How Christopher Nolan Made Dunkirk, "One of the Best War Films Ever"

Nolan brings what he is known for — a narrative that breaks time apart, an immersive visual experience — to the war film.

Twenty-two years ago, the British director Christopher Nolan and his wife, Emma Thomas, sailed across the English Channel to Dunkirk, a port in northeastern France near the Belgian border. They were retracing the route hundreds of British boats had taken during the evacuation of Dunkirk in World War II.

In May 1940, after Nazi Germany broke through France's Maginot Line and outflanked the Allies, 400,000 British and French troops fell back to the beaches of Dunkirk. Home was 26 miles away and out of reach. The tidal shallows there are only 21 feet deep, too shallow for British naval ships to dock. But there was still hope: civilian boats were called in to help. A small fleet of fishing boats, ferries, yachts and lifeboats set out from the south coast of England and, in 10 days, carried 340,000 soldiers out.

That crossing left a deep mark on the young, then-unknown director. The weather was harsh, the journey dangerous, the currents fast — and crossing the Channel in wartime would have been harder still. That was when he first thought of making a film about it.

The film, Dunkirk, did not reach audiences until 2017. The wait of more than two decades appears to have paid off: since it opened in North America and Britain in mid-July, it has been one of the films people most want to see in a theater this summer. Reviews have been full of praise, and some critics call it one of the best war films ever made.

On September 1, Chinese audiences will finally see Dunkirk in theaters. On an earlier promotional trip to Beijing, Nolan talked with media outlets including QDaily about the goals he set himself during the production, and the problems he ran into.

He started with why he had "put off" the film for 20 years: back then it was simply too hard, and he wasn't sure he could handle scenes on that scale. "A film this size involves hundreds of thousands of people, hundreds of ships, hundreds of fighter planes. As a director, you need enough experience to tell a story that big."

"Ten years ago I didn't have the confidence. Now I do. For a British audience, if this film can only be made once — if I only get one chance in my career to make it — then it has to be made well."

Since the early 2000s, Nolan has accumulated a deep store of production experience, turning out one blockbuster after another, each of them a signature work: the Batman trilogy, Inception, Interstellar. By his own tastes, he may be one of the directors who fits best with a commercial system that chases maximum narrative tension, and the results have been encouraging — audiences and Hollywood studios alike have become his followers.

But nothing in Nolan's body of work had been adapted from real history the way Dunkirk was. That was the first challenge he faced.

He prepared the way a documentary filmmaker would, doing a great deal of research and interviewing alongside his historical consultant Joshua Levine, author of Forgotten Voices of Dunkirk.

"When you film a real historical event, you come up against the weight of that event and that historical fact very early on," Nolan said in Beijing. "To me the history itself is fascinating, so you can't film it casually. You look at people's oral accounts of it, and I met many people who lived through it."

"That sobers you up fast — these questions are far larger than filmmaking or entertainment, so you feel a responsibility. The choices you make in the film, the method you use to show these facts, come down to showing human nature, and that is the kind of conflict you're dealing with." "So once we had decided to make this film, every decision we made was aimed at a balance: giving the audience the drama of the event, conveying not only the true feel of the history but also how different people lived through it."

It is no surprise that once Nolan got down to the writing, he knew exactly what he did not want: Dunkirk was not going to be a "traditional war film." By "traditional" he meant large battle scenes and a grand thesis about military strategy, politics and the course of the world.

He wanted audiences to follow a protagonist into a world of suspense in Dunkirk, as they had in his earlier films. He calls Dunkirk "a survival story, a suspense thriller." "I wanted to tell this story in a very intimate way, so I wanted the audience to feel real suspense and real tension, rather than sitting through a history lesson or a politics lecture."

To get that intimacy and tension, Nolan at one point considered working without a script at all and shooting the whole film improvised. He wanted to subtract, formally, in order to push the atmosphere to an extreme: let the actors follow the real locations, genuinely return to what soldiers went through in 1940, without much complicated plotting or dialogue.

The outlandish idea was vetoed by his producer and wife, Emma Thomas. Emma thought that working without a script would leave a large commercial crew with too much it could not control, and that it was not practical.

