Scott also believes that CGI has a sensory and emotional effect on an audience – it can allow them to step back from the film. ‘People’s eyes are trained to it now. It can take you out of the moment because you know it’s not reality based. It changes it in your mind, I think.’ But for Chris and Nathan, the audience has to have an authentic experience, a first-person perspective. It has to be a soldier under fire on the beach, or a Spitfire pilot flying against the Luftwaffe – so anything that allows it to step back is unwelcome. Chris wants the film to have a documentary feel. As Nathan says, ‘We want to make it about being with them.’
The script features three storylines through four elements – land, sea, air and, crucially, time. In many ways, time is the most fundamental. There is a ticking clock running through the whole story which poses relentless questions. Will the men make it away? Will the ships survive? Will the planes run out of fuel? Chris and Nathan worked together on finding defining images for these four elements. Nathan started by making a model of the mole. ‘We realised that it’s a road to nowhere,’ he says. He first thought the defining image would be men sitting around on the seafront, but with more research and as their ideas developed, that changed. ‘There’s nothing new to that image, the public knows it already. It’s not interesting enough. So we were happy to open the film with it and then leave it behind. That was an early decision.’
The film starts with Tommy making his way through the perimeter towards the beach. ‘We defined the town of Dunkirk with the chase through the old, mysterious streets, the low buildings. Then you break onto the seafront, you understand the size of it – and you’ve done it.’ The key image for the land element was ‘the white mole with troops, three men wide, endless helmets as far as you can see, going to nothing, just out into the sea – that’s the desperation of the event. No boats. Just men on the mole. It says “This is the end of the road.” You’ve been chased to the water and there’s one bridge. But it won’t get you to England.’
For the sea, the defining image was of a soldier sitting on the hull of an upturned boat, stranded in the English Channel. The boat is derelict, its broken propeller rocked by the wake of the sea. It’s been bombed, too far from the beach to get back, too far from home to swim. For Nathan, this caught ‘the circular motion of the film, the never-ending Groundhog Day for those soldiers who got off the beach but their ship was sunk, and they had to keep coming back. And here’s this broken soldier sitting on a wreck in the middle of the sea. He’s exhausted, he’s giving up, nothing can save him. The man sitting between a big sky and a big sea.’
This image inspired another decision: ‘It helped us choose IMAX, because it’s such a good format to cover the sky.’ The Little Ships also define the sea element. The film features one in particular, Moonstone, a boat found on Loch Ness. ‘We’re with this small ship for an entire day of the film’s timeline,’ says Nathan. ‘It’s a well-known image but it’s absolutely key – that’s the really human part of the story, the Moonstone.’
For Emma, this is what makes the story so relatable. ‘Any film that is going to appeal to a modern audience has to be a story about humanity,’ she says. ‘You can watch any number of war films and feel distanced from them because you can think “I’m not in the army. I haven’t done military service and never will”, but what differentiates the Dunkirk story is it’s also the story of civilians. It’s the story of everyday heroism. That’s why it’s appealing as a film – soldiers waiting to be rescued and the people on the Little Ships coming across to save them.’ For Chris, civilians willingly going into a war zone is what makes Dunkirk ‘one of the great stories of all time’.
The Spitfire, meanwhile, unites two elements – air and time. Cameras were placed inside the cockpit to capture both a view of the pilot at work and the pilot’s view of the outside world. ‘It was about being with the pilot,’ says Nathan. ‘Rather than always seeing these planes from the outside, we wanted the audience to really experience this piece of machinery. The task was to get cameras on a real plane, which we did, and on the wings, and actually shoot banking over Dunkirk. When you bank over, you see the scale of the event from the plane’s point of view, rather than a “God shot”. It was always about being with them.’
Chris and Nathan flew in a Spitfire themselves, and this informed the film for them. ‘The fuel will only allow you to fly for a short time over Dunkirk, and there are so many other considerations – apart from being attacked by the Luftwaffe – there are so many other things you have to control to make sure you can get there and get back.’ Nathan thinks the challenges for a Spitfire pilot were similar to those of the men on the mole or the Little Ships: ‘It’s time running out, chances running out. People don’t realise how many planes were lost trying to protect that beach.’
