Dunkirk Read online

  DUNKIRK

  by

  CHRISTOPHER NOLAN

  Storyboards drawn by

  RICHARD BENNETT

  Contents

  Title Page

  Cast and Credits

  Allowing Fate to be Arbitrary

  DUNKIRK

  Screenplay

  Storyboards

  Copyright

  Warner Bros. Pictures

  presentation

  A Syncopy

  production

  A Film by

  CHRISTOPHER NOLAN

  Dunkirk

  FIONN WHITEHEAD

  TOM GLYNN-CARNEY

  JACK LOWDEN

  HARRY STYLES

  ANEURIN BARNARD

  JAMES D’ARCY

  BARRY KEOGHAN

  with

  KENNETH BRANAGH

  CILLIAN MURPHY

  MARK RYLANCE

  and

  TOM HARDY

  Written and Directed by CHRISTOPHER NOLAN

  Produced by EMMA THOMAS, P.G.A.

  Produced by CHRISTOPHER NOLAN, P.G.A.

  Executive Producer JAKE MYERS

  Director of Photography HOYTE VAN HOYTEMA, ASC, FSF, NSC

  Production Designer NATHAN CROWLEY

  Edited by LEE SMITH, ACE

  Music by HANS ZIMMER

  Visual Effects Supervisor ANDREW JACKSON

  Special Effects Supervisor SCOTT FISHER

  Costume Designer JEFFREY KURLAND

  Casting by JOHN PAPSIDERA, CSA

  TOBY WHALE, CDG

  Allowing Fate to be Arbitrary

  A conversation between

  Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan

  JONATHAN NOLAN What made you want to make a war movie?

  CHRISTOPHER NOLAN I never wanted to make a war movie. In a funny sort of way, I don’t see Dunkirk as a war movie at all. I think the reason I was drawn to the story of Dunkirk is because it’s a survival story. I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing what I consider to be a war movie, never having fought in a war.

  You always feel a bit fraudulent as a filmmaker. I would feel truly fraudulent. Whereas a survival story, I can tap into that emotion. Dunkirk as a survival story, as a sort of ticking-clock suspense story, I feel confident and comfortable taking that on. I don’t know how people who haven’t been in a war take on a war movie. I think that would be daunting.

  JONATHAN Well, they’d probably find their way back to the original material. You’d find someone who’s written on the topic, who connects you to it, I guess. As a writer, you pride yourself on being able to imagine yourself in situations, but this does feel like the one that is maybe beyond the bounds.

  CHRISTOPHER The last time I looked at The Thin Red Line on Bluray – it’s a favorite movie of mine, as you know – and included in the Criterion Edition is an essay by James Jones who wrote the novel. He’s talking about war movies – and he just shreds them all.

  JONATHAN (Laughter.)

  CHRISTOPHER I mean, literally just shreds them. He basically says, since All Quiet on the Western Front, what has there been to say about war? That war turns men into animals; the longer they’re in it, the more they turn into animals. That’s it, that’s all there is to say about it. He then goes through all the different story models – such as the benevolent sergeant; he goes through all the things and just shreds them, as someone who’s been in war. I found what he said quite sobering because I was about to start writing the script. It really spoke to things that I’ve worried about. You’ve got to talk to people who were really in it, who’ve been through these things.

  JONATHAN Did you spend a lot of time doing research and talking to people?

  CHRISTOPHER I did a lot of reading of first-hand accounts. And partly inspired by James Jones, I then watched All Quiet on the Western Front, which I don’t think I’d ever seen.

  JONATHAN I haven’t seen it.

  CHRISTOPHER They did a silent version and then they also released a sound version, because it’s right on the transition from silent cinema. I’d seen bits of it when I was a kid. It’s got these amazing camera moves of the silent era, before it all became very static, but it does have sound. And it’s absolutely relentless. They’ve got a shelling scene where they’re in the trenches and it just goes on so much longer than you can imagine, more than you can take. And, when I got to the end, I was like, wow, this pretty much says it all – as far as the horror of war goes. And there’s a nod to that film at the beginning of Dunkirk with Gibson taking the boots off the body, and then tying his boots – there’s a whole thing about boots in All Quiet on the Western Front.

  JONATHAN Right.

  CHRISTOPHER I moved on from there and said, okay, I really have to address this as a survival story, something that I can tap into and relate to. And that’s why the enemy is unseen. I try to get across the experience that I got from reading first-hand accounts – the point of view of somebody on the beach, who didn’t really see the enemy very much. They’re threatened by the planes, they’re threatened by the bombs and the unknown enemy, which I think is terrifying.

