Dunkirk

by Joshua Levine

  One of the biggest sets for Gary to dress was the interior of a destroyer. This set was built on stage in Los Angeles, in a huge water tank. His assistants sourced components for the interior from the largest ship-wrecking yard in the United States. ‘It’s in Texas,’ says Gary. ‘They brought back all these parts, doors and valves, bunks. And it’s only a page and a half of script, but it’s a key scene.’ Then he had to dress the interior of a trawler with fishing gear. ‘But with the exteriors, on a war movie, there were a lot of sand bags, and artillery, ammunition crates, trucks and parts.’

  Gary had also to recreate the human carnage. ‘We used a lot of dummies for long shots. Chris would lay actors and extras closer to camera.’ Gary confounded Chris at one point; he had dressed the beach for the first reveal, near Malo-les-Bains, as Tommy first arrives. ‘We had dressed forty trucks and ammunition crates from the point of view of the camera in the dunes. To stretch it out, we used a forced perspective. We had a walkie-talkie so we could tell the person on the beach, “Move this, move that” until we got it just right. When Chris pulled up in his car, he walked straight to me, like a man on a mission. He looked at the beach and what we had dressed and he said, “When I was driving down the beach just now, I saw this stuff spread out and it meant nothing. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. It looked sporadic. But now I understand – you made it work for the camera.”’ Gary says this is how you compose a frame. ‘You take a position, and you start stacking things and spreading them out. You can cheat with things fifty feet apart, but from the camera’s angle they look like they are closer. It makes your eye feel there’s more there. We did that several times in different areas to get the bang for the buck.’

  Scott was responsible for organising the sinking of ships, explosions and shootings. He used more high-yield explosives on this movie than normal. ‘All those World War Two explosions have such a distinctive look, you need a lot of explosive to replicate that. We used those more in the distance and as we got nearer to the actors, we used air mortars so we could be right on them and still be safe.’ Air mortars are tanks of air connected to high-pressure air guns that blow the surface of sand or water. ‘It’s very repeatable,’ says Scott, and being able to reset an effect is a crucial part of his work. ‘It’s safe so you can have a stunt man or actor in close proximity, we can test it and work in a little closer, and there’s no worry of anything dangerous hitting anyone.’

  The men being blown through the air work with Tom Struthers, in charge of stunts. ‘Tom has a crane with a wire rig. He can ratchet the stunt man away incredibly fast, as if it’s the power of the explosion. But it’s his rig doing all the work and he’s in charge of them.’ Back in the States, on set, there were ‘dump tanks’ filled with water to film both the sinking of interior holds and the exterior portion of a ship that could roll over by about ninety degrees and sink to twenty-five feet.

  Scott had to create the effect of bullets striking the sides of boats. This was a challenge, as Chris wanted bullets to blast through the trawler’s sides and water to enter through the holes while sunlight came through above the water’s surface. It was a complex effect. Scott’s team drilled holes in the side of the boat and filled them with disguised squibs that could be blown out on cue. Behind the wall, they built a clear tank that they filled with water, and behind that they carefully positioned lights.

  Squibs are also used to create the effect of a man being shot. ‘They are really tiny,’ says Scott, ‘just for the movie industry. You always want to have as much continuous action as you can, so we link the squibs to remote control devices. At the start of the movie, there are guys running down the street, they get shot, they go down, they continue on, climb over a wall, then bullets hit the wall.’ The squib is shielded from the actor’s skin and packed with fake blood or red dust, and it has enough power to blow through the material of their shirt. ‘You can trigger it remotely, fifty, sixty feet away if you want, so you can be behind camera when the thing goes off – or two or three – however many you want on a person.’

