Dunkirk

by Christopher Nolan

  JONATHAN In terms of the crossing, the character of George – where did that part of the story come from for you? I think you and I are both sort of allergic to the idea of symbolism in film. I remember reading the script and feeling it’s very powerful, very emotional, this story within the film. Where did that come from?

  CHRISTOPHER I had read a couple of different accounts of real people, young people, who went over to Dunkirk. And one of the things that struck me as very sad is the way in which they would be memorialized. Or the way in which they would be portrayed as heroes. In some ways, it made you feel good but, in other ways, it made you feel that there was real pathos, there’s a real sense of, you know, what good does it do, somebody whose life’s been cut short, to refer to them as a hero? To put them in a newspaper or whatever. For me, that tension is very analogous to the bigger idea of what Dunkirk means.

  JONATHAN Yeah, very much.

  CHRISTOPHER I wanted some sense of conflict to that. You completely understand it, but you feel conflicted about it. You feel both things at the same time. You feel that somebody in some ways has stepped up and done something great. But then the actual essence of it is pathetic and small and unimportant. And that scale in warfare or in any big geopolitical event is fascinating to me in terms of point of view. The film to me is not about individual heroism; it’s about collective heroism. You can have a bunch of people who are acting primarily in their own self-interest and very small in their concerns and really worrying about how to get from A to B. But, overall as a community, there’s something that’s taking place that’s very admirable, and that tension I think is interesting.

  JONATHAN George’s story gives you a feeling he’s an ordinary person but, in getting on the boat in the first place, there’s a heroism.

  CHRISTOPHER Yeah.

  JONATHAN The circumstances of his death are almost banal. Right? And then, seeing his picture in the newspaper makes you feel a little better.

  CHRISTOPHER (laughter) Yeah, but you also feel worse that you feel better.

  JONATHAN I think one of the things I really admire about the film, not to bag on the collective state of English filmmaking right now – but they keep making films about kings and queens, and the landed aristocracy. And one of the things that I really admire about this film is that it connects to our experience, of growing up with a dad who lost his dad in the war, all these people who are remembered individually, they’re remembered collectively. This film is about ordinary people. It’s not about the generals in tents somewhere, wrestling with noblesse oblige.

  CHRISTOPHER Yeah, and it’s not about Churchill. I think it’s very important. There’s a fascinating thing that happened at the test screenings. We were consistently getting the complaint that people weren’t quite sure they’d understood how George dies, or at what moment … It’s just not enough for people. They completely understand what’s happened. They would write on the card: I didn’t quite understand that he hit his head on the thing. So, you go: No, you totally get it. It’s just not much.

  JONATHAN They’re waiting for it to mean something.

  CHRISTOPHER And it doesn’t. But that’s the whole point. Cillian and I talked extensively when I wanted him to take on the Shivering Soldier role. It wasn’t really finished at that point, but I asked him to commit to it. I asked him to trust me; I was like, we’ll figure out the resolution of the character together. I said to him, I know how to resolve this character in conventional Hollywood terms. But I don’t want to do that. I could give him examples of how we could sort of finish it, but I said that the whole point is there’s no right or wrong, it was an accident. There’s just shit that happened, basically. So the moment we came up with – ultimately, it became what is one of the most interesting moments of the film, which is where he asks if George is going to be okay and Tom Glynn-Carney, playing Peter, says yeah. He lies to him. I don’t think that was even in the script when Cillian signed up for it, so it was a leap of faith on his part. It was like, I’m looking for what’s the moment that’s in tune with everything that’s going on in the film. It’s in tune with the perspective of the film, so it’s a tiny moment of heroism, I suppose you’d say.

  JONATHAN Right.

  CHRISTOPHER Tiny, tiny, just sparing somebody’s feelings. Then I put in the moment where he sees the body anyways.

  JONATHAN Yeah, that’s a heartbreaking moment.

