Most D-Day movies eventually land on the beaches. Pressure stays in the rooms before the invasion, where a weather forecast helped shape command decisions affecting thousands of troops waiting to cross the English Channel. The Focus Features film, opening in U.S. theaters on May 29, follows the tense 72 hours before the Allied invasion of Normandy, when Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Scottish meteorologist Group Capt. James Stagg faced a decision that could have altered the course of World War II. Focus Features describes the movie as the story of Eisenhower and Stagg weighing whether to launch “the largest and most dangerous seaborne invasion in history," or risk losing the war altogether. In interviews with Military.com, actor Andrew Scott, who plays Stagg, director Anthony Maras and actress Kerry Condon, who plays Eisenhower aide Kay Summersby, all said the film’s tension comes from treating D-Day not as an inevitable chapter in history but as a frightening decision made by people who could not know how history would remember them.
“Just his level of integrity,” Scott told Military.com when asked what mattered most in portraying a man carrying that kind of responsibility. Scott said the challenge was showing who Stagg was while also making the audience care about science, his team, and how a weather forecast could become a matter of life and death. Stagg’s forecast was no minor technical detail. The Associated Press reported that the real Stagg advised Allied leaders that the weather for the planned June 5, 1944, invasion would be dangerously bad, helping push the attack to June 6. The film, adapted from David Haig’s stage play, focuses on that narrow window before the operation.
