Is ‘Pressure’ based on a true story? We fact check the D-Day movie

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The filmmakers dig into the real history behind the weather-fueled World War II D-Day thriller “Pressure,” starring Brendan Fraser and Andrew Scott.

• Brendan Fraser stars as Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Andrew Scott is meteorologist Capt. James Stagg in “Pressure.”
• The movie highlights the little-known story about how bad weather delayed the 1944 D-Day invasion of Normandy.
• “Pressure” arrives in movie theaters on Friday, May 29.

Spoiler alert! We’re discussing important plot points from the new film “Pressure” (in theaters now), so beware if you want to go in cold.

The World War II thriller “Pressure” is about the impact of weather on the D-Day landings at Normandy. Director Anthony Maras had his own hurricane of worries about the forecast while making it.

The film, based on David Haig’s stage play, stars Andrew Scott as Scottish meteorologist Capt. James Stagg, who predicted potentially disastrous storms, leading to a key 24-hour delay in the Allied invasion that occurred on June 6, 1944. The movie had to look sunny for three-quarters of the runtime before turning overcast and rainy, and when shooting in England during fall going into winter, the weather is unpredictable under the best of circumstances. “Anxiety riddled through every part of my body,” Maras says.

One important scene finds Stagg, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) and other leaders going to a morning church service with the sun out at Southwick House, worried that the delay might have just lost them the war. But as Stagg leaves the church and Eisenhower follows, ominous clouds arrive overhead and the weather dramatically turns.

The director thought he might need CGI to make it all work, but in the end, he got cloudy weather in the morning, and after a lunch break, “the bloody sun came out,” Maras recalls. “It was something special. The weather played ball through the absolute entire shoot.”

Maras and fellow co-writer Haig break down fact vs. fiction in “Pressure.” 

Operation Tiger really happened – and it was a disaster

“Pressure” opens with a bloody scene, as Eisenhower grimly walks along a beach filled with casualties after Operation Tiger, a rehearsal for D-Day that ended in tragedy in April 1944. More than 700 soldiers died in the training exercise amid German attacks as well as friendly fire.

“As a dramatist, to learn that this happened, you think, ‘Wow, this is the punch in the guts your main character needs to really focus on the big event,’ ”  Maras says. “Because if they couldn’t even land amongst their own men, how are they going to face these entrenched German positions where they’re waiting for them?

“The reason we started the film with that scene is to try and reinforce not only the doubt and the trepidation that Eisenhower had, but to get across the sense that when they were living through this, it wasn’t history. It’s history now that D-Day was a success. Back then, a few little things got unraveled, and the whole thing could have gone in a different direction.”

James Stagg actually did fiercely disagree with his American counterpart

When Stagg arrives to Allied headquarters at Southwick House, his demeanor immediately rubs people the wrong way and he butts heads with American meteorologist Irving Krick (Chris Messina). Krick argues that in past years, the weather was ideal with clear skies on June 5, the date of the planned D-Day landing, yet Stagg finds that methodology moronic and insists they pay attention to two potential storms that could disrupt the landing.

In reality, Maras says, there was “incredible friction amongst the weather teams” and Stagg was extremely opinionated. “He was renowned for being very matter-of-fact, very gruff, and he was the kind of scientific mind that we might not be used to. This guy spent years in weather stations in the Arctic Circle. He was a tough dude.”

While “you accentuate and heighten that sense of drama” for film, Haig adds, the relationship between Stagg and Krick was quite contentious. “Stagg’s understanding of the jet stream and what it could do to those landings was ahead of its time. Their clash was very genuine because Krick, with all the integrity in the world, believed that it would be safe, just as Stagg believed it would be profoundly unsafe to go on the 5th.”

In one of the film’s most intense scenes, Stagg has to get up in a packed war room with Eisenhower, British field marshal Bernard “Monty” Montgomery (Damian Lewis) and others to give his final forecast. Krick says to go on June 5 but a nervous Stagg, calling Krick’s prediction “pure unadulterated horses—,” digs in his heels and tells Eisenhower to delay.

“Those meetings, he stood there, probably terrified out of his skin, in front of the most powerful men on the planet and had to give the forecast that he truly believed was the correct one,” Haig says. In his research writing the original “Pressure” play, Haig read the meteorologist’s memoir and there was a whole section in Stagg’s book about how “when he started to give his forecast, that really the response to that negativity, or pragmatism on his part, was very powerful.”

James Stagg’s wife was actually pregnant in the lead-up to D-Day

As if delivering an unwanted forecast wasn’t pressure enough for Stagg, Scott’s character in the movie is also dealing with the fact that his wife is pregnant and goes into labor. The hospital she’s in is hit by a German bomb, so Stagg for a while doesn’t know what’s happened, but she ends up being safe and delivering their baby.

In real life, Stagg’s wife was pregnant while Stagg was at Southwick House but didn’t have the baby until November. Also, Haig says he included the fictional bombing of the hospital to “heighten drama.”

Maras adds that one surprise Stagg family member did play a role in “Pressure.” He needed film researchers/editors to sift through archival material for the movie, and one guy who showed up for the job had a familiar name: James Stagg. “The receptionist looks up and goes, ‘What a coincidence. That’s the name of the protagonist of this film,’ ” Maras recalls. “And he goes, ‘Is it a World War II movie about a meteorologist?’ She goes, ‘Yeah.’ ‘That was my grandfather.’ So his father was the man born at the end of the movie.”