However, there were no grand country estates and houses and although we came across one relic, it was dreadfully rundown, had become the local communist party headquarters and was never to serve our purpose.

Yugoslavia was then, of course, a friendly communist state, Tito was still in power, and it proved to be an excellent choice for our filming: open country in what is now Serbia for our battle scenes, wide rivers and forests, an excellent summer climate but with deep snow in the winter and, last but not least, a cooperative army for the battle scenes.

I had never read War and Peace and so I was sent home for three months to read, prepare and get fit! The book itself came first, of course, and then what seemed a whole library of associated literature, biographies of Napoleon and Tolstoy, together with as much history as I could absorb in the time.Ī recce of our film locations was next on the agenda. As a young television drama director in the 1960s, I was kept busy mining a rich seam of work at the BBC, directing serial adaptations of novels by Emile Zola, Thomas Hardy, Guy de Maupassant, Somerset Maugham, Arnold Bennett and many others.Įarly in 1970 I was asked by the producer, David Conroy to consider taking on Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which was to be made in 20 episodes – the length of 10 feature films! The scripts were being written by Jack Pulman, who was later to write the wonderful I Claudius, directed by Herbie Wise, and although War and Peace was to be largely studio based and shot multi-camera, David had already started negotiations with a Belgrade-based film company in Yugoslavia for most of the exteriors and had approached the authorities there for the use of the Yugoslav army in the battle scenes, as filming in Russia would have been out of the question then.Īlthough feeling over-worked already, I took a deep breath and accepted, with a mixture of dread and sheer excitement at the prospect.

For iphone instal War and Peace