  Dealing with the actors and extras were Nilo and his team of assistant directors. ‘You’re painting with people,’ he says. ‘Chris is loath to use CGI, so there’s a lot of art involved on set, a lot of fooling the eye.’ On the biggest crowd days, there were 1,380 extras. ‘And they are all human beings,’ Nilo says, ‘they wander off.’ He remembers saying, in a production meeting with other department heads, ‘You may think we’re doing Dunkirk but to me this is two hundred pairs of pants!’ ‘What I meant was, with our budget we had two hundred pairs of correct British Expeditionary Force pants. In order to be close up, in other words to see people, we could use two hundred guys at any given time. We have to pay a man to attend a costume fitting for this uniform, and they only had enough money to do two fittings each. So this is a movie about vast numbers of people and we have two hundred pairs of pants, two fittings each – you’re going to have the same four hundred guys in front of the camera all the time – you’re going to see the same faces too often! I just kept repeating this, in one context or another, “This is two hundred pairs of pants, guys. That’s the movie we’re making.”’

  Nathan Crowley and his production team created ‘fake men’, a row of soldiers painted onto canvas that could be rolled out and pinned in position with stakes in the ground, to fill the frame. ‘If you have a living, moving person at either end,’ says Nilo, ‘in the middle and in front or behind it – that changes everything visually. Because it’s all about fooling the eye. It’s all about how people perceive things.’ Nilo remembers how the beach ‘ate’ men. ‘It was daunting. The scale just swallowed them. And when you look at the pictures of the real event, the sheer density of people, especially on the boats, we just couldn’t do that safely. Even if we’d had the people, we couldn’t do it safely.’ This made him think about the realities of war. ‘You can’t do what people do in war. You can’t fly aeroplanes the way they flew them, you can’t operate ships the way they operated them. You can’t have men flinging themselves to the ground the way they did, because it’s dangerous. It turns out war is a very dangerous thing! And the only reason people do these incredibly dangerous and risky things, is because the alternative is being killed.’ Certain things, in other words, can never be entirely recreated.

  The size of the beach created practical, as well as artistic, difficulties. ‘The scale is hard to register on film,’ says Chris. ‘Walking to scout the various locations, you can walk seven or eight miles just to get to the next location along.’ This had to be made clear to the team of assistant directors responsible for ensuring that the cast and supporting artists were where they needed to be in good time. ‘I had to explain to the assistant directors that the fact you could see the mole from every point along the beach didn’t really make the beach one location. To go from where we were shooting one scene to the base of the mole, for example, was what we call a “company move”. Everybody had to be put in vehicles, driven up onto the roads and into the town to come back out. So the simple geography of a beach setting is paradoxical, because it feels like everything is close and should be in one place, but it’s not.’ This made Chris focus on the 1940 Dunkirk experience: ‘Entire little communities, temporary villages of people on the beach appearing and forming during the evacuation. Then people just disappearing, individuals disappearing.’

  Chris has described the characters in this film as ‘present tense’, since they do not have pasts and back stories, and this meant that fine character differentiation was something for Jeffrey Kurland to work up in his costume design. ‘It is my job to give a director as much detail and reality as possible,’ he says, ‘then he can do with it as he feels best.’

  Jeffrey started by researching the uniforms for historical accuracy. Then he thought about the characters as individuals – who these boys were, their ages, their experience. ‘I tried to humanise them,’ he says. But, of course, by the time they had made it to the beach, a lot of the soldiers
had been retreating for a fortnight. Their uniforms were dishevelled, kit had been discarded, weapons lost. This gave Jeffrey room for character. ‘There’s an ease to the character of Tommy, reflected in the way he wears his uniform. And that’s different to the way that Alex wears his – he’s more of a “tough”, for want of a better word.’ And then there’s a character who wears an ill-fitting uniform. This is not accidental. It is part of the story-telling – and the essence of Jeffrey’s job.