In 2015, Nolan finished a 76-page script. It still looked "not very Nolan" — barely half the length of his usual work. That was because it had so little dialogue; it was built almost entirely out of an intricate narrative structure.

For Nolan's fans, breaking with ordinary chronology is one of his signatures.

He admits he is fascinated by "the sense of time." "I believe in relativity, but what interests me is the relationship between storytelling and time in film. In all my films I want the audience to take part in that — to think about and feel the idea of time."

Memento, the 2000 film that made his name, follows a man with no short-term memory as he hunts his wife's killer. It starts at the end and uses black-and-white and color to separate past from present; if you number the sequence 1 through 10, the film runs 10-1-9-2-8-3…… Producer Jennifer Todd said: "Memento is a film with a deep sense of human nature, but part of why the material worked so well is that it adds a lot of complexity for you to think through."

Nolan does not have the most advanced ideas. His weaker rendering of human warmth, set against his command of narrative, has always been an obvious point of contention.

In Nolan's earlier films, the butterfly-effect chain of dramatic consequences usually does not get going until the final third, after a great deal of setup. Dunkirk drops into that chain reaction from the first minute.

At its most basic, Dunkirk cuts between three vantage points — sea, land and air. And the three have different timelines.

The land story covers a week: young soldiers trapped for seven days, pushed to the limits of body and mind.

The escape by sea covers a single day: an old boat owner, played by Mark Rylance, steers the fishing boat Moonstone and picks up a downed pilot and soldiers from a minesweeper hit by German bombers.

The air story covers one hour, in which each round of the life-or-death fighting between Tom Hardy, Jack Lowden and the German planes decides whether the men on land and at sea can get out.

Nolan says the story itself was written around a principle from music: the "endlessly rising scale," or Shepard tone. (The same principle went into the Batpod's sound in The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises.) The pitch always seems to climb and yet never leaves its range. The effect is the illusion of a tone rising without end, a spiral. Nolan wrote his script on the same principle, with the three storylines constantly braided together so that the tension keeps building.

Nolan had no interest in the political situation, or in the battle plans of the men at the top. "I didn't much want to shoot generals sitting in a conference room pointing at maps." Because he did not want to get stuck in politics, the film leaves out Winston Churchill entirely, and every senior commander with him.

He wanted the subjective viewpoints of the three protagonists, at sea, on land and in the air, to pull the audience in: "You are the one running for your life on the beach with the soldiers. You are the one on the civilian boat going out on the rescue. You are also the one in the cockpit of a Spitfire, fighting the enemy in the sky to the death."

Before they signed the production deal with Warner Bros., Nolan and Thomas had already settled on several key crew members, including cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, who shot Interstellar. They scouted Dunkirk and decided to film there whatever trouble it caused the logistics department. The crew did run into a lot: bad weather, a rough, windy sea, and the building of "the mole" — a narrow wooden breakwater a kilometer long, running unsteadily out into the cold water of the Channel.

"The beach at Dunkirk is a strange place," Thomas said. "But it was probably the best choice. We looked at other options, but it was clear it would be very hard to fully reproduce the scene we needed anywhere else."

Meanwhile the talks with Hollywood were going on. Word got out in 2016 that Nolan had signed a record deal with Warner Bros.: a $20 million directing fee plus a cut of the box office as high as 20%. The last time a Hollywood director got terms like that was Peter Jackson on King Kong.

Warner's indulgence came out of the happy market experience of the earlier films — the Batman series, Inception, Interstellar. It also let Nolan meet a goal he had set himself long before: to take money from an American studio and make a thoroughly British film.

The cast is entirely British. Dunkirk cost $100 million to produce. It uses few A-list stars: apart from Tom Hardy, who plays a pilot whose face is hidden except for his eyes almost the whole way through, Nolan filled the important parts with young British newcomers. Fionn Whitehead, who plays the central role in the land story, was born in 1997 and was working in a London coffee shop before he was cast. Nolan also picked the pop star Harry Styles, formerly of One Direction.