As he did his research, Nathan was also struck by the industrial nature of the area. ‘It’s not a quaint seaside town, it’s a big industrial port. No one’s portrayed how industrial it is before. We wanted that in our story, the unromantic modernity of it.’ He says the original mole, built only two years before the event, was an extremely modern structure. ‘This was not about people in deckchairs, it was about this huge industrial area – and a lot of it on fire.’ They chose an area where the oil spills were burning for the Spitfire’s landing. ‘I was very pleased to get that brutalism into our film,’ he says.
Recreating the black smoke that hung over Dunkirk, and guided the RAF from the English coast, was Scott Fisher’s task. He did it by burning diesel, but the city of Dunkirk imposed restrictions. ‘Our permit to create that smoke,’ he says, ‘was based on which direction the wind was blowing because it was so thick. It wasn’t toxic, it was just so dense there were concerns for motorists on nearby roads.’ But the wind is an unreliable cast member. ‘There was a local factory and the whole building started filling up with smoke. They couldn’t work. And another time the smoke went into the town. So there were a few incidents where it was a problem.’ Scott and his team just had to keep working round it, ‘positioning the diesel in different areas until we got the desired effect’. The diesel was passed through a high-pressure pump and lit in a containment reservoir. ‘There were some days when the wind was blowing in a really bad direction and we just couldn’t do it.’
Nathan remembers that one day, foam suddenly appeared on the beach. ‘It was like Doctor Zhivago or something, these guys walking through this foam.’ Utilising such unforeseen moments was all part of making the film. ‘To us, this was how we wanted to tell the Dunkirk stories. The event itself was all about improvisation, organised chaos. There were so many different things happening, so many individual events, there are as many versions of Dunkirk as there were men on the beach. And there were the small ships, the mole, the destroyers, the minesweepers, the planes, Dutch trawlers, thousands of men – it was such an event! The film is all about being thrown into this event visually, not sitting outside it. Chris has these concepts in his mind, then I come in and just help him visualise the whole thing – that’s my job in the first six months.’
There is one last crucial element of the film that is both ever-present and permanently absent – the enemy. Chris understood that there was no personal contact between the soldiers on the beach and the enemy, and he wanted to reflect this in the film. ‘That is the way war is experienced,’ says Nilo Otero. ‘When you talk to old soldiers – they didn’t see the enemy. For one thing, when somebody’s shooting at you, you don’t stick your head up and look! You get in a hole and you stay there. It’s a frightening experience. I think that revelation of mortality is really what the picture’s about. That, and the simple effort to avoid dying.’
For Chris, making the threat faceless frees the event from its geopolitical ramifications – it becomes a timeless story of human survival. He didn’t want to take a classic war film approach because in so many ways, the story of Dunkirk is not the story of a conventional battle. ‘It was death appearing from the sky,’ he says. ‘U-boats
under the Channel that you can’t see. The enemy flying over and rising up through the waves to pick people off, to sink ships.’ The soldiers cannot understand their own predicament, and the audience experiences the same horror. This is why the action never leaves the beach. ‘If you’re continually showing the Germans as Germans and generals in rooms talking about strategy, you are lifting the veil.’ The audience would then be more informed than the soldiers. ‘Standing on a beach, trying to interpret what’s going on, “How do I get out of here? Should I stand in these lines? Should I go into the water?” That’s the experiential reality I want the audience to share. You see herd behaviour, primal, animal behaviour – people standing in lines in the water because they see other people doing it, not because they know there is a boat coming. I think that is fascinating and frightening.’
Emma agrees. ‘The enemy is scarier when you’re not seeing them. You don’t need to see them. It’s such a simple notion, what these people were going through – tanks and soldiers over there, planes above, submarines and mines below – that’s all you need to know really. When you think about Jaws, you don’t need to see the shark to understand the threat of it.’