  CHRISTOPHER But you’ve got to be true to the reality of things. If you’re going to take a more human tone, you can have the lie to sort of let him off the hook, which I think is a very interesting moment. But then you’re gonna to have to follow through – when he got there, wouldn’t he see? Wouldn’t he know? How’s that gonna play out? I think the film, as it’s finishing, is very true to all of that – with the notable exception, really, of Farrier, Tom Hardy’s character, who is ultimately a bit of a super hero. But, given my fondness for pilots and Spitfire pilots, I don’t think it’s in me to not do that in the film, if you know what I mean.

  JONATHAN Right.

  CHRISTOPHER On the other hand, he shoots the bomber down and it kills everybody on the ground, so …

  Jack Lowden is the other pilot who is looking up at him and when he shoots the bomber you see his eyes light up. It’s great, and then he looks down at all the guys and …

  JONATHAN He realizes …

  CHRISTOPHER The oil, and he’s like, oh shit. You always try to allow fate to be arbitrary. That was the challenge for me in the script – and it turned out to be a lot more difficult than I realized to just not allow destiny or fate to be constructed, to be about punishing the bad or rewarding the good. Or ironically punishing the good. It’s a very difficult thing to achieve some kind of neutrality, some kind of arbitrary quality to fate. Like trying to create random patterns.

  JONATHAN Yeah.

  CHRISTOPHER I struggled very hard to do it. And then, of course, when you start putting the film together and putting the music on, you’re putting the cinematic feeling to it. So everything starts to feel logical, even when it’s not supposed to. (Laughter.)

  You’re fighting the form of movies themselves. We’ve talked about this for years; it’s what I used to call the kind of jump-left thing. You would say to me, well, let’s not do that because that’s the way movies do it. Yeah, but if you don’t do that, if we jump left because everyone usually jumps right … you can’t just not do it. I always think of it in musical terms. It’s like, do we have to do the crescendo at the end of the song? Well, you kind of do. If you can find a way to do it differently, in an unexpected way, as we did in The Dark Knight – you know, with the ferries, which I fought you on for a long time, because I didn’t know how to make it work. But you have to have the kinetics. You have to have the thing that makes sense musically or rhythmically. So to try and not reward good people and punish bad people – to try and not push the audience into feeling one way or another about the morality of things – is much harder than I realized. Much harder.

  JONATHAN Especially with the music. Because music can be filled with nuance but it is an extra level of emotional manipulation on the part of the filmmaker, right?

  CHRISTOPHER It is. We’ve been very objective with the music, so there’s very little sentiment in the music.

  JONATHAN Yeah, I noticed that.

  CHRISTOPHER That was a very calculated thing. Even by making something tense or exciting you are manipulating the audience. In a way you are putting a commentary on things, and amplifying things.

  JONATHAN Yeah.

  CHRISTOPHER It’s really on the page that you sort these things out. You know, I originally had Gibson burning to death, but when I was getting reactions to the screenplay, it just felt too cruel to a person you like.

  JONATHAN Yeah, I remember feeling that.

  CHRISTOPHER It didn’t feel neutral. It felt cruel. It felt like an anti-war statement. And the film is intended to be neutral. I wanted fate to feel arbitrary. And so, in the end, it becomes the Highlan
der who suffers that fate – which seemed better to me. He’s also someone you don’t like that much – although the way Brian Vernel played it, I think he’s quite relatable, quite engaging. So you get not quite as much of the villainous. Alex is the trickiest version of that – where does he come out? He goes to a pretty unpleasant place, but he’s never villainous. What I love about the way Harry Styles played him is that he’s very ashamed, he’s carrying a lot of weight, and then he sees some pretty girls with pork pies and it’s, ‘Hey! We’re heroes!’ You know what I mean?

  JONATHAN (Laughter.)

  CHRISTOPHER You know Alex is a simple soul. It’s like, actually, what was I worried about? On to the next thing. The way Harry played it feels very real to me.

