouble is that most people's idea of history is now formed by cinema and television.

John Schofield, the producer and a major military buff in his own right, took me to see the set at Krampnitz. The countryside around Berlin is flat, with sandy soil, lakes and woods of tall, etiolated pine trees and birch. At the end of the war, soldiers of the victorious Red Army had been struck by its similarity to the approaches to Moscow.

I suddenly remembered what I had read about Rüdersdorf. The quarries just a few hundred metres from where Annaud was filming Stalingrad had been turned into the main collection camp for tens of thousands of German prisoners after the surrender of Berlin in May 1945. It was the first stage in their via dolorosa eastwards to labour camps in the Soviet Union. And Krampnitz, our destination just north of Potsdam, was where Field Marshal Keitel had moved Wehrmacht headquarters when the rapid advance of Russian tanks threatened its command centre at Zossen.

The former Soviet tank base at Krampnitz, as I discovered with astonishment, had been turned into the centre of Stalingrad, with the facades of 200ft-high buildings supported by scaffolding nearly 60ft deep. It was the biggest set ever built in Europe. We trudged through the mud and bio-degradable snow made from corn towards a toppled statue of Stalin. The head alone would have filled a small room. The set makers had even recreated the original fountain of dancing children which had been such a poignant symbol among the massacre of so many innocents in the battle. There was also a gibbet from which dangled dummies representing the corpses of executed civilians. A couple of them had been stolen by locals as macabre souvenirs.

John Schofield explained how they could refashion the roofs of the barrack building using the CGI-computer-generated imagery. They could also remove pylons and any other anachronistic inconvenience. Even the shell-holes would be added later. The set constructors had begun digging shell-holes with excavators, but they had all been filled in again. The stunt coordinators had pointed out that once action started, with smoke and explosions, the charging extras would fall into them and hurt themselves.

For the Krampnitz scenes, they had hired 300 young unemployed "Ossies", or east Germans. To their surprise, these extras had thrown themselves enthusiastically in the battle scenes in the snow and slush. Unlike British extras, they had not grumbled or demanded "mud money" or "water money". I heard later that some real fights had broken out between the east German extras in Wehrmacht uniform and the Red Army soldiers played by ethnic Russians.

Back in my hotel room, I wondered whether I had been invited along as a sounding board or as an informal consultant. But since I was not allowed to see the script, there was little I could contribute. The important thing was that Annaud remained constantly alert for any false note. A member of the crew told me that he had been exasperated when the boy who played the part of Sasha - a young admirer of Zaitsev who acts as a spy - arrived on set spotlessly clean. Annaud thought that he looked "like a character out of Walt Disney", not a boy caught up in the battle of Stalingrad. He has asked the boy to take off his shirt. He took it from him, ripped it and stamped it into the dirt before handing it back.

I tried to visualise how the finished work would look on screen. We all have fixed images of war, partly conditioned by black-and-white newsreel footage and partly by previous movies, but then I remembered hearing that Annaud hated shades of grey. He went instead for black and red: the colours of sex, as well as the colours of war and politics.

The next morning, John Schofield took me to see the other huge sets that they were building near Cottbus, close to the Polish frontier. This was to film the Volga crossing points. On the way, he explained that the fall in the value of the German mark against the dollar had greatly helped them in meeting budget shortfalls. The transportation costs alone were huge, shipping in paddle steamers and another 30 craft on low loaders. They had even built some Panzer Mark IVs, costing $45,000 each, based on old Swiss tanks, but with new fibreglass turrets added.

Back in the phosphates factory in Rüdersdorf, further visits revealed how extensively they had made use of that one site. The railway sidings at the rear had served as the look of sidings in Stalingrad, which the Germans had dubbed the tennis racket because of its shape. Wolf Kroeger, the brilliant production designer, had even overturned burnt-out railway wagons to make it look like the photographs from 1942. In deep bunkers just beyond, I found that they had recreated the Stalingrad sewers. The water had been warmed up for the actors who would have to stand up to their thighs in it for quite some time. Meanwhile, defrosted laboratory rats who had "died in a noble cause", as one onlooker remarked, floated on the surface. Jude Law and the others were then filmed wading through this "rat soup".

A month later, I returned to the set of Enemy at the Gates, by which time the crew and actors had decamped en masse to Cottbus. The set was now based on the shore of a huge pit half-filled with water and nearly a mile wide. Annaud had chosen this great gash in the earth, excavated in Communist days as a vast open-cast mine for brown coal, to shoot the fighting round the vital Volga crossing points. The sloping, sandy banks were very like those at Stalingrad. The polluted water held no fish, so the technicians could set off as many explosions as they wanted without disturbing the wildlife: another requirement of German environmental regulations.