Rebuilding the mole was one of the first tasks for the production department. Despite research and studying photographs, Nathan felt he hadn’t understood the mole until he got to Dunkirk and saw what is now left of it. ‘The concrete part is still there,’ he says, ‘and we rebuilt about a thousand feet onto the end of it.’ Emma remembers how difficult the process was. ‘The work on the mole was massive and time-consuming. It involved all sorts of work, dredging around the mole, rebuilding. We were incredibly lucky in that the city of Dunkirk were very helpful. They’re very film friendly, it made all the difference.’
Even the process of rebuilding the mole was influenced by how Chris wanted the audience to feel. ‘What had been there in the first place was a mixture of wood and free-cast concrete – those big Xs that you see on all the photos,’ says Nathan. ‘We had so much trouble finding out what it was originally made of. If you took a boat out to the end of the pier, you see that it’s concrete, but people also talked about wood. We decided to build the part we added on out of wood for two reasons: we needed to get it up in a decent amount of time but it was also a cinematic decision. We could have faked concrete using wood but decided not to. Chris and I both thought we didn’t want the audience wondering what we’d done, “What is that made of?” So we decided to play it as wood.’
In the end, they didn’t want to draw the audience’s attention away, to remind them they are in a cinema. So the trademark crosses were made out of enormous twelve-by-twelve timbers, harvested from a local forest. Each beam was milled and pre-cut and had to be put up with steel plate. ‘It was the biggest challenge of the entire film,’ Nathan says, ‘because we were dealing with the tide. There is a three- to four-hour window to put your base plates in and then to crane the structure in place. We built it in sections on the side of the dock, and using a crane barge placed each section. But with only four hours to actually bolt it down, to get it secure from the sea before that tide came in – that was hard.’
During filming, a storm damaged the rebuilt mole and ripped off the wooden walkway on top. ‘The sea is hard out there,’ Nathan says, ‘which we found out. It was a huge worry. Our Warner Brothers engineer said, “This is an incredible structure, stronger than most permanent piers I’ve stood on.” But because it was an open structure, the waves crashed in underneath and punched the boards off.’ Extra boards had been set aside in case of emergency. ‘It was all fixable,’ Nathan says, ‘but it was about getting out there in safe weather and putting them back so we could carry on filming.’
Chris and his crew did not have the miraculous good weather of the evacuation – but they were pleased artistically if not historically. ‘Rough weather looks much better on film,’ says Nathan. ‘Having sun on film is no good even though it was more historically true.’ And the bad weather made it a very difficult beach to work on. ‘We tried hard and we had lots of problems – the mole, the truck pier. And it’s not easy to land a priceless Spitfire on that beach.’
The Spitfire landing on the beach is a crucial moment in the film. Dan Friedkin, a Spitfire owner who flies his own aircraft, was prepared to attempt it and the area was walked many times in order to find the right place to land. The RAF pilots in 1940 discovered that Dunkirk beach made a surprisingly decent landing strip. ‘That tide washes the beach pretty flat, and it’s hard-packed sand, so it’s pretty good,’ says Nathan. ‘The chosen area was cordoned off and the pilot did many “touch and go” practice runs, all of which we filmed.’
Nathan vividly remembers the moment of landing: ‘To see a Spitfire Mark 1 land on Dunkirk beach – incredible.’ But after landing, the aircraft stuck in the soft sand. The tide was coming in, and everyone had to run and help push it out. Suddenly, the Spitfire’s safety became everybody’s concern.
Two major issues were crowding in at once – the relentless twenty-foot tide, and sunset. And this was significant because the pilots had to get back to their airfields before dark. Nathan was at a distance when this happened. ‘I just saw this commotion, people running to the Spitfire. You can push a Spitfire around, you can lift it out with enough people. So a lot of people went down and got it out. It took off and got home before sunset. But I’ll never forget seeing a real Spitfire land on Dunkirk beach.’
