Christopher Nolan wades into his biggest battle yet for ‘Dunkirk’
Christopher Nolan still recalls a momentous sail across the English Channel 25 years ago.
Even with his experienced sailor friend navigating the small stretch of water between England and Europe, wind and rough waves made for an intense 19hour journey — one that stuck with the filmmaker as he contemplated the Battle of Dunkirk, in which a flotilla of British civilian boats made the same journey, but under heavy German fire, to evacuate Allied soldiers early in World War II.
“Being on that small boat in the middle of a channel, that’s never left me. Nor my respect for the people willing to go through that, knowing they were entering a war zone. That has been in the back of my mind for many, many years,” says Nolan. “For me, the excitement of it is being in that boat and in that plane. I want to be on that beach with those guys going through it.”
The result of Nolan’s long journey is Dunkirk (in theaters Thursday night), an audaciously ambitious foray into real battle with epic scope. Nolan produced, directed and wrote the screenplay that follows three viewpoints during the bleak days when 400,000 troops were pinned down on French beaches before being miraculously evacuated.
Dunkirk hits the water with Mark Rylance as a small boat owner crossing the channel, flies with a Spitfire pilot (Tom Hardy) dogfighting German Messerschmitt planes and dodges bom- bardments on the beach through the eyes of young soldier Tommy (newcomer Fionn Whitehead).
“It’s terrifying. I cannot imagine anything worse than being thrust into the situation these guys were thrown into,” says Nolan. “The survival instinct is just pretty remarkable.”
Nolan acknowledges that he needed to step into Dunkirk at the top of his action directing skills to handle the battle scenes with 1,300 extras and complicated shots on open water.
“It was a question of when would I be ready, just from a technical level,” says Nolan. “Telling the story with destroyers and planes, and all the elements bringing to bear on this — the wind and waves all that stuff — requires a lot of experience.”
Producing partner and wife Emma Thomas says that unfolding just one of the three stories onscreen would have been a directorial challenge. “In terms of the massive scale, it’s no question this is more ambitious than any of the others,” she says. “And it’s a very different film, stepping out of his comfort zone from the movies he’s made in the past.”
That Dunkirk could get made on Nolan’s terms speaks to his formidable Hollywood clout following the success of the Dark
Knight trilogy ($2.4 billion in worldwide box office) and 2010’s
Inception ($826 million). The dialogue-sparse script lacks exposition and the action is led by largely unknown actors on the ground.
“Far too often, Hollywood movies take a 35-year-old and says this a fresh-faced recruit. These guys were 18, 19. They were children,” says Nolan. “We made this when we had the ability to look the studio right in the eye and go, ‘This is a British story that has to be told this way and with a cast of unknowns. But we’re going to make it a very exciting film. Trust us.’ ”
Shot on large-format IMAX and 65mm cameras with seat-rattling immersive sound, the results have been rewarded with stellar reviews (96% critical score on review site Rotten Tomatoes). The film’s summer release date is early for awards consideration (movies that arrive later in the year are favored), but Dunkirk is a “slam-dunk best picture” Oscar nominee, says Dave Karger, special correspondent for IMDb.com, who predicts sustainable box-office punch.