  JONATHAN It feels right at the center of what the film is doing so much of, which is presenting these events but not telling you how to feel about them. Not pushing you – that’s the problem with war films. The problem specifically with World War Two films, which is impossible to unpack. I remember the amazing story about the German houseguest that Mom and Dad had. At one point, Kim came to stay and she was in a revival of Allo Allo.

  CHRISTOPHER (laughter) I remember that.

  JONATHAN And Dad was in the kitchen and the doorbell rang. And they’d been having this argument with Dad where the German houseguest says the English are obsessed with the Second World War, all the TV programs are about the Second World War. And Dad saying, ‘No, it’s just a coincidence.’ And then the doorbell rings and Dad’s in the kitchen and the German houseguest goes to answer the front door, and is greeted by Kim’s co-star in full SS uniform. And he says ‘Oh, I’m here for Kim.’ And the houseguest turns around and here’s Aunt Kim coming down the steps in the full Gestapo uniform. (Laughter.) Dad had nothing to say. Honestly, the English have made a lot of films about it, more so than other conflicts; it feels like a clear delineation between the good guys and the bad guys. A distinction that isn’t really explored in your film at all. I guess this connects to the beginning of our conversation. Did you sort of say, well what’s there left to say about the Second World War, what’s left to say about war at all beyond All Quiet on the Western Front.

  And I think in the film you have found things that I haven’t seen in a war film before. Was that your intention going into it? Was it to try to explore this topic from a perspective you hadn’t seen before, or were you more excited about the cinematic possibilities of it?

  CHRISTOPHER Well, I was certainly excited about the cinematic possibilities of it. I think the reason it took a very long time to figure out what kind of film to make was that my initial attraction to it was, and indeed still is, it’s just one of the greatest stories ever. And that’s really what is always the jumping-off point. There are myriad versions you could make of this story. There’s the Chariots of Fire version because you’ve got civilians and the military on parallel courses, kind of interacting. And I struggled for years just trying to figure it out because you’re not working in a vacuum. You’re working with all this film history. You’re working with all of the things that have come before. And having a fresh take on things is important but it’s got to be something you’re deeply passionate about. One of the reasons it’s one of the greatest stories is that it’s bizarrely simple. It’s biblical in its simplicity. You know how the Bible stories are just four lines – you know, Noah is only a page long.

  JONATHAN (Laughter.)

  CHRISTOPHER It’s one or two chapters. And the Israelites being driven to the sea by the Egyptians and parting the Red Sea, I don’t know how much time it takes up in the Bible, but it’s monumental, and I think Dunkirk is like that. You can explain the story to someone in three lines. It’s resonant and primal and relatable, and it’s never been told … in movies. And that’s bizarre. There’s a 1958 film, but even that one was very much in the tradition of the early post-World War Two films. So the perspective is very different – not just as a sort of isolated story, but in the context of the whole of World War Two, which is the other thing we’re doing when I think about it, it’s just Dunkirk. It’s not really about the greater World War Two. There’s just enough at stake so people know why it was important. I don’t think people are going to be waiting for the sequel, if you know what I mean. It’s a very self-contained story.

  So, as far as bringing something new to it, I felt very strongly that on a mechanical, cinematic level, I could bring something that hadn’t been done before – in terms of the structure and the drive, and the simplicity. The film starts with a gunshot and just runs to the end; everything stripped down. And I felt that I had the freedom to do that. Most filmmakers don’t have the freedom to do that. So even if they have the idea, even if they have the impetus to do it, getting the freedom to do it on a huge scale is a very difficult thing and I was in a position where I could do that. I could say to the studio, I want to shoot a 76-page script. I want to experiment. The film is very experimental. I wanted to grab that opportunity with one of these great, simple stories. Try that. See what happened.

  JONATHAN Well, let’s talk about that non-linear structure just a little bit. Obviously, it’s been a hallmark of many films that you’ve worked on over the years. Here there’s a more formal idea from the beginning of taking a week, a day, and an hour and collapsing them into each other. When did that come?