The main set – a jetty for the Volga flotilla to re-supply the defenders of Stalingrad and take off wounded and civilian refugees – made an impressive scene with its anti-aircraft gun emplacements, rusted oil pipes, abandoned carts, telegraph poles askew, tank traps and barbed wire. Even close up, one could not see that the iron girders were made out of plywood and that the armoured vehicles were glass fibre. The only „real“ things on the set were the 20,000 sandbags which had been filled over the previous three weeks. The local fire brigade was hosing down the ground to make it look authentic, and monster forklift trucks were lifting burnt-out vehicles to their designated places. I also noted the numbered panels which marked the explosions in order of detonation. The bomb and shell craters were missing, but they would be added later by computer imaging.

Annaud was waiting at the top of the bank for filming to begin. He looked completely relaxed: the mark of the consummate general, which is what he had to be. The most obvious enemy proved to be the weather once again. It was the beginning of the week before Easter and the sun was burning hot.

Down below, Rachel Weisz and Joseph Fiennes were having sunblock applied by make-up as they waited. Their deathly pale „Stalingrad tans“ had to be preserved. Weisz wore a long-peaked baseball cap to keep her face in shade.

I was watching a group of young soldiers, already sweating in their Red Army uniforms. A member of the crew told me that they were all German. When the set had moved from Rüdersdorf to Cottbus, there had been so many skinheads in the town that those in charge of extras had thought it a great advantage to have all these shaven-headed youths to play Russian conscripts. But the skinheads did not want to play Russians. They all wanted to be Wehrmacht soldiers, preferably officers.

One rehearsal followed another as the morning advanced. The choreography of the whole scene, with nearly 1,100 extras, was alarmingly intricate. Finally, everything was ready for the first proper test-run. Smoke billowed, cameras rolled, crowds began to run, explosions in the water and on land went off, amid shouting and shooting as sub-machine-gunners fired into the air. Diving Stukas would be added later with computer-generated imagery. The smoke machines belched forth black clouds. At times they was so thick, one wondered if anything would be visible.

After the rehearsals, the fire brigade „wetted down“ the ground again as almost everyone sat around waiting and watching. The explosives experts checked their cables. The heat became so intense that all the extras in great coats and helmets became very thirsty. Members of the crew bearing bottles of mineral water moved among them.

Tension began to mount as assistant directors relayed shouts of „Final checks!“ Someone on the ridge shouted „Smoke!“. Then came „Cameras! Background action!“ The pinnaces and tugs out on the water began to move, their long, thin smokestacks billowing – „Action!“

Everyone began running and shouting and firing guns. The scene looked utterly convincing, but something was wrong. One of the producers nearby was swearing under his breath. The main explosions had failed to go off. The cable could not have been buried deeply enough. One of the extras must have tripped on it. Almost a thousand pairs of eyes focused on the director, but to everyone’s astonishment, Annaud appeared unruffled. A few moments later he announced the already delayed break for lunch. It was depressing to think how much that single mistake had cost.

Late in the afternoon, I wandered down to the water’s edge to watch the second unit film details of the burning city. Footage was needed of animals escaping the blazing Stalingrad by throwing themselves into the Volga. A German company which schools animals for movies had brought 150 rats and three dogs.

The rats were first on. They were going to emerge amid flames and smoke from a sewer mocked-up on the edge of the lake. A fire engine stood ready to pump water down the tunnel. Logs and railway sleepers around the exit were set alight with inflammable gel, and the animal handlers, wearing waders, took up position in the filthy water with nets at the ready to recapture the rats.

As we waited for the cameras one of the crew then told me about the other wildlife in the film. A ghastly feature of the battle of Stalingrad which I had described in my book was the way crows pecked out the eyes of corpses. This detail clearly had not escaped Annaud. A female bird trainer was hired to teach crows to peck the eyes out of dummies for the cameras. „What did she use?“ I asked feeling rather sick. „Peeled lychees?“

„No. The best were balls of white cheese pushed into the eye sockets. But she was seriously worried afterwards that this would give the crows the idea of trying it on live people. And one of the birds escaped. That caused a real panic. Thank Christ, he was recaptured.“

Finally, everything was ready. The floating logs were aflame, smoke belched out. The fire engine started pumping, and bedraggled rats were swept out of the pipes into close-up camera shot. The trouble was that the rats did not seem to know how to swim, or if they did, they appeared extremely reluctant. They even preferred to clamber on to the flaming logs. Their handlers rapidly snatched them from danger and the scene had to be rethought.