  JONATHAN At what point in the process did that idea occur – the idea that you would never see the enemy, not until the last shot, out of focus. You would feel them. I’m trying to remember, when I watched the movie for the first time, if I even noticed, because the tension is so effective.

  CHRISTOPHER People tend not to, actually.

  JONATHAN Yeah, you had to point it out to me, which I thought was great. At what point when you were writing the script did you decide, or was it more organic?

  CHRISTOPHER I honestly can’t remember. I clearly must have decided. I remember deciding very clearly that I didn’t want the generals in the rooms, I didn’t want Churchill, I didn’t want maps, I didn’t want too much knowledge. I found this way of having them overhear some knowledge, from the guys on the mole. It was sort of an attempt to give you just enough that you understand what’s going on but not too much, so you only have the level of knowledge of the soldier. I remember deciding that because I was looking at films like A Bridge Too Far, which is such a brilliant film.

  JONATHAN A great film.

  CHRISTOPHER But every time they cut to the generals in the rooms, I lose interest. I’m seeing the German High Command, I’m seeing the Luftwaffe. It takes me out of the experience.

  JONATHAN It also suggests a level of sort of omniscience and awareness for those people that wasn’t accurate to what is actually happening.

  CHRISTOPHER Exactly. And it dated the films, because there was a particular way that those World War Two films were made when we were kids. Actually, they were made before we were kids, but they were the ones we grew up with, watching them on TV on Sunday. All these movies had a particular formula that involved the higher-up generals – there’s a version of that in contemporary cinema: the control room with all the monitors and everything. But it’s not even quite as codified in the same way. There was a real rhythm of ‘you’re in it’ – a cinematic rhythm – and then you get pulled out of it to the kind of higher-ups drinking champagne in the Schloss and talking about whatever. And it dates the films, they’re hard to relate to now. Just as a rhythm. What I’m interested in in movies right now is where movies are firing on all cylinders – the subjective experience going through it.

  JONATHAN Trapping you.

  CHRISTOPHER So I think not seeing the Germans evolved naturally out of that. But the thing that I do remember is in the dialogue and in the text and in the cards and stuff to begin with, there was much talking about Nazis, the characters were always talking about Nazis, reminding the contemporary audience how awful this conflict was, how evil the bad guys were.

  JONATHAN Right.

  CHRISTOPHER When Mark Rylance read the scri
pt – I wanted him to play Dawson – I had told him this whole thing about not seeing the enemy, they could be aliens, they could be anybody, you know. This is about survival. And when he read the script he pointed out that it referred to the Germans seventeen times – he counted them. And he said, ‘Doesn’t that fight what you’re trying to do?’ And I thought, yeah, maybe he’s right. I’ll try removing all of those references. And, I preferred it. It made more sense, you know, using the word ‘enemy’ instead of using the word ‘Germans’. It made it more obvious, in a good way, what we were doing. As in, not showing the Germans, you know?

  JONATHAN Yeah.

  CHRISTOPHER I always talk about letting the audience in on the joke, letting them know that we’re not showing the Germans. That’s why the Germans are out of focus in the end. You want people to notice, you want them to realize it’s deliberate. It’s not like, oh, we didn’t show much of the Germans. It’s we never show the Germans, other than the planes.

  JONATHAN And it addresses one of the things that’s problematic about war films, starting with All Quiet on the Western Front, which is about the First World War – ‘the war to end all wars’ – because, at the end, it’s incredibly nihilistic, right? People could barely remember why it started.

  Vietnam-era war movies have a similar level of nihilism to them. World War Two films are problematic because in Western memory there’s a sense of it being a virtuous conflict. There was a very recognizable bad guy, they were the worst bad guys, ever. And it tilts the whole narrative in a way. It’s interesting that The Thin Red Line is set in the Pacific Theater. Certainly the Japanese did terrible things, war atrocities, but there is less of a recognizable, instinctual position of this is good versus evil.

  CHRISTOPHER Right.

  JONATHAN That film is a little more experiential. I know it’s one that you and I both love.

  CHRISTOPHER I love it. I think it’s one of the best films ever made, maybe the best film ever made. That’s how strongly I feel about it. But when I look at it in relation to this, the only relevance it had was a timelessness in the design, and the feel of it. The poetry of it felt totally at odds with Dunkirk and what the story was.