  Casting the film, meanwhile, was an unusual process because it required unknowns for the younger characters. ‘Our casting directors, John Papsidera and Toby Whale, put actors’ auditions on tape, and we looked at that material,’ says Emma. ‘Then Chris met in person with some of the actors he liked.’ Emma found putting together the ensemble for this film to be one of her most interesting casting experiences. She has a degree in history, the subject has always fascinated her, and she felt as though ‘we were bringing history to life with this film, with its rich tapestry of characters and faces.’ But meeting these young actors brought home to her one of the realities of Dunkirk. ‘It was shocking to me how young everybody was. When we met Fionn Whitehead, he’s wise beyond his years and incredibly mature, but he’s very young, he’s only four years older than my oldest child, and it really made it clear to me how young some of these people were, caught up in these terrifying events.’

  As well as the newcomers, there are some very experienced actors in the cast – Kenneth Branagh and Mark Rylance, to name two. There’s a sense that these men play the reliable old warriors, while the newcomers play the untested young kids of the BEF. Emma acknowledges the parallel. However, although one actor in the film may be making his movie debut, he is currently one of the most famous young men on the planet: Harry Styles. Was it a risk to cast someone so well known, and yet such an unknown quantity? ‘It didn’t feel risky at all,’ says Emma, ‘because he auditioned the same way everyone else did. Over the course of days of coming back to audition, giving it his best, Harry was absolutely right for the part, and it didn’t feel any more a risk casting him than it did casting anyone else.’ Emma appreciates that his fame might get in the way for some: ‘there’s always the risk that people can’t get past the persona, but the truth is he’s a great actor. I think when you watch him in the movie he utterly sucks you in. He’s not Harry Styles any more, in the same way that Fionn isn’t Fionn Whitehead any more – he’s Tommy.’

  For Nilo Otero, the chance to work on a film set during Operation Dynamo was the chance to indulge his interest in this period of history. Or as Chris put it in his thank-you note: ‘At last you got a chance to put some of your arcane knowledge to good use.’ Nilo says, ‘I’ve been a distant student of war my whole life somehow.’ When he first did a breakdown of Chris’s script, it was brought across the US and hand-delivered by Andy Thompson. The script was codenamed ‘Bodega Bay’, as Chris is very protective of his scripts.

  ‘I’m from San Francisco,’ says Nilo, ‘so I just ran with that. And it became the Germans invading northern California. If I’d been captured with my schedule and interrogated, that’s what it would have looked like.’

  Nilo scheduled twenty-five days of filming on the beach. They finished in twenty-three. ‘I’ve done a lot of military movies,’ he says, ‘and you often have serving officers acting as advisors, and for the first couple of days they laugh at you. But after four or five days, they sidle over to me and say, “This is a lot like what we do.”’ Nilo is aware of the crucial difference between war and war films, but he points out the similarities. ‘You have a working unit of people who go out and perform a very specific job, in varying circumstances and environments. This unit must be flexible enough to adapt but be specific to what you’re doing that particular day.’ The shooting days on the beach were eleven hours long, with everyone exposed to the weather. They had to wear goggles to protect their eyes from the sand. ‘There aren’t many jobs now where you are absolutely at the mercy of the elements,’ he says, ‘and with two tides a day, that beach appears and disappears. I was astonished because the photos show vast numbers of men on the beach – well, let me tell you, that beach disappears! And all those guys had to keep moving back and forth.’

  Nilo is probably, in the last seventy-five years, the man who has come closest to understanding how to organise an evacuation from Dunkirk; he has dealt with large numbers of people, the tides, the weather, limited resources, the challenge of bringing ships into the mole and onto the beaches, the truck piers – the list goes on. He was in no danger of dying, but he was under pressure to work within a time frame, effectively and safely. And while he would be far too modest to mention the names Tennant, Ramsay or Wake-Walker, his job was not entirely disimilar to theirs. In effect, he’s trying to coordinate thousands of people. ‘I am a field guy,’ he says, ‘and I depend on good staff work. Which is what the production manager and line producers do. I schedule the things in micro time, as it were. It’s that minute-to-minute working your way through the day, that’s what I do. And in the process of that, I run a film set.’