  CHRISTOPHER I think that came from looking at the aerial story. Of wanting to put people in the cockpit of the Spitfire in real time. And when you look at that timescale and you look at how little flying time they had, how much fuel they had, I didn’t want to do multiple missions, I wanted to just have that experience in real time. The film is well under two hours, so the proportion of that that’s actually in the air is almost literally the real time. I’ve always been interested in point of view in storytelling. When you look at trying to put the audience very subjectively into the cockpit of the plane, the level of detail that that requires, the concentration on the fuel gage, the charts, the gun sight, the engine and all that, a very limited, small world. In a way, it requires a completely different form of storytelling, because you have to shoot it completely differently; I didn’t want to take the camera outside the plane. I really wanted to be true to that. It’s about a concentration of detail. It’s about the guy wiping his eyes because he’s a bit sweaty, and blinking at the sun and looking in the rearview mirror. That has its own timescale, a different timescale to the vast number of people on the beach. There’s a sense in which each storyline tries to feel like it’s in real time; we try not to do too many time cuts. They have these very different timescales and, mathematically, I wanted to put it together so that they would coincide at a particular point, they’d have a confluence, and then they would separate again. So I did plot it out very carefully. But when you’re watching the film, you tend to just experience it. My gamble, in a sense, was that because people are so used to watching war movies where the same sort of thing happens again and again and again, people wouldn’t get overly hung up on whether they were understanding the structure or not.

  They’d accept the action they’re shown, as long as the story’s interesting. There’s a moment when things come together, where the structure works for people and they start to understand the different timescales. Then they get a bit more enjoyment out of the film, anticipating how it’s going to come together. But for me, it was the only way to tell the story because I wanted to cross-cut the Spitfire pilot with a guy who’s spending a week on the beach, and I didn’t want to do multiple missions and construct extra stories. I wanted to put the audience in that cockpit for the time in which they would engage with a couple of different enemies. So, even the number of planes is quite restrained, but it’s a credible mission in terms of the number of encounters and engagements and so forth.

  So that pushes you to use the different timescales. And then the boat fits naturally into that because it’s one trip back and forth and it’s, roughly, a day.

  JONATHAN It speaks to the idea that the
human mind takes one tiny perilous moment and expands it.

  CHRISTOPHER Yes.

  JONATHAN And then, for the soldiers on the beach, it’s this week-long experience. That is equally extreme and I think cinema can speak uniquely to that.

  CHRISTOPHER It can. It’s what I dealt with in Memento. It’s the scaling of timelines, and cinema is very good at being able to do that. I think of that as a very modern approach, for whatever reason. It’s been in literature forever, so it’s not modern, but in movies it feels the way we address the modern world. To make you look at it in a different way. And I really wanted to do that with this because I don’t want people to be able to look at the subject matter at a remove. People might say, well if you tell a linear story, can’t people tap into that better? Well, no – people put it in a box. They look at the uniforms and they put it in a World War Two box. I want them to keep looking at the imagery, to keep feeling like they’re in the cockpit, or going, why are we on this tiny boat – all of those things and points of view. I think an aggressively modern storytelling approach wakes that up. jonathan Yeah.

  CHRISTOPHER And the editing rhythm on this one was different as well. I’m used to just stuffing things tighter and tighter into the box, but this was about letting things breathe. Which, actually, was a follow-on from Interstellar because Interstellar was a film where, when we tried our usual tricks to tighten the rhythms we looked at the film and it had damaged the movie greatly, because the film had to breathe in certain ways. You had to be able to experience the images – which is one of the reasons I wanted to have a much shorter script for Dunkirk. With Interstellar it was tricky because there was just no way to get the film away from that three hour mark – I mean 2:49, or whatever it was. It was never going to come down to two and a half hours. It was never going to be a sort of ordinary-size film. But, with this film, it was very important to me that it be lean and stripped down in its story so that the images could breathe a bit. You can experience those things, but still have a manageable size of film.