CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’S ‘INTIMATE EPIC’
Award-winning director puts together an intense docudrama-like spectacle
Re-inventing Batman with The Dark Knight trilogy tested Christopher Nolan’s resolve. Redoing the iconic British evacuation of desperate troops at Dunkirk was something more challenging and more personal.
“Like most British people, Dunkirk is the story I’ve grown up with,” says Nolan with some of his cast members. “As kids we received the simplified, mythic, fairy tale version of what happened.”
Nolan’s Dunkirk is an intense docudrama-like spectacle from three points of view — on land, sea and in the air — framed by IMAX and 65 mm film.
The story recalls the gripping 1940 evacuation of nearly 400,000 British and Allied troops, including Canadians, from the beaches of Dunkirk, France during the early days of the Second World War. The soldiers were under heavy German fire but were eventually saved by a flotilla of commercial boats and leisure craft sent from England.
In fact, Nolan was inspired to make the Dunkirk picture 20 years before when he joined wife and producer Emma Thomas and a few friends on a sailing jaunt across the English Channel to supposedly retrace the trip made by their brave countrymen years earlier. The excursion turned into a harrowing 19-hour ordeal, which upped his interest even more.
“I never understood why a modern film hadn’t been made about it, and as a filmmaker, those are the gaps that you’re looking to fill,” says Nolan.
“It’s always been about finding a story that hooks me. I think it has to have an emotional connection that will sustain me through the years of making a film.”
There were some marketing concerns, however. For instance, most American audiences wouldn’t know about Dunkirk. The U.S. hadn’t declared war on Japan and Germany until 1941. And outside of the British Commonwealth, Dunkirk is more of a footnote.
In other words, the Oscar-nominated writer-director understood he had to make more than just a war movie saluting “a communal heroism.”
To that end, Dunkirk often references Alfred Hitchcock thriller devices. The director also admits that he borrowed some of the suspense techniques from director HenriGeorges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, a 1953 movie which shifts from one dangerous and claustrophobic moment to another.
“I also didn’t want to give the audience information the characters didn’t have,” Nolan says.
Casting proved to be just as unique. Familiar performers in the film include Kenneth Branagh, Tom Hardy, Mark Rylance, Cillian Murphy and One Direction pop star Harry Styles. Yet new faces Fionn Whitehead, Aneurin Barnard, and Barry Keoghan have important roles, too.
All the actors agreed Nolan’s up-close involvement, whether it was on the actual Dunkirk beach or struggling with rough seas on a 40foot yacht, helped their emoting.
“It grounded us in a sense of reality,” said Whitehead, who is making his movie debut as a frightened infantry man.
Having immediate access to Nolan also assisted the cast with improvising, although action more than dialogue drives the narrative.
“As the writer, it gives (Nolan) a flexibility,” says Oscar-winner Rylance who plays a civilian boat captain. “He’ll know if it’s a valuable idea or not, and get on with it. I felt very trusted because I have been in films where it feels like the director is not even there.”
Adds Styles, who plays another soldier: “(Nolan) gives you confidence. And he never has you overthinking stuff.”
However, some of the more difficult sequences with Hardy’s Spitfire pilot pushed even Nolan’s creative abilities to the limit. He had to refit a Yak-52 Soviet aircraft to resemble a British Spitfire fighter. The extra effort was worth it, though.
Not only did the two-seater aircraft allow a stunt pilot to fly the plane, it was sturdy enough to mount IMAX cameras on the wings to capture close-ups of Hardy’s pilot. “That really let us tell this aerial story in a way we hadn’t seen before,” Nolan says.
You could say that about the entire movie which moves seamlessly but quickly from one edgy sequence to another with not much let up.
In many ways, it’s an amalgamation of his efforts from 2000’s Memento introduction to 2005’s Batman Begins and the subsequent sequels The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises with a little bit of 2010’s Inception and 2014’s Interstellar thrown in for good measure.
So far, Nolan’s cinematic experiment has been vindicated by positive previews of Dunkirk in the U.S. and more critically at the London première last week.
“I wanted to create an intimate epic,” he says.
By most accounts, it’s mission accomplished.
It’s always been about finding a story that hooks me. I think it has to have an emotional connection.