Dunkirk

by Joshua Levine

  Astonishingly, just weeks after the first, a second chaotic retreat to the coast took place, again involving the abandonment of supplies, and ending in a further call for ships and boats. It also led to the greatest single maritime disaster in British history, as the Cunard liner Lancastria, bringing over 6,000 people back to England, was sunk by German aircraft as she left St Nazaire. Up to 4,000 men, women and children died, most of them drowned. Churchill refused to allow news of the Lancastria’s sinking to be released; the press had published enough bad news that day, he believed. Operation Ariel (the code name for the evacuation of the 2nd BEF) brought huge numbers of Allied troops to Britain.

  On 22 June, France signed an armistice with Germany. The signing took place in the same railway carriage, in the same clearing near Compiègne, as the armistice of 1918. Hitler wanted his revenge, he wanted to humiliate the French, even if that meant ripping an old railway carriage from the wall of a museum and transporting it into a field.

  Reporting from Berlin on 14 June, American journalist William Shirer noted that diners crowded around a loudspeaker in his hotel bar as news of the Germans’ entry into Paris was announced. They smiled and seemed happy. But there was no undue excitement, and they all returned to their tables to carry on eating. The next morning the Nazi Party newspaper, Volkische Beobachter, reported: ‘Paris was a city of frivolity and corruption, of democracy and capitalism, where Jews had entry to the court, and niggers to the salons. That Paris will never rise again.’

  Shirer arrived in Paris three days later to find the streets deserted and the shops closed. At night, the streets he remembered as being full of laughter and music were dark and empty. But there were sightseers. Every German soldier seemed to carry a camera, and they acted like naïve tourists. ‘I saw them by the thousands today, photographing Notre-Dame, the Arc de Triomphe, the Invalides.’

  The majority of French troops who had arrived in Britain as a result of Dynamo and Ariel, meanwhile, chose to return to France. One of those who stayed was Leon Wilson. Evacuated to Dover at the beginning of June, Wilson had been held at White City Stadium until he changed his name and joined the British Army. Stationed in Wiltshire, he was sent to a children’s school where he sat by the door almost every day learning English. ‘I didn’t take long until I started talking,’ he says, ‘and after a while I could speak quite well.’

  On a break from school, Wilson attended a dance at the Astoria on Tottenham Court Road. There were more women than men present, and he noticed ‘one gorgeous young lady, very little, about five foot, but fantastic’. He asked her to dance, and at the end of the evening, walked her towards Hyde Park, where he tried to kiss her. This was how he met his wife.

  In the meantime, he had begun training at various locations around England, and was sent to Egypt in 1943 as a lance bombardier. Months later, he was transferred to the Intelligence Corps, with whom he went to Italy. In August 1944, he arrived in his native city of Paris just two days after its liberation. He went straight to his old family home at 8 Rue des Bois, 19th Arrondissement. But Wilson’s family was Jewish, and much had changed in the city since he had been there last:

  I rang the bell. I walked into the concierge, and when she saw me, she fainted. She thought I was dead! And I was in a British uniform! After a couple of minutes, I said I wanted to go up to see my parents, as I said I didn’t know what had happened to my family. And of course, while I was talking, somebody probably heard me, and they went up to the First Floor, and they alerted the people who lived there now. I went up there and I saw a plastic swastika on the right hand side. I knocked – the lady was crying and three or four kids were crying. People were shouting in the street, ‘Why don’t you arrest them?’

  The new occupants had been placed in the apartment by the Nazis, but Wilson was not interested in them. He only wanted to find his own family. For several days he searched, but learned nothing. He went to the family’s old factory on Rue Belleville, to find it closed. In the end, he returned to the apartment and gave the concierge his address in London.

  After a long wait, news arrived that his father and one brother had shown up in Paris. They had survived the camps together. But his mother, his grandmother and his other three brothers (the youngest of whom was only two years old) had died in Buchenwald.

  Two weeks after he heard the news, Wilson’s father came to London – without his brother. ‘I’m glad he didn’t come,’ says Wilson, ‘because my father showed me a photo and he was just a skeleton and nothing else.’ His father told him that the camp guards had separated the men and women, but he said little more. ‘I’ve never ever asked my brother what kind of a life he experienced when he was deported,’ says Wilson, ‘because why restart it all over again?’

