The miracle of Dunkirk
> Kenneth Branagh takes on the commanding role of the officer in charge of saving thousands of trapped soldiers in Christopher Nolan’s WWII epic
ONE OF the most eagerlyanticipated film of this year is writer-director Christopher Nolan’s take on the Battle of Dunkirk in France during the early days of World War II, and its aftermath.
Dunkirk tells the story of the epic evacuation, code-named Operation Dynamo, of the hundreds of thousands of British and allied troops trapped by the German army on the beaches and port of Dunkirk, back to Dover, England.
The movie was shot on IMAX 65mm film and stars Kenneth Branagh, Fionn Whitehead, Harry Styles, Aneurin Barnard, James D’Arcy, Cillian Murphy, Mark Rylance, and Tom Hardy.
In a questionand-answer transcript provided by Warner Bros, Branagh who plays Commander Bolton, tells what made him take up the role.
When Nolan first approached you about what attracted you more – the filmmaker or the subject matter? “It was the filmmaker. I didn’t know what the subject matter was initially. When Christopher first got in touch, he only said he wanted to chat with me about a project. “Then I learned he was making a film about Dunkirk. “He walked me through the story, and told me he wanted to compress and condense the flavours and experiences of Dunkirk across intersecting stories set on the land, on the sea and in the air. “He left me with the screenplay he’d written, which was surprisingly lean but tremendously powerful. “It combined all the qualities people associate with Chris – the mathematically precise construction, the humanity and layers of meaning in the storytelling, the epic scope and driving, visceral pulse, all of it.
“I found it to be both a thrilling ride, and a profound meditation on war and this extraordinary moment in history.
“Growing up in Ireland, I often heard people use the expression ‘Dunkirk spirit’, but it wasn’t until I started learning about World War II that I came to understand what it meant. It has to do with never giving up, no matter how impossible the odds.
“An entire nation united in an epic, courageous, impossible evacuation effort to bring some 400,000 trapped soldiers home from enemy-occupied lands.
“What is so striking about it was the sheer scale of the event, and how deftly Christopher reveals the enormous scope and high stakes of this battle through the eyes of the people fighting it, or just trying to keep themselves and each other alive.
“In Christopher’s screenplay and in his execution of the film, he brings all those personal moments together to immerse the audience in a visceral experience of war while giving us a broader perspective on the event than any individual character has in that moment.”
What can you tell us about your character, Commander Bolton? “Bolton is a composite of some real people who were there on the beaches at Dunkirk.
“He’s charged with organising the logistics on the Mole – a narrow breakwater that, in this desperate situation, is being used as a temporary dock for the ships coming in to evacuate the stranded soldiers on the beach.
“Bolton carries enormous responsibility, and therefore, has to keep a cool head and maintain as much control as possible under these unpredictable and extremely dangerous conditions.
“Based on my conversation with Chris, I came to understand Bolton as a character who attempts to remove any emotional reaction to the enormity of the situation, yet he’s exactly the person you would want in charge because he’s practical, pragmatic, tough, but also compassionate.”
Nolan is known for keeping things as real and ‘in-camera’ as possible. Was that challenging for you as an actor, out there on the Mole in Dunkirk, being battered by the elements? “In a way, yes, but that was only a distant hint of what it might have been like in reality.
“For the real people who stood on that Mole, home was so close they could see it – just 26 miles away – and yet they were stuck in this kind of hell.
“Focusing on the reality of the experience was important to Chris and to all of us. Standing on that Mole, battling the elements and embracing the variables becomes ingrained in the DNA of the character.
“The tide is a variable; the weather and even the sun could be deceptive. When the winter kicks up across that Channel, it is bitterly cold. It’s four seasons in a day, with every possible condition, sometimes all at once.
“Yet filming on this beautiful beach in France was the key to anchoring our imaginative effort to put the audience in this situation and evoking the spirit of the people who were there.
“It was a miraculous deliverance. It delivered us to the world we’re living in now.”
Many of the characters in the film are young, fresh-faced men, thrown into this horrific situation. What is Bolton’s perspective? “Bolton is from a generation that had been in the World War I as well.
“So, to come out of the War to End All Wars and find himself here, you can feel an older generation of Brits saying: ‘What have we come to again?’
“I think that’s a perspective Chris was interested in expressing through this character.
“Where Bolton is on that Mole, he can see into the far distance the massive numbers of people involved, and feel an incredible sense of youth exposed, at risk and in danger, and the role his generation played in setting them up to be cornered on this strip of beach.”