The Irish Mail on Sunday

THE GREATEST ESCAPE

A British destroyer built in the Thirties, three working Spitfires, 50 period boats and stars made to lace their boots just as the Tommies did. More goes behind the scenes of this summer’s blockbuste­r Dunkirk to reveal the full, painstakin­g detail that we

- BY JIM WHITE

On his very first day working on the set of the new movie Dunkirk, indeed on his very first day working on any film set, Harry Styles had a swift introducti­on into what was expected.

The former One Direction star had just emerged from the wardrobe department’s trailer when he encountere­d the film’s director Christophe­r Nolan, who had cast him as one of the 340,000 Allied troops who were evacuated from a French beach in May 1940, even as the German forces pincered in around them.

‘I’d put my uniform on and walked out and Chris checks me over,’ the movie debutant recalls. ‘And he says to me: “Your boots are laced wrong.” He explained that the British soldiers did them looped rather than criss-cross.’

Welcome to Dunkirk. When it came to re-telling the story of the most extraordin­ary evacuation in military history, for Nolan this was personal. The 46year-old Briton had long nurtured an ambition to bring the events of May 1940 to the big screen. After the success of Interstell­ar, The Dark Knight and Inception, he had credit among the big studios who would be prepared to back him. But for him it had to be on his terms. He would not allow the story to be diluted, bastardise­d, in any way undermined by Hollywood norms. He had seen too many World War II movies into which American heroes had been shoe-horned. This was a British film with a Hollywood budget. And to deliver it properly, for him there could be no compromise. This was a moment of profound significan­ce in Europe’s collective past, the moment that defined Britain’s refusal to yield. Consequent­ly nothing in the film – from the ships and planes to the manner in which Styles laced his boots – was to be incorrect, nothing affected, nothing contrived. His insistence that the memory of this most telling chapter in Britain’s history was to be appropriat­ely respected meant, too, that there was to be no computer-generated imagery, no blue screen action, no background filling in the editing suite. None of the tropes and tricks of modern filmmaking were to be adopted. Every last second was to be – as the movie jargon has it – ‘in camera’.

‘We want to put people on the beach at Dunkirk, on the deck of one of the little ships and in the cockpit of a Spitfire,’ Nolan explains. ‘We want to take the audience on a very intense ride and make them feel that they’re actually there.’

So it was that Nolan, after gathering a fine ensemble cast including Tom Hardy, Kenneth Branagh, Mark Rylance and Cillian Murphy, as well as Styles, instructed his production crew to go out and find the tools to help him depict precisely what had happened. And for Nathan Crowley, the visual effects coordinato­r, that meant starting with the location.

‘The first thing was to go to Dunkirk and take a look; I’d never been before,’ he says. ‘It’s a huge beach. I think the first day I went I walked about 12 miles. And I realised as I walked, everything had to be filmed there. We couldn’t do the wide shots there and fill in with the rest on some beach in California. There was nothing else we could do but re-stage the whole thing there.’

Re-stage is a bit of an understate­ment. Rebuild might be more accurate. Take the mole. This was the 250-yard pier heading out from the beach into the waters of the English Channel. For the majority of the troops massing on the sand in May 1940, this was the only route home. And it provides the backdrop for the sequence that defines the film.

We see thousands of men lined up on the pier, patiently waiting for their turn to embark on to the boats moored alongside it, when we hear an ominous drone buzzing in the distance. A dive bomber has just appeared on the horizon and the look on the upturned faces of the men is one of abject terror.

‘It’s an incredibly stark image,’ says Crowley. ‘They are at the end of the road. On a pier to nowhere.’

And there was just one problem for Crowley about staging it: as Dunkirk restored its bomb-damaged industrial port after the war, the jetty fell into disrepair and much of it was washed away.

‘I remember standing there on the beach thinking, “Oh God, we’ve got to build an entire pier”,’ he recalls.

The mole was a 2ft-high stone breakwater, which had been topped off in the tall-ship era by white, wooden boards. And during the 12 weeks it took Crowley and his team to build a new version, the weather turned raw. In the midst of one storm, the tide ripped the filmmakers’ newly installed structure to pieces.

‘The sea was pretty rough,’ says Crowley. ‘The only plus was that every time the water peeled boards off, it would always deposit them on the same bit of beach. So we knew where all our parts were, and could go and get them. It was a constant repair job.’

A repair job, Crowley adds, that only enhanced his respect for the men involved in the evacuation. ‘We had all these problems,’ he says. ‘And we weren’t being bombed.’

Meanwhile, as set-builders scrabbled around in pursuit of flying gangplanks, other members of the team were scouring Europe for the floating stars of the movie: the civilian ‘little ships’ that answered the call to cross the Channel to bring the troops home. There were to be no CGI boats steaming in the distance: Neil Andrea had been charged by Nolan with sourcing an entire flotilla.

‘Nothing in the film – from the ships and planes to the manner in which Harry Styles laced his boots – was to be incorrect, nothing affected, nothing contrived’

‘We found them in the most unexpected places – Holland, Denmark, we got a couple in Norway,’ he says of the boats. ‘We wanted working boats not museum pieces. A lot of it was word of mouth. We ended up with about 50 boats, all of them from the time. During the shoot, Pier 7 in Dunkirk looked like a museum. Every day, hundreds of people would turn up just to look at the boats.’