Nolan wanted to avoid a Hollywood casting habit: "There's a tradition in Hollywood films where actors around 30 play much younger characters, but I wanted actors who were the age of the characters. When I read the primary sources on Dunkirk, one thing hit me hard: how young these soldiers were, and how little of the world they had seen. That feeling matters."

After four months of pre-production, casting included, Dunkirk began shooting in May 2016. The shoot ran three months.

Nolan used real locations as far as he could, putting a thousand extras on screen at once. The Spitfires and warships in the film were all rebuilt from genuine antiques; the crew tracked down real civilian boats that had taken part in the evacuation. At its peak the set had more than 60 real boats.

This is another mark of a Nolan film: he avoids digital and CGI effects where he can, and prefers to catch real action in the lens. On set the visual effects team watched the camera feed constantly, to make sure the real images were being caught on film.

"My feeling is that when you film a historical event, the photographic language and the shots you use have to be true," he said, "so that you feel you are there, so you can smell it, hear it, see what's around you."

The most important tool for producing that feeling was, once again, the IMAX camera technology Nolan loves.

IMAX stands for Image MAXimum: a projection system that can show a film at a larger size and higher resolution than a conventional print. Over the past decade or so, as digital cinematography has gradually replaced film, the Canada-based company has remained one of the few offering directors and producers both shooting and projection on film.

Nolan was the first director to shoot a film's main footage — The Dark Knight — with IMAX cameras. He particularly likes the full-frame image an IMAX camera produces: the audience sees the frame open up vertically from its usual flat shape into something close to a square, with more in it, filling nearly your whole field of view, so that you almost feel you are inside it.

For Dunkirk he shot more of the film on IMAX and 65mm large-format stock than ever before, 75% of it. "I'd never done this before," he confirmed, "but Dunkirk has such a huge story structure that it needed an enormous canvas."

He is famously fixated on the texture of film stock. "If you want a very real feeling in a film rather than a stylized one, then for me shooting on film is the best way to get it — the color, the clarity and so on are very true. For me it has a very particular quality; it can show the world as I see it. So it feels like the right technology for this film."

The scene in which a fighter plane goes into the water was shot for real. The crew built a replica Spitfire and actually ditched it. To get the shot, they strapped an IMAX camera to the plane.

Jack Lowden, who plays a pilot and flew the plane himself during the shoot, remembers how wild it got: "I flew the fighter across the English Channel, and they mounted the IMAX camera on the wing, following me as I flew and dived over the Channel."

The one drawback is that IMAX cameras are too noisy, so every scene in the film with dialogue was shot on a different format. Nolan says he took a great deal from the French director Robert Bresson and from a range of silent films of the early 20th century.

The score could make up for the missing dialogue.

The music for Dunkirk was written by Hans Zimmer, who has worked with Nolan many times. "I wanted the score written on the mathematical principle of the 'endlessly rising scale' too," Nolan said. "Early on I sent Hans a recording I'd made of a watch ticking, and gradually that sound became specific sound effects, and then became music in the final cut. So it's a complete integration of music, sound design and image, which I'd never managed before."

You can hear that ticking-watch effect in the trailer below.

Dunkirk trailer

The film premiered at the Odeon Leicester Square in London on July 13, 2017. On July 21 it opened wide in North America, Europe and elsewhere, including 70mm prints at 125 theaters. (Chinese audiences, unfortunately, will not have an IMAX 70mm option.) By the end of August, Dunkirk had taken $170 million in North America and $410 million worldwide, not counting China and Japan, which open in September. It holds a 93% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

The immersion Nolan worked so stubbornly to build is why the film succeeded. Mick LaSalle, the film critic at the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote: "This is one of the best war movies ever made, distinct in look, in craft and in the effect it has on an audience. There is a kind of movie — there are very few of them — that can lift you out of your surroundings and immerse you completely in another experience."

On what a director means to the film business, Nolan said: "This industry, which I see as something like an industrial process, tries to make filmmaking as impersonal as possible, because that makes it a more predictable economic model. But honestly, thank goodness, that has never worked on directors — at least not for long. On set the director comes closest to being all-powerful; the director is the creative force driving the whole film forward."

Images from film stills.