13 Letters That Saved a Dying WWII Documentary

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"I've done nothing in my life that deserves to be reported. But if as a small witness of an age, I can help recall the value of the fabulous sacrifices our American friends made for our liberation, I will be happy. My hummingbird's share." An 88-year-old man in the south of France wrote that to me in a letter. One of thirteen. I'm gonna tell you all about him. But first I have to tell you about the two years. I almost gave up on a film. This is Documentary First. I'm Christian Taylor. If you have ever poured yourself into something you believe in, a film, a business, a calling of any kind, and watched it stall until you started to wonder if you'd wasted your time, then this podcast is for you. Today you're going to hear how a film gets put on a shelf and what it takes to bring it back to life. I'm taking you inside. My own film, the one I was stuck on for two years that just came back to life in dramatic fashion. Part one today is how it fell apart, and then how it came back. Part two is what happened when I went to Normandy and the letters I had been reading that came to life. They jumped off the page, they grew skin and bones, they shed tears, and they told jokes.

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Now, Heroes of Carentan is my second feature doc. I started it in 2022, and it's about the liberation of a small Norman French town called Carentan in June of 1944. Four days after the hard fighting that helped hold the whole invasion together, the 101st Airborne Division, the Screaming Eagles. It's incredible story. My first film, The Girl Who Wore Freedom, was about the Battle of Normandy too, but it focused on the gratitude the French still carry for the men who freed them and the units that brought them.

The Girl Who Wore Freedom clip 1:50
In Normandy, celebrations of remembrance and gratitude take place every year.

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French citizens bring World War II veterans and their families to Normandy to share their stories. In doing so, the French, once liberated by the Americans, liberate these soldiers in return from their oppressive memories of war.

Valerie Cardin 2:12
Freedom is not free, it's too important to never forget.

Marie-Pascal Legrand 2:18
Boys went ashore on our beaches to fight in a hell

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to liberate people they even didn't know. Then you realize what they have done and the sacrifice that many of them have made. And this show, Documentary First, actually started back in 2019 to follow the making of that first film. So in a way, doing this, tracking my own work out loud, is going back to exactly where this whole thing began. But here's what I don't usually say out loud. For about two years, Heroes of Carentan sat on a shelf, half made. There were three walls that I ran into. The first was the story, and it was the one that really stuck me. Because from the outside, it looked like I had everything. I had shot French interviews, reenactments, historical experts, modern soldiers. I had a story, an outline, a point of view. I had a pitch deck and a trailer. I even had a signed production agreement with Department of Defense. On paper I had a film. But every time I sat down with it, something was missing. It didn't move me. I couldn't find the thread, the heartbeat, the thing that makes a stranger lean in and not really get bored or look away. I had all the pieces of a documentary, but really none of the feeling, and I couldn't figure out what was wrong.

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The second wall was the storytelling device, or the shape. My plan had been to have soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division from today's army, men who had just come back from the border of Ukraine tell the story of the men from 1944 who'd spearheaded the liberation of the town. Modern soldiers to the historical ones. And then the ground shifted underneath that idea. The headlines changed, the mood of the country changed, and the a frame that felt timely started to feel like it would date the film. It would box it in and make it harder to to last. I don't need to get into the politics of it. The lesson is the part that matters to anyone making something. If your film only works in one news cycle, well, it won't survive the next one. And I could feel that whole approach was turning into a cage and I didn't know what to put into its place. And the third wall was money. And me. On my first film, I was the main fundraiser. I raised a lot of money and it emptied me out. I didn't have it in me to run that gauntlet again. I was looking for a smaller group of backers, ones who shared my vision and who would believe in the story the way I did. But I didn't really find them, or at least I haven't yet. I did find a merry band of travelers who contributed a little bit to the first Normandy shoot in June of 2022, but for the most part I funded things myself.