Shortly before „magic hour“ – the movie speak for sunset – Annaud was waiting to shoot another scene a mile back along the bank. It was to be a stamped of civilians, some pushing handcarts and baby carriages, others hanging on to horse-drawn carts, down a curving track past trenches, gun pits and the ubiquitous burnt-out vehicles. The road was deliberately littered with old pots and pans and ancient sewing machines.

German extras of all ages dressed as impoverished Russian civilians from nearly 60 years ago looked strange next to crew members with their baseball caps and mobile telephones in belt pouches. Another anachronism which intrigued me were all the fluorescent yellow tennis balls and, further back towards the skyline, bright yellow footballs. These were tracking markers which scanners in post-production would pick up to triangulate the computer-generated imagery. The burning city would be inserted in the background.

After a couple of rehearsals, with the civilians running past, many screaming in panic, and the horses genuinely nervous, Annaud walked over to me. „I’m thinking of wrapping the horses. Wouldn’t they all have been eaten by this stage of the battle?“

„Probably,“ I replied. „If you’re talking late October. Most were killed by shell splinters. In any case, they would not have been as well fed as this lot. But I can’t tell you for sure that there were no horses left alive on the west bank at that time.“ He nodded, undecided for the moment. He went over to glance at the camera monitor which was screened from the light under an improvised black awning. The smoke that day had turned his hair from white to grey. „I’m so filthy,“ he remarked to Joseph Fiennes. „I could join the cast.“

The extras tramped back up the hill to take up their start positions again. Most of these Germans had really good faces as Russians. Bags had been painted under their eyes to underline the exhaustion and stress. The German actress, Eva Mattes, playing Mother Filipov, had to run down the road with Weisz, a steadi-cam focused on their faces as the explosive charges went off. The anxiety on Eva Mattes’s face was entirely convincing. „I don’t know what I’m doing in a war film,“ she had said earlier. „I can’t stand explosions.“

On my last evening in Cottbus, I was aware of an end-of-term-itis which affected the crew. In the hotel bar they were speculating whether this really was the last week of shooting. Many spoke of who was going to do what next. A number of them were off to the Mediterranean to work on Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Jude Law was to shoot Artificial Intelligence, a Stanley Kubrick film passed to Steven Spielberg. Rachel Weisz was off to star in The Mummy II. Joseph Fiennes was going to work on a film in Macedonia.

Rachel Weisz came down for a drink and chat, before retiring to bed, I joined Jude Law who was standing there exhausted after a long day, yet he evidently could not face the idea of going to bed straight away. We talked of the various titles that had been suggested to replace Enemy at the Gates. Some had been excruciating. One of the slightly better ones had apparently been Eye for an Eye. I shuddered. It made me think of the crows.

The movie was obviously very important to Law, not just because it offered a second chance at an Oscar. He was longing to see the final cut. „For weeks and weeks now, I’ve been working with hundreds of people all around me, military hardware and explosions going off. It all felt right at the time, but I need to know whether I‘ve got it right.“

His real fear, it emerged, was studio policies and the likely pressure on Annaud to change key parts after test viewings with selected audiences. There were already rumours that the distributors wanted a happy ending, even if a story of Stalingrad with a happy ending seemed a sick joke. Law fervently hoped that Annaud’s strong international following would ensure that he was listened to. In fact, I discovered later, these concerns were misplaced. Annaud has a clause in his contract giving him the final cut.

We talked of history as well as of Hollywood. Law had got an A in the subject at school. War fascinated him, even though he hated it „for all sorts of liberal reasons.“ I relayed to him what one of the set drivers had told me. As an East German, she had been taught the Soviet version of the Second World War. The rewriting of history had made her parents‘ experiences seem like a world which had not existed. During her first day on a set in Rüdersdorf, she had watched the young German extras dressed in jeans who had been brought in by bus as they were sheperded into costume. When they reappeared in Wehrmacht uniform, still joking and smoking together, the shock had been considerable. They had looked just like photographs of their forebears marching towards Stalingrad in 1942. The generations, she had found, were not so far apart after all.

„She’s right,“ Law said. „History really is a question of timing... of when and where you were born. This film has certainly made me think again about the whole thing.“

He badly needed his bed and he searched in his wallet for the credit card version of a room key. At least the stars did not have to worry about their beauty sleep on this film. The more shatterd they looked on set, the less the make-up people had to do. Reality is nearly always better than artifice.

„Enemy at the Gates“ opens in March.