A Director Bends Time for a War Movie
BURBANK, California — It is a little surprising that World War II would grab the cinematic fancy of Christopher Nolan, given the dystopias, demimondes and dreamscapes that have sprung from his fertile mind.
He has conjured underworlds peopled by tattooed amnesiacs and broody superheroes; he has plunged audiences into Escherian dreams within dreams within dreams; he has tested their grasp of wormholes and gravitational singularity.
But with his new movie, “Dunkirk,” in global release this month, Mr. Nolan ventures into the harsh world of a real war.
“It’s the first time I’ve taken on any kind of real subject matter, any kind of historical truth, and that was very daunting,” Mr. Nolan said.
His film is about the astounding rescue of 338,000 Allied troops from the beaches of Dunkirk, France, in 1940. Hemmed in by German forces, the Allies were trapped as German aircraft strafed and bombed the sands, with the only way out across the English Channel. Shallow waters prevented British destroyers from coming close to the beaches, so the call went out to private boat owners in England to help ferry the soldiers to safety.
Hundreds of pleasure boats, barges, yachts, ferries and fishing boats set out, and, under bombardment from the Luftwaffe, helped pull off the rescue. Had they not, the war could have taken a much different course. “If Britain had surrendered, it effectively would have left Europe Nazified,” said Joshua Levine, a historian who worked closely with Mr. Nolan on the script.
“As a filmmaker you’re looking for gaps in the culture, pop culture at least; you’re looking for things that haven’t been addressed in movies,” Mr. Nolan said. “And Dunkirk, for whatever reason, has never been addressed in modern cinema.”
Mr. Nolan, 46, grew up in Chicago and London, but his accent and look — floppy schoolboy hair, blazer and Oxford button- down — is British all the way. His breakthrough film was “Memento” (2001), and he went on to make the “Dark Knight” trilogy.
Mr. Nolan said he did not want to make a typical war movie, and instead built it as a suspense film. He also kept out nearly all traces of blood.
“We wanted an intensity not based on horror or gore,” he said. “It’s an intensity based on rhythm, and accelerating tension, and overlapping suspense scenarios. Dunkirk to me is one of the most suspenseful ticking- clock scenarios of all time.”
Much of the production happened on the actual beaches of Dunkirk. The film interweaves perspectives from people on land, in air and at sea, through the eyes of, among others, a naval officer ( Kenneth Branagh), a civilian boat captain ( Mark Rylance), a shellshocked officer (Cil- lian Murphy), Royal Air Force pilots ( Tom Hardy and Jack Lowden), and the central character, a young British soldier played by Fionn Whitehead.
The most talked about bit of casting was Mr. Nolan’s hiring of the pop star Harry Styles, of the boy band One Direction, for an ancillary part. Twitter erupted after Mr. Styles lopped off his flowing locks (“Haircut revealed!”) and when images appeared of his character possibly drowning (“Our hearts can’t take it!”).
As much as a departure as “Dunkirk” is for Mr. Nolan, it bears his signature hallmark of dancing around linearity and time. The film jumps forward a few hours or days, then back, and takes repeated runs at harrowing incidents from different vantages.
Mr. Nolan said the structure was perhaps his most intricate yet and mirrors how people tend to remember and recount things. “You know, we very rarely speak in chronological terms; we very rarely tell a story from the beginning chronologically to the end,” he said. “We’re trying to disturb the natural rhythm of these war movies. We’re trying to disturb the established rhythm of the blockbuster.”