  Since the end of the war, Leon Wilson has lived in England. But in 1950, he returned to Dunkirk. He wanted to visit a village outside the town where he and his comrades had stopped on the retreat and stolen bicycles from a shop. His bicycle had helped to save his life, but he had long felt guilty for taking it.

  After searching for a while, Wilson found the shop. It was still there. He stood outside for a while. ‘But to be honest, I was a coward,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t go in to say that I was sorry for pinching some of your bicycles. But I was very upset for seeing the place that really saved our lives.’

  Leon Wilson’s life has taken any number of turns since his evacuation from Dunkirk, but it remains the defining event of his life. The same is true for many of those evacuated and taken prisoner. But the importance of Dunkirk spreads beyond those who were there, or even those who can remember it. It is a cultural event, an icon, whose significance has changed over the last seventy-seven years as society has changed. And we are now approaching the point where Dunkirk turns from living memory into history. Soon there will be nobody left who can tell us what it was really like. The politicians, historians and journalists will be able to invoke the story completely freely, whether to confirm a prejudice, further a career, or present it truthfully for its own sake. And it is now that Chris Nolan has chosen to make a survival film, set during the evacuation. I wanted to speak to those involved in making it – to learn what they felt about Dunkirk the historical event, how they approached it as a subject, and how they went about turning it into a film.

  Emma Thomas is Chris Nolan’s producer as well as his wife. She has often brought ideas for movies to him in the past. ‘Ninety-nine per cent of the time,’ she says, ‘he might be intrigued by it but he doesn’t see a way into it for him as a director.’ But this time was different. Emma had been reading about Dunkirk, and she said there hadn’t been a recent film on the subject. ‘He saw the void,’ she says, ‘which made me very happy.’

  Dunkirk is a story that Chris grew up with, and once Emma had reminded him of the story, he began to read around the subject. He closed himself away, just as he had done with Batman, another iconic and beloved institution. ‘Privately, in my own time, I find my feet in terms of the story that I think needs telling,’ he says. He needs to distance himself from pressures and influences.

  But the process of writing the Dunkirk script was an unusual one. ‘I did a lot of historical research, I read many first-hand accounts, which I don’t usually do, whether I’m dealing with real life or not.’ This was because he wanted to understand the mechanics of the event. And then he started on how to tell the story. ‘Once I felt that I had the mechanics of the event in my bones, then I could put the structure together.’

  But he didn’t pitch the idea to a studio immediately. He sat down and wrote the script first. And then he took a long walk. In Dunkirk.

  Chris asked production designer Nathan Crowley to meet him there in August 2015. It seemed the obvious place to start, and nobody had any idea why they were there. Or, indeed, who they were. As Nathan says, ‘If you put Chris in a baseball cap, no one knows who the hell he is.’ But this walk would define the look and feel of the film. Nathan (who has worked with Chris on the Dark Knight films an
d Interstellar) has a wide-ranging job. ‘Anything you see in front of camera, anything physical, the production design team is responsible for it. From location picking, to the way the ships look, or whether the hospital ships have outlooks to the beach, the planes, the mole, the destroyers, half-scale destroyers – we’re responsible for everything. Except for costumes and special effects, we create the world that the film is based in.’

  Nathan and Chris walked from the harbour to Bray Dunes, although they didn’t make it to La Panne. ‘We were a bit tired by then,’ he says. But the walk was essential to their understanding of the film. They tried to study the mole to establish what it was made of. And they soon realised they had to film in Dunkirk. ‘You can’t fake this, it’s unique,’ Nathan says, ‘the tide, the beach, the buildings in the town, the mole itself.’

  But it wasn’t just the atmosphere of the place that they were after. It was also the integrity. ‘We just felt like we should shoot there, it was important.’ And then they started wondering whether they could get real Mark I Spitfires, and any Little Ships that had really taken part. ‘We felt there should be a sort of return. Get some of the original items, rebuild the mole in its original position. It was partly a search for accuracy – but it also seemed the right thing to do. For the movie and for the event.’

