Eliza Berman
Jul 19, 2017
Christopher Nolan has built a career making
smart films that also happen to make hundreds of millions at the box office.
His 10th feature, Dunkirk, may be the British-American directorfs most
ambitious yet. Shot almost entirely on location in Dunkirk, France, the movie
depicts the harrowing week in 1940 during which nearly 340,000 British troops,
stranded on the beach with German forces closing in, were evacuated by a fleet
of more than 800 civilian boats. As Nolan, 46, tells TIME, they faced the
choice of gsurrender or annihilationh but held out
for a seemingly impossible third option—a miracle.
Dunkirk (out July 21) is already being
hailed as one of the most important contributions ever made to the war movie
genre. A relentless thrum of action captured from air, land and sea, it is
meant to be experienced as much as it is seen. Although its subject matter
marks a departure from Nolanfs forays into the DC Comics Universe (The Dark
Knight Trilogy) and outer space (Interstellar), it features many of the directorfs
trademarks. Nolan spoke to TIME about why and how he made this film now.
Over the past decade, youfve made movies
that take place in the DC Comics universe, within the human subconscious and
out in space. Why come back to earth, to history?
Dunkirk is one of the great untold stories
in modern cinema. Having made a trip on a small boat across the Channel about
25 years ago, the roughness of the water, the sheer physical challenge of
making that crossing—but without anyone dropping bombs, without traveling into
a war zone—cemented in my mind an extraordinarily high level of admiration for
the people who in 1940 just got on those little boats and came over to help the
soldiers.
Growing up in Britain, what was your
perception of the events at Dunkirk?
In Britain, you grow up with this story.
Itfs really part of the national DNA. Itfs in your bones as a British person.
You receive the story first in its more mythic, somewhat oversimplified terms.
The more you find out about the reality of the evacuation, the more you find
out about the messy historical truth of the thing.
Do you think therefs a particular reason
why the story hasnft been told in film?
Yes, I do. What I realize in retrospect is
this is a British film—it has no Americans in it—but it needs the Hollywood
studio machine to be able to make something technically on the scale thatfs
necessary to do this story justice. Ifve always seen Dunkirk as a universal
story, something that anybody could relate to. But the reason why it hasnft
been made before is it requires such massive resources.
How did you approach research?
We tried to not slavishly re-create
photographs that wefd seen. We tried to look at enough material and absorb it
so it was in the back of our minds. Then we tried to construct our own visual
language for how to portray these things, to give the audience a sense of the
paradoxical geometry of this event. You have lines of men queuing out to the
sea, lines leading to nowhere. We tried to use symmetry and organization to
express the almost bureaucratic nature of some of the horror of what was going
on.
How did that influence how you filmed?
There are very few gGod shots.h Everything
is about trying to have the camera there on the beach with the soldiers. In the
aerial sequences, the camera is always in the cockpit or mounted to the plane,
always somewhere where it would need to be to photograph that kind of combat.
And on the small yacht crossing the Channel to come to the rescue of the men,
we almost never take the camera off the boat. Everything is shot from the point
of view of the characters.
Why did you make this movie now?
This tale is about the idea of home. Itfs
about the desperate frustration of not being able to get to where you need to
be. We live an era where the idea of too many people piling onto one boat to
try and cross difficult waters safely isnft something that people can dismiss
as a story from 1940 anymore. We live in an era where the virtue of
individuality is very much overstated. The idea of communal responsibility and
communal heroism and what can be achieved through community is unfashionable.
Dunkirk is a very emotional story for me because it represents whatfs being
lost.
Youfve made the distinction that you view
this as a survival film, not a war film. Why?
Dunkirk is not really a battle—itfs an
evacuation, a retreat. Itfs a fight for survival, and it immediately drew me to
the language of suspense, and the thriller, rather than all-out combat. It
really was a question of, Can they pull off this miraculous feat before having
to either surrender or be annihilated by the Germans? That was the choice:
surrender or annihilation.
In a lot of movies that take place during
wartime, wefre used to seeing emotional scenes like the mother waiting at home.
But here, I didnft even know the names of the primary characters.
Films have a sophisticated level of grammar
thatfs developed over the hundred years of cinema¬ to be able to tell the
audience everything and have them know much more than the characters. I
actually wanted to take a step back and say, gWhat would you know if you were
actually stuck on that beach?h The more I read firsthand accounts, the more
apparent it became that part of the terror, part of the real sense of fear and
isolation and vulnerability of these men, was not knowing what was happening.
Not knowing, lining up on the beach out to sea, if somebody was going to come
and get them or not.
While the movie certainly has some famous
actors, many of the soldiers are pretty unfamiliar to audiences—especially Fionn Whitehead, who plays the soldier we spend the most
time watching.
Fionn Whitehead had really done nothing before. He was 18 years old. That
was exactly what we were looking for. Too often in Hollywood movies, therefs a
sort of implicit pact between the audience and filmmakers that they can cast a
35-year-old as a fresh-faced recruit and wefll be O.K. with that. One of the
most striking things when you spoke to veterans of this conflict is they were
just children when they went over there.
Therefs a lot of intensity: boats flooding
and capsizing, oil ablaze in the ocean, bombs landing on the beach. How much
did you rely on special effects?
Obviously we used visual effects when
necessary to remove rigs, to make things safe, and make it look like there are
more planes than there were. But of any of the films Ifve worked on, this was
the most in-camera [meaning shot on film, not added as an effect later] film
wefve been able to achieve. Therefs a very uncomfortable matchup between
computer-generated imagery and the World War II period. It tends to not sit
well.
What makes Dunkirk different from your
previous films?
I would say Dunkirk is my most experimental
structure since Memento. I tried to give the audience an experience that will
wash over them. Theyfll sit back and—I wonft say enjoy the ride, because this
is a very intense ride—but experience the film. I never want the audience to
watch the film in an overly cerebral way. Itfs not meant to be a puzzle. Itfs
meant to be an experience.
This is the shortest movie youfve made
since your 1998 feature debut, Following. Why did Dunkirk demand less time to
tell?
I wanted to tell the story primarily in
visual terms and not through the usual theatrical devices of people discussing
backstory. I wanted to throw the audience straight into this very intense,
snowballing series of events that in my films you normally only find in the
third act. I felt the intensity of the experience would be such that there
would be a saturation point where people couldnft sit through anymore. For that
reason it felt important that it be as short as possible.
Seeing this movie in Imax
is almost overwhelming. How much are people missing if they watch it from their
couch?
I like to make films that justify the price
of admission. The type of film that is most vital right now is a cinema of
experience—a film in which you really feel that you are being taken away
someplace different.
You are a serious filmmaker whose movies
are also blockbusters. Why has that become a rarity lately?
Itfs a very different world than when I made Batman Begins, where I felt I was really able to express something about what I felt. Right now individual voices in mainstream filmmaking are a little bit buried by the concept of the existing franchise, which has become a very robust economic model for the studios. But I think that will change. I think that the studios have always valued freshness and new voices. Hollywood has always valued the unexpected—even if Wall Street doesnft.