Director Christopher Nolan talks about “Dunkirk.”
Key WWII battle from the viewpoint of soldiers, pilots and citizen sailors
In 1940, defeated Allied forces were frantically evacuated from the beach at Dunkirk, France. Boundary-pushing writer-director Christopher Nolan tells the story in the movie “Dunkirk” as an “intimate epic”: Nolan’s twisting narrative structure shifts among three groups of characters, captured entirely on large-format film — mostly in Imax.
“What I wanted to do was never depart from a strongly subjective and intimate form of storytelling ... rather than taking an omniscient point of view or cutting to generals in rooms, pushing things around on maps to explain everything to you,” says Nolan by phone, describing his aim of a “cinema of experience.”
The result is a kind of “fog of war” from inside each of the perspectives of the three groups — soldiers on the beach desperately searching for a way out; Spitfire pilots trying to provide air support with almost suicidally limited resources; and citizen sailors braving the unknown.
“It’s about the ignorance of people on the ground without the privilege of information, strategy, geopolitics,” says Nolan.
Though “Dunkirk” sports some major stars — Tom Hardy, Kenneth Branagh, Mark Rylance — Nolan cast unknowns and newcomers (led by Fionn Whitehead) as the soldiers on the beach. The intense film has epic scale, but is packed into less than two hours of running time.
“I wanted to be thrown into it,” says the filmmaker. “One of the most frightening things about being on that beach must have been the lack of information. It was essential to put the audience in the same position.”
From late May to June 1940, about 400,000 soldiers had to be rescued from Nazi forces picking them off at their leisure, largely via Luftwaffe strafing. The British government called on fishermen, leisure sailors and merchants (“little ships”) to cross the English Channel to aid in the rescue of what Prime Minister Winston Churchill called “the whole root and core and brain of the British Army.”
No problem, right? The distance from Dover to Dunkirk is only about 20 nautical miles and today takes just over two hours by Chunnel.
“About 20 years ago,” Nolan says, “I took a trip along with Emma (Thomas) — the producer of the film, my wife — we joined a friend with a small sailing boat who wanted to make the crossing about the same time of year as the evacuation. We sailed across the Channel to Dunkirk, and it was a very, very shockingly arduous, difficult experience. It was cold and rough; it took about 19 hours to get across. And that was without people dropping bombs on us, without going into a war zone.”
Nolan grew up with the story. The dual American-British citizen shuttled between the two countries in his youth, so he “learned it an almost mythic way; it has a fairy-tale quality to it.
“I think (the film is) a meditation on the concept of communal heroism . ... There’s a sense of the sum of individual actions, people working together. I think often ... the idea of a hero is very individualistic. Dunkirk is a story unique in its emphasis on community, communal effort; the whole being
greater than the sum of its parts.”
In films such as “Memento” and “Inception,” Nolan toyed with narrative convention, especially with chronology and perceptions of reality vs. dreams. Starting with “Batman Begins,” he rescued the caped crusader from the ash heap of off-putting camp to craft a serious, grounded trilogy that explored the character’s psychology and deeper themes. Those Batman movies grossed billions and won the only acting Oscar for a comic-book movie so far — for Heath Ledger’s indelible Joker in “The Dark Knight.”
Nolan has resisted the tide of computer-generated visual effects, insisting on practical ones — those are real Spitfires in the air in “Dunkirk,” and actors really are in those cockpits. He has also increasingly surpassed limits on using massive Imax film stock for its clarity and immersive quality.
“Dunkirk” sets another standard, with 70 percent shot in that ultralarge format: “It maximizes cinema’s ability to give you this unique combination of intense subjectivity, but a shared empathetic experience with the rest of the audience,” Nolan says.
Nolan felt the weight of responsibility as he shot on the actual beach of the evacuation.
“There was a day when we were shooting the arrival of the little ships. We were on the exact spot where it happened, on the 76th anniversary of when it happened, with the real little ships that had come over from England to re-create their journey. I think that was a very moving moment for everyone on the crew.”
Michael Ordoña is a Los Angeles freelance writer. Twitter: @michaelordona