  The further they walked the more they learned. ‘Seeing that tide go in and out, the scale of it – you realise it’s a really difficult beach to get off,’ he says. And once they started building, the difficulties piled up. ‘It was difficult to rebuild the mole, and we found it difficult to berth a ship at the rebuilt mole. And when we built our truck pier, that was really difficult too! You really start to understand the task, get a sense of what they had to deal with.’

  Nathan is quick to stress that he and his team weren’t under shell fire, there weren’t any Stukas above them, and the enemy wasn’t attacking the perimeter as they worked. ‘We were just trying to moor boats on the mole. But we learned it’s not simple. The mole wasn’t built for that.’

  This, in a sense, is what occurred to Captain William Tennant late on the night of 27 May 1940, and to many ships’ crews in the days that followed. ‘Recreating these real events gave everyone a taste of what the men went through at the time – and added to the sense of responsibility.’

  The next stage for Chris and Nathan took them back home. ‘I set up a mini-art department in his garage,’ says Nathan. ‘Just me and him. Chris wants to figure out how to make the film before anyone else comes on board.’

  Eventually Chris and Emma put the idea to Warner Bros. ‘We went to them with the script all ready,’ says Emma, ‘and we could say “This is how it’s going to be” and they were very excited about that.’ But Dunkirk is not only an event that’s little known in America. It’s a story of failure, of a military catastrophe. These were two elements likely to challenge any American film company. ‘But I think that the universality of the story, how relatable the dilemmas are, means that everyone can understand that wherever they come from.

  ‘It felt like the right time to do this,’ Emma says, ‘because we’re in a fortunate position.’ The fact is that Chris and Emma have made some hugely successful films, which places them in a strong position with the studio. ‘They tend to give Chris the benefit of the doubt – at the moment!’ says Emma. ‘It was similar with Inception, a totally unconventional film that it would have been hard for anyone else to get made, but Chris was coming off an enormous success. We were in the same position with this, and they got what it was about the story that excited us.’

  So now, with a studio behind them, Chris and Emma assembled their team. They went to Nilo Otero, first assistant director, a man they’ve worked with before, on Inception and Interstellar among other films. Nilo describes his role: ‘I’m like number one on a ship. Chris, as captain, thinks about strategy and overall goals. I make the ship run. That’s the best analogy. I used to have a second assistant director who quoted In Which We Serve a lot, and would say to me, “More cocoa, Number One?”’

  Nilo describes his first task on a film. ‘I get the script and I break it down into its components. For scene one, its description, what’s needed for it and where it’s going to take place.’ He then works out a series of ‘strips’ (they used to be actual cardboard strips; now the process is computerised), each representing a scene or piece of action, and decides how many strips will be shot on each filming day.

  With this breakdown, Nilo and Chris create a provisional schedule – how to get the story on film in the time available. ‘We start horse trading,’ he says. ‘This day is too light, this one is too heavy, and in the process of going through the components as, essentially, individual manufacturing elements, we pound out a schedule.’ And they factor in geography. ‘Where are we going to do this? Where exactly on the beach at Dunkirk? What’s going to be shot in the UK, what’s to be shot on stage in the US, what’s going to be on the sea?’ This was a daunting project for Nilo, who has a passion for history and particularly for the Second World War: ‘I’ve been on the English Channel and it’s a difficult stretch of water. The first miracle of Dunkirk for me is the weather. What made it possible at all was the fact that it was this ridiculous clock-face calm sea – like the Channel never is. It was reasonable for Hitler to believe this evacuation could never succeed, because who would expect you could float across the Channel in a row boat?’

