Christopher Nolan got personal to summon ‘Miracle of Dunkirk’
History - some of it intensely personal - leant heavily on Christopher Nolan when he was making his wartime epic Dunkirk.
The English-born director of the Batman movies had long dreamt of tackling the story of how a kind of victory was pulled from Britain’s worst defeat of World War II.
With the cream of the British army trapped by a lightning German advance into northern France in May 1940, the country’s new leader Winston Churchill was told they would be lucky to get 30,000 men out alive.
But in nine days more than 10 times that number of British, French and Canadian troops were evacuated in what became known as the “Miracle of Dunkirk”. Many were plucked from the beaches by a flotilla of “little ships” crewed by civilians who answered the call to cross the Channel.
Their courage came home to Nolan and his wife producer Emma Thomas when they crossed the same stretch of water in a small boat in what he described as “one of the most difficult and frankly dangerous experiences of my life.”
“It drove home to us how heroic this was,” Thomas said. “And no one was shooting or dropping bombs on us.”
“I grew up in a household where the war was very important,” Nolan added.
“My grandfather (Francis Thomas Nolan) was a navigator on a Lancaster bomber and he died near here in 1944. While we were shooting the film I took the children to see his grave. Seeing my own grandfather and the rest of his crew in a communal grave, you realise the concept of entertainment and war is a very tricky thing.”
Which is why Dunkirk - despite its relentless high-octane action scenes - is not “really a war film”, he said.
Instead Nolan wanted to turn it into a “survival story... and to create a different feeling and rhythm to what people have ever seen or experienced before in a cinema.”
“The leads at the heart of the film are kids,” he said, including the pop star Harry Styles of One Direction fame.
“You are not expecting them to take on the German army. When you see the young soldier played by Fionn Whitehead at the beginning (fleeing German fire) you just want this guy to be OK. You don’t have a problem with him dropping his rifle and running. Because that is what you would have done.”
As filming reached its climax last year came the Brexit bombshell. Suddenly the prospect of another ignominious retreat from Europe gave Dunkirk an unexpected and unwanted politician resonance. Nolan said that “like most British people we didn’t think Brexit would happen”.
With the idea of Britain alone against the world again in the air, he warned against “the Dunkirk spirit” being abused.
“Dunkirk is always being used by politicians as a symbol of something. But whenever anyone tries to link it with contemporary politics they are flying in the face of the fact that it happened in 1940,” he said.