  JONATHAN Sure.

  CHRISTOPHER So it was a question of putting that to one side. I think The Thin Red Line in a lot of ways almost feels more like a Vietnam film in the nihilism and the grey areas it’s dealing with. There’s a different way of looking at the World War Two film issue – which is to say, that if you think of the point of view of somebody passing through those experiences, I don’t think the people involved in the situations would have been anywhere near as analytical or as self-reflective as modern movies tend to portray soldiers, tend to portray conflict. I was talking to Matthew McConaughey about this, about a recent film about war, and I asked him what he thought of it and he said, ‘Well there’s a lot of people having conversations, having a perspective on what they’re going through that they would never have had. They would have had later. They wouldn’t know what they’re going through, you know?’ I think that’s where the simplicity of World War Two movies lies, even though they can seem jingoistic and too far in the other direction by today’s standards. But there is also a truth to that, which is when soldiers go off to war, they can’t necessarily think in terms of grey areas. They have to just get on with it. And then, years later, they process the experience.

  JONATHAN One of the details you found which is so interesting to me on the script level, and in the finished film, is that both Tommy and Alex, building on what you’re saying, they’ve gone through this experience. On the one hand, it’s a retreat, right?

  CHRISTOPHER Yep.

  JONATHAN But, on the other hand, it’s one of the pivotal moments in Western civilization. Certainly, a defeat at Dunkirk, and the rest of the twentieth century would have followed a very, very different contour. Hard to imagine what would have played out with the entire British army trapped in France. An opportunity for the Germans to end the war, essentially. It’s a pivotal moment, but one that’s almost impossible for the soldiers participating to understand in the moment. Right?

  CHRISTOPHER Yeah.

  JONATHAN One of the things I loved about the script is that unknown quality of what just happened? For Alex and Tommy, when they’re asking for the newspaper, Alex is very much in a place where he imagines the public reception for them when they get back home will be very negative, they’ll be looked at as cowards. Tommy has a slightly more sanguine take on it based on his reactions. They both misinterpreted their first encounter with civilians when they come back. So they need the newspaper. They need Churchill to tell them what just happened, right?

  CHRISTOPHER Exactly. To tell them what they did and what they went through.

  JONATHAN There are various accounts in which the soldiers during the Second World War were faintly embarrassed by the purple rhetoric coming out, the things that politicians say, contrasted to the experience that they’ve been having, which was brutal and amorphous and hard to place in that registry. There is something in that moment of needing someone to set the historical moment. Needing a leader to tell you what the fuck just happened.

  CHRISTOPHER I was fascinated by the idea that they wouldn’t know what they had done until someone told them. And I think that’s an interesting thing you address. Particularly when dealing with Churchill’s eloquence. The reason the film ends with the shot of Tommy rather than the shot of the burning plane, because it was scripted ending with the burning plane, which is an apocalyptic image – kind of things to come – but it’s a big image. And when I saw the dailies of Fionn reading the Churchill speech and then, at the end, he did this thing where he just, I don’t even know what he’s doing, but you want to end with this quiet moment with him, where no one’s paying attention to him and Alex is eating and drinking stuff the girls are handing through the window. It brings you back to this personal moment: he’s trying to process the words he’s just read from this very eloquent politician and trying to reconcile that with his experience. Hopefully the audience is trying to do the same thing, through his eyes. So it comes back to a very small thing. I think that is one of the things I was most interested in, because Dunkirk, more than any other, really more than any other historical event that I know of, is a Rorschach test. I’ve been very interested in talking to Americans over the last two years once I announced what it was I was doing. A disturbing number of people, the first question they would ask me, Are you going to address the fact that Hitler let the British escape? And I was very, very shocked by this.

  JONATHAN (laughter) Right.

  CHRISTOPHER As an English person, first, it’s just not something you’re particularly aware of as a possibility. And secondly, it simply isn’t true. Demonstrably, it’s not true. They sank 230 ships. The attempt to destroy the British troops was full on and unambiguous. And there are various reasons why it didn’t work, primarily Himmler insisting on doing it with the Luftwaffe because that was the Nazi service that was opposed to the old, aristocratic German army officers. So the Nazis had built the Luftwaffe, and Dunkirk was going to be a demonstration. It was: save the tanks, we’ll take care of it. And they weren’t able to, for various reasons. I think one of the big reasons is the bombs would drop into the sand and