  Nilo is interesting when he discusses the meritocracy that formed at Dunkirk as units were broken up and men had to manage their own survival. It is reflected, he believes, in the microcosm of a film set, which also has its own natural order. His authority on set is granted to him for the same reasons soldiers follow leaders. ‘You obey your officer because he’s the guy who’s going to save you. You don’t obey him because you’re afraid of him. At Dunkirk, the environment was one of total chaos and everything was unknown – who knows if enough ships are going to come? It’s absolute uncertainty and therefore acting with an interest in the future is very difficult to do. I’ve worked with directors who come to me the first week and say, “Should we fire somebody just to show that we’re serious here?” People do that! And it’s foolish! You don’t flog your way to a good ship. You lead by example.’

  Nilo believes that in real combat, when everybody has a gun, the army becomes fiercely democratic. ‘Anyone who thinks he can put people’s lives at risk because of the insignia on his hat – that guy’s going to get shot in the back of the head.’ When he thinks about how the evacuation was conducted, he is in awe of the BEF and the Royal Navy. ‘I’m so impressed it didn’t turn into horrible chaos. It’s an example of discipline, but not the discipline of the army in peacetime. It’s the discipline of circumstance.

  ‘Chris commands a film like no director I’ve ever worked with,’ Nilo says. ‘He’s the best, he really is. He knows his material inside and out, he has a very clear idea of what he wants.’ Even though their relationship is that of captain and number one, Nilo offers suggestions to Chris if he thinks they’re useful. ‘A lot of assistant directors are really just assistant producers, they worry about a schedule and a budget. I pride myself on actually being an assistant director. I’ve been at this a while and I know the job of directing is a lonely one because only the director is worrying about the story. Chris and I trust each other, and he understands that you can’t micro-manage making a film. Eventually you’re going to be standing there with some actors and a cameraman and it’s going to be a collective process.’ He acknowledges that ultimately, it’s Chris’s vision that everyone is there to serve. ‘But if you want things to be exactly the way you want them,’ he says, ‘go paint. Chris has as certain and focused a cinematic vision as anybody I’ve ever worked with and at the same time, he can experience what is going on in the moment and adapt that to what he originally desired, in a way that’s just a joy. It’s wonderful to be able to contribute occasionally. And he is open to it. Or he’ll just say, “No, never mind that.”’

  Gary Fettis says, ‘Chris just loves movie-making. He’s in love with movies. And this movie wasn’t easy and there were times when he thought he had a particular series of boats and then all of a sudden found out, “Well, I can’t have those two, because the harbour isn’t dressed”, or whatever it was. And he looks like this kid that’s just s
ad for a moment. Five minutes later, he’s re-directing, saying “How do we solve this, how do we . . .” He’s moving forward. And you have to jump, you have to be on your game to keep up with him.’

  Even though this is a multi-million-dollar film, as Emma notes, ‘There is never enough money. We actually made this film for a lot less than people will realise when they see it.’ When Chris and Emma pitched the script to the studio, they simultaneously asked for the amount of money they needed – and it was significantly less than their previous films. ‘We thought the studio would go for that. But it meant we definitely had to be imaginative. It’s a vast story and scope, and we had to do an awful lot for the money we had and we had to be clever about how we scheduled things and shot things. We had to be incredibly efficient.’ Emma believes having such an accomplished and resourceful team made a huge difference, but also that financial limitations can be creative. ‘Setting yourself a challenge like that, in some ways, it frees you to come up with interesting ideas that you wouldn’t have if you could just write a cheque.’

  The very first films Emma and Chris made together with a pittance of their own money may seem very different from these movies made for many millions of dollars, ‘but ultimately it’s all the same. On those very small films, we had no money and never enough money. But honestly, you never do, because you’re always trying to push the limits of what you’re able to do within the parameters that you have. And so the experience of making all of those films is remarkably similar.’