Incredibly, 14 of the little ships audiences will see in the film were actually there at Dunkirk. These are the living ghosts of the evacuation.

‘The owners were incredibly excited to be part of the project and were really generous about lending us their boats,’ says Andrea. ‘They gave so much input into how the craft were used, how they manoeuvred.’

The film’s maritime hero, the boat the camera follows on its journey from the Kent coast across the channel, is

Moonstone, a tiny little cabin steamer. Although not involved in the evacuation, Moonstone, built in the Thirties, is an exact contempora­ry of many of those that provided unlikely rescue. And Mark Rylance, who plays her captain, found himself inexorably drawn to this aquatic character.

‘I really fell in love with her,’ Rylance says. ‘I spent many hours sitting down in the cabin. She’s got a beautiful cabin, which the art department decorated with books on the shelf and all this stuff from the period. Even when you opened the drawers, they had these beautiful old tins and things from the Forties. But she didn’t have a deep keel, so she rocked about like anything in the water.’

It wasn’t just little ships Andrea found. The destroyer that filmgoers will see anchored just beyond the mole is no stage set. It is the real thing, a genuine British naval destroyer built in the Thirties.

‘We found her in a museum in Nantes,’ says Andrea. ‘As it happens, she was the only ship we used that isn’t working any more. So we had to tow it all the way from Holland.’

As the men waited to be evacuated, over the Channel a full-scale air battle was under way. To recreate the dog fights, Nolan did not want models or facsimiles. He wanted the real thing. So Crowley found three Spitfires – two Mark Is and one Mark V – as well as a Spanish HA-1112 Buchón to double for the German ME-109s.

However, Nolan acknowledg­es, here was a rare moment of cheating.

‘We did take certain liberties with historical accuracy for narrative reasons. For example, our ME-109 Messerschm­itts have yellow noses, when at that point, they had not yet started to paint the ME109s like that. But it allows the audience to more easily distinguis­h the enemy from the Spitfires.’

What Nolan wanted was to shoot the dogfight sequences from the pilot’s point of view, as if they had go-pro cameras

‘I stood on the beach thinking, “Oh God, we’ve got to build an entire pier”’

attached to their flying jackets. It meant the planes were put through their paces, flying sortie after sortie over the Channel to ensure that every possible angle was covered.

‘Those Spitfires are so brilliantl­y engineered, they’re well looked after and are incredibly reliable,’ says Crowley. ‘But boy do you feel a sense of responsibi­lity working with them.’

Indeed the venerable nature of the aircraft was a constant of the filming process.

‘I remember when we landed a Spitfire – painted in the markings it would have had at the time – on the beach at Dunkirk, everyone there stood to attention. It was so moving,’ says Crowley.

With all the vessels and vehicles in place, and the pier built, and hundreds of Dunkirk locals drafted in to act as extras, the formidable cast Nolan had assembled gathered on the beach for what turned out to be less a shoot and more a full-on battle re-enactment. One conducted in particular­ly inclement weather, as the boats dipped and bobbed on the Channel swell.

Cork’s Cillian Murphy, who plays a character identified simply as Shivering Soldier, was working with the director for the fifth time. So he had an idea of the demands that would be made. And of the requiremen­ts of doing things for real.

‘I remember on Inception, shooting on the side of a mountain in a snowstorm, and Chris continued to shoot even when it became total white-out conditions,’ he says. ‘If you want to get the most authentic reactions, or the most truthful responses from actors, throw ’em into the real sea or fly real Spitfires over them. The audience will feel the reality of that – the actors certainly do.’

Though Kenneth Branagh, who plays Commander Bolton, the naval officer who was one of those in charge of organising the evacuation, cautions that, whatever the conditions that might have prevailed during the shoot, whatever the grit and grime and difficulty, he and his colleagues were engaged in making a movie. Nothing could ever properly compare to what had happened in that place 80 years before.

‘It was only a distant hint of what it might have been like in reality,’ he says. ‘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. They didn’t win medals, it wasn’t considered a victory but, neverthele­ss, it was a miraculous deliveranc­e. It delivered us to the world we’re living in now.’

‘Dunkirk’ is in cinemas now

‘When we landed a Spitfire, everyone stood to attention. It was so moving’

 ??  ?? BEACH BOY: Harry Styles plays soldier Alex. Above, right: Kenneth Branagh as Commander Bolton
BEACH BOY: Harry Styles plays soldier Alex. Above, right: Kenneth Branagh as Commander Bolton
 ??  ?? Main picture: soldiers scattered on the beach in a scene from the film. Right: Allied troops desperatel­y try to reach the rescue ship from which this photo was taken in 1940
Main picture: soldiers scattered on the beach in a scene from the film. Right: Allied troops desperatel­y try to reach the rescue ship from which this photo was taken in 1940
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 ??  ?? terror: The film’s recreation of the mole, the long pier that extended into the Channel from Dunkirk beach. Over 6,000 extras were needed during the 106-minute production. Below right: Tom Hardy as Spitfire pilot Farrier
terror: The film’s recreation of the mole, the long pier that extended into the Channel from Dunkirk beach. Over 6,000 extras were needed during the 106-minute production. Below right: Tom Hardy as Spitfire pilot Farrier
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