Why Churchill had nothing to offer director of new Dunkirk
Christopher Nolan says he had no room for war leader in his non-political and modern take on evacuation
FOR SOME, the Dunkirk evacuations are inseparable from Winston Churchill and his defiant pledge to never surrender.
But a film about the little ships and the heroes within them will not feature the wartime leader at all, its director has said, for fear of getting audiences “bogged down” in politics.
Christopher Nolan said he had strived to make a film relevant for a modern day audience, disclosing that the on-screen action would instead focus on the survival story.
Writing for the Telegraph Magazine, he said he wanted to create “virtual reality without the headset”, bringing the reality of Dunkirk home without touching its politics. “I knew I didn’t want to make a film that could be dismissed as oldfashioned, something that wasn’t relevant to today’s audiences,” he writes. “What that ruled out for me immediately was getting bogged down in the politics of the situation. We don’t have generals in rooms pushing things around on maps.
“We don’t see Churchill. We barely glimpse the enemy. It’s a survival story. I wanted to go through the experience with the characters.” Nolan, the director behind Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, Inception and Interstellar, said he had pitched the film by telling Warner Bros he wanted to create a cinematic world that would make the audience believe they were in the cockpit of a Spitfire, feeling the sand on the beaches or bobbing in a boat towards a war zone. The finished film, out later this month, stars Sir Kenneth Branagh, Sir Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy and Cillian Murphy, with a cameo for pop star Harry Styles. Nolan, who said he had been thinking about the story of Dunkirk for 20 years since taking a sailing trip on a similar route, received help from the Imperial War Museum and veterans now in their 90s. “The story has not been told in modern cinema, not since the 1950s, when Leslie Norman made a blackand-white version [starring John Mills and Richard Atten- borough],” he said. “One reason is that it’s a massive event that needs to be portrayed on a huge scale.
“That comes from Hollywood studios. The studios are interested in films about Americans. So I didn’t want to try to take on this subject until I had enough trust from a studio that they would let me make it as a British film, but with an American budget.”
Nolan added that film-makers tried to use “the actual planes” rather than resorting to CGI for all scenes, drawing on Spitfire experts about how to recreate the most realistic dogfights. Speaking of intense physical demands on the actors, including scenes in the English Channel, he added: “But however challenging our process became, we were always aware that our trials were nothing compared to what people experienced in 1940.
“The idea behind Dunkirk that we’re trying to get across is that it’s not about individual heroics. It’s about communal heroism.
“It’s about the tremendous sense of community that was vital to the operation. That’s what makes the story unique and that’s why it has always served as a rallying point for British people.”
Churchill became prime minister on May 10, 1940. Within two weeks, the British Expeditionary Forces were trapped on the north coast of France.
Over the following days, a total of 338,226 soldiers had been rescued in the Dunkirk evacuations by a fleet of 800 boats, including a flotilla of fishing boats and pleasure craft.
On June 4, Churchill told the Commons “we will fight on the beaches …” as he hailed the “miracle of deliverance”.
Dunkirk is in cinemas from July 21.
Christopher Nolan: Magazine
‘We don’t see Churchill. We barely glimpse the enemy. It’s a survival story. That’s what makes it a rallying point’