  The team now grew to include, amongst others, set decorator Gary Fettis, costume designer Jeffrey Kurland, special effects coordinator Scott Fisher and props master Drew Petrotta. Each has a specific responsibility, but they work closely together and their roles interconnect. Gary Fettis explains that his team ‘provides all the details – the props and the dressing that define the characters and support the storyline’. There is typically minute attention to detail on a Nolan film; on Interstellar, for example, the young girl was living in a bedroom that had a wall of books, and Gary, Emma and Chris chose every single book on the shelves. But for Dunkirk, the process was a little more organic. ‘The emphasis was on the sweeping panoramic canvas of Dunkirk itself – the beach, the industrial areas, the mole.’ Gary’s primary rule is that nothing should distract. Rather, every detail should serve the story, the director’s vision, the actors’ imaginations. Gary says that Chris didn’t want to push the destruction and carnage of war to a level that would overwhelm. ‘His mandate was to keep it simple and lean. So the challenge for me was how to make a statement in those vast spaces where any military hardware could be easily dwarfed.’

  Jeffrey Kurland and Drew Petrotta, costume and props respectively, work closely together, as what they both do is personal to the film’s characters – how they dress and what they own, handle or use. Drew describes his job: ‘If you have a table in a room and characters are eating dinner, we wouldn’t do the table, but we might do the dishes and the food.’ In a historical setting such as Dunkirk, he must stay as close to what he discovers in his research as possible. ‘And in a military movie like this,’ he says, ‘it’s pretty much laid out what the guys had. We just had to think about quantities and that depended on how many people, and how much money, we were going to have.’

  While Jeffrey had to organise the making of hundreds of costumes, even to the extent of building looms to weave accurate period fabric for the uniforms, so far as Drew’s department was concerned ‘there was not a lot of manufacturing to be done, other than some rubber guns and life jackets.’ Drew found real life jackets from the period, in different styles, and showed them to Chris who picked his favourite. ‘Then we recreated them as new.’

  For Jeffrey’s department, using original costumes was out of the question. ‘With the wear the uniforms had to take, in and out of the water, blasted with sand, they would have fallen apart. It would have been totally impractical.’ Drew, however, could use original items. ‘We had some great binoculars that we used for a colonel on the mole – actual World War Two binoculars. We had some actual navigati
on tools too. And some of the rifles were real, from the period.’ His department also recreated the leaflets used in the opening moments of the film. ‘We showed some copies of the original leaflets to Nathan and Chris. Then they designed their own version – close to the real one, but with some things, like colours, augmented to help them tell a story on film.’ He laughs. ‘And then we made five thousand of them.’

  Jeffrey and Drew also work closely with Scott Fisher on special effects. Scott is responsible for all the physical effects except those created in post-production through computer graphics. As technology advances, so Scott’s department evolves – but not in its dealings with Chris.

  ‘Chris wants to get as much stuff in camera as he can and then use CGI to fix the few things that you don’t get,’ says Scott. ‘For him, everything is traditional.’ Which means that Scott takes a different approach on a Nolan movie. ‘I’ll read a script of his very differently than I will for another director. With other directors, you can kind of assume that things will get done with CGI, but you can never make that assumption with Chris.’ It means that Scott has to combine traditional methods with new. ‘The basic stuff is tried and true. Then I use whatever technology I can to achieve what we’re trying to get.’ Recreating bomb explosions, for example, is very traditional and something that Scott has a lot of experience with.

  Scott thinks CGI can change how a film feels to an audience. ‘It can be so heavy when it’s used in whole sequences,’ he says. ‘Everyone knows those movies – a computer-generated world has a very distinctive look. CGI’s a fantastic tool to go back and remove the wires from the stunt guy when he’s getting pulled out of an explosion, or if we’re missing a boat that should be there. But we have all these real assets in the shot – full-size ships, the mole, all the extras – that if we just add stuff in the back of the frame, it’s much less noticeable. It’s just cleaning up.’

  One of the big advantages with shooting for real is the genuine impact the event can have on an actor’s performance. ‘Something happens to the reactions,’ Scott says. ‘With Interstellar, Chris wanted the robot right there on set delivering lines and interacting with the actor, otherwise that actor would be staring at a green screen, faking an eye line and pretending to interact.’ This is even more true, he thinks, when filming the impact of a bullet, or an explosion. The effects may be stage managed and completely safe, but the reactions are visceral. ‘I’ve been on shows where things were meant to be done with CGI, and we’ll stage something simple like a little air mortar, just for a reaction, and you’ll see a light go on in a director. They’re like “Whoa! That reaction was real!” So you start doing more and more of it.’