Where’s the Dunkirk spirit? We are too selfish to volunteer today, says Rylance
A DUNKIRK-STYLE evacuation would attract fewer volunteers if it happened now because people are more selfish, Sir Mark Rylance has suggested.
As Christopher Nolan’s wartime epic Dunkirk opens this week, Rylance, who stars as an intrepid fisherman in the film, questioned whether such a rescue mission could happen again.
More than 338,000 Allied troops were rescued from Dunkirk in 1940 in Operation Dynamo, which saw 700 private boats sail from Ramsgate in Kent to help them.
Rylance said he had met a number of veterans during filming.
“What I got was a sense of people doing their part. People were surprised to be called on and more often than not they didn’t exactly know what they were doing of where they were going,” he told Saga Magazine. “They just knew that they’d been asked to help and they should do it. They seem so innocent and uncynical and hopeful and positive. No one asked ‘ Am I going to be insured? What happens if I die? Will there be anything for my family?’ It was just ‘we’re needed, we go’. Imagine if that was the case now!”
Rylance, who was knighted this year, says he had initial misgivings about taking a role in the film.
He has spoken out about conscientious objection and is a patron of charity Peace Direct.
“I had a conversation with Chris, right at the beginning,” he said. It didn’t feel like the script was glamorising war, but I just needed to check that that was his opinion, too – and it was. I speak out about conscientious objection and all that, because war exists.
“It was important to me to be part of a film that portrays the situation faithfully and truthfully, where people are really dying and there are real consequences. It’s not a game.”
He is joined in the tension-filled de- piction of the Dunkirk evacuation by Tom Hardy as a fighter pilot, Sir Kenneth Branagh in the role of a naval officer and Cillian Murphy as a soldier.
Harry Styles, who was a member of boy band One Direction, makes his film debut also as a soldier.
Nolan used real Spitfires and many boats from the period in the film, reportedly spending £3.8million on a vintage Nazi war plane.
The film opens in cinemas on Friday.