In an 18 January 2008 article he wrote for The Guardian to coincide with the film's re-release, Stuart Cooper described at length the creation of this film. He originally intended to make a documentary about the Overlord Embroidery tapestry. Cooper was told that it would take 9 years to review all the footage in the collection, which included dangerous nitrate film stock. He wrote that after narrowing his selection, “I spent approximately 3,000 hours in that dark cell between 1971 and 1975...It was during the archival research that I developed the idea of a dramatised feature film about an English soldier who sees his first action on D-Day, interweaving the archive footage to expand and tell the story. More research in the museum's document section - reading letters and unpublished diaries of ordinary soldiers who saw action in the first wave of D-Day - refined the concept...The film archive controlled what historical events our soldier's story would encompass. Once that was established, Hudson was able to dramatise some wonderful and totally original scenes extracted from diaries and letters of real servicemen.” The Imperial War Museum and the Ministry of Defense assisted the production in many ways, from help with costumes and props to training actors to a flight by the last operational Lancaster bomber over Bristol.