5:06
I put my own money in and unwisely took a COVID disaster loan that I'm still paying back today. I'm telling you that on purpose because first of all, don't take loans. But second of all, nobody tells you that part. When you get to the premiere and you're taking photos We show you the premiere and the laurels. We don't show you the loan you're still carrying when you smile for the photos. So there it was. A story that didn't move me, a structure that had stopped working, and a tank that was empty. For two years I told people the film was in post, and that was true. It was just stuck. And some days honestly, I wasn't sure it was ever coming off that shelf. Then something happened. Two things actually, close together, and it changed everything. The first was that I made myself go back to the very beginning. Not the footage, the research. Two years of archival documents, letters, photographs, unit histories, a mountain of it. And I went back through all of it, not looking for facts, I had the facts, but looking for another way to tell the story, looking for a heartbeat, for something to move me. And The answer when it finally came was almost embarrassing, because it had been sitting there the entire time.

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The way to tell the story of what these soldiers did was not to point the camera at the soldiers, it was to point it at someone they saved. To tell the French side and the soldier side at the same moment, through the eyes of one person who actually lived it. Now, you would think that I shouldn't have to think that hard about that, and I didn't. My first film did talk a lot about D-Day from the French civilian perspective, but I didn't want to make a repeat of the same story. But as I began to think about it, that film was about a different subject. It was about gratitude. This one had to be about something different. I realized it had to be about the cost, what the liberation cost and what it brought, carried in a single human being. And the second thing, when I asked myself who that person could be, I remembered a man I had once met two years earlier at the 80th of D Day, briefly, in passing. And his name was Yves, Yves Marchais, and he was six and a half years old when the 101st Airborne Division liberated Carentan. He was there, inside it, as a small child. We had a lovely moment on the Place du Valnoble where he had lived as a child, and then we watched the World War II veterans dancing with French women in forties dresses, with smiles on our faces and tears in our eyes, if I'm gonna be honest.

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And then I said goodbye and moved on, because at the time I didn't understand what I had right in front of me. But then I started thinking about a civilian I could interview. Someone who might know something about the Heroes of Carentan who might have seen them face to face, and his face popped into my mind. And I remembered he spoke English and had a very sharp mind and a very clear memory. And I also remembered he was friends with my co-producer Denis van den Brink who could probably track him down and connect us, which he did. So I asked Yves if he would be willing to tell me his story, and he said yes. And then Something happened I did not expect at all. Before we ever set up a camera, before I booked a single flight, he started writing me letters and sending me beautiful photographs. He's quite the amateur photographer. He wrote his memories down for me in French. Long, flowing letters, 13 of them. And they were not what I thought war memories would be. They were memories of a child, vivid, funny, terrible, and tender. He wrote about being told that the Germans burned children. And not quite understanding how that could be, only that it was terrible. He wrote about thirty-five oranges that he was given by GIs, and he counted one by one and threw them in a blue velvet chair, his own private treasure. He wrote about the first time he ever saw the sea, a 10 minute drive from his house that the war had kept from him his entire short life.

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And near the very start of his first letter, he wrote this. I was barely six and a half years old. That is an age when one does not yet connect the past, the present, and the future. One only lives in the present, in a constant state of adapting to everything. I did not know death. But I've kept the spirit of those times. And because an American woman wishes to carry these moments forward, moments that made great history, I owe it to her to make the effort to remember, and to tell a little of my own small story, if only to thank symbolically the idols of my childhood. For a long time we never spoke of these things in the family, except in passing, as if to move on as quickly as possible. And I myself never searched deeply into that past as if to avoid growing old. So here I am now, about to grow younger by writing it down. I devoured those letters, and two years of being stuck just fell away. because there it was, the heartbeat. It was never in the battle maps, it was in this six-year-old boy who was still at 88, carrying every bit of it. I had my film back, and I knew I had to get to Normandy fast while there was still time because Yves is 88, and time is the one thing the story does not have.

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So I went. I paid for it myself, I kept it small, and I flew to France to meet the man whose letters had just saved my film and won my heart. What happened there is in part two, and I'll tell you everything next time. This is Documentary First, and I'm Christian Taylor. And if this is the kind of story you want more of, follow the show so part two lands in your feed the moment it drops. And until then, if you know a filmmaker who needs to hear this story, or a history lover who might love it, Text in a link to this podcast. Bye everybody. I'll see you next week.