As far as the Spitfire’s German counterpart, the Messerschmitt Bf 109, was concerned, Nathan made an artistic decision. ‘I really needed to use the yellow nose of the Messerschmitt,’ he says, ‘even though it’s historically inaccurate. They didn’t have them until August 1940, and Dunkirk happened in May and June.’* But it was a visual consideration. ‘We have to be able to identify them quickly, because if we’re with the pilot and these things are moving so fast, we have to understand who’s who. The obvious thing to do was stick a big yellow nose on the enemy. And also, it looked much better.’ They decided not to specify the Spitfire squadron. Nathan found genuine squadron numbers that hadn’t been used. ‘The numbers on the Spitfire were real. When the war was done, they had spare squadron numbers at the Ministry that hadn’t been used yet. So we had real numbers.’
After rebuilding the mole the next great challenge for Nathan was recreating the truck pier. ‘There’s no account of how to actually build one,’ he says. ‘We tied the trucks together, real, solid truck bases – there were logistical concerns even about that. We had to take the oil out because the city didn’t want any chemicals in the water. But when we towed them into the sea and the tide came in, we realised, “Oh shit, they’re floating!” The first tide that came in, two of them floated off!’ Nathan and his team had to think fast. ‘We got our knives out and stabbed all the tyres before the whole lot went. So it was an enormous learning curve.’ This was pretty much the same learning curve undergone by the Royal Engineers on 30 May 1940. They too had to deflate the tyres – although, back then, the city was in no fit state to issue restrictions on oil pollution. ‘You appreciate it’s not easy building a truck pier,’ says Nathan, ‘there are so many unforeseen details and it’s got to be long enough to reach the tide, which is enormous.’
Nathan was very keen to get hold of HMS Cavalier, a 1943 destroyer, now in dock at Chatham Dockyard. Although not at Dunkirk, she was similar to ships that were, but she couldn’t be brought out of dry dock. The team did get other original ships but they had to disguise any later developments. They also made half-scale destroyers. ‘We have ships that get sunk in the film,’ says Nathan, ‘and we wanted to make sure they had accurate markings. I felt that I needed to make every number you see on a ship, to recreate a ship that was actually there.’
He was also very keen to use original Little Ships if possible – and any paddle steamers that could be found. ‘Our first day walking the beach,’ he remembers, ‘we saw the remains of Crested Eagle out there. Then you go to the end of the mole and at very, very low tide
, you see the remains of Fenella. It was very important to get a Thames paddle steamer because it’s such an oddity to see one moor up. It didn’t have its engines but they towed the Princess Elizabeth out for us.’
Gary Fettis remembers how much work had to be done on the boats to make them historically accurate. ‘There was always so much to do,’ he says. ‘Even for the smaller craft. And then there were the hospital ships, all the Red Cross supplies. We did a lot of re-rigging with rope ladders.’ The amount of work needed led to some interesting collaborations. ‘The big fenders on the ships, they use giant rubber balls nowadays, but back then they were made out of rope, woven in thick hemp. We had to make about ten of them.’ They found a Dunkirk man who had re-rigged a ship for a local museum. ‘He knew how to weave these bumpers. And he employed prison labour to make them. First-time offenders, kids, they weren’t hard-core criminals. I hope the producers know,’ Gary adds, ‘because we saved a lot of money that way.’
Gary also needed a team on the beach, known as ‘set dressers’. ‘I have to be ahead getting the next set ready,’ he says, ‘so I can’t stand around where they’re shooting or I won’t get tomorrow’s work done. So we wanted set dressers, but not having the budget, we found this local hockey team. It was in between their seasons, and they were great – nice, intelligent guys, we gave them direction and they were unbelievable.’ Later on in the shoot, when Gary and his assistant, Brett Smith, were driving through Dunkirk they saw a poster featuring the hockey team. ‘They were like local movie stars! We had no idea. But they took direction so well, and they said it was an experience they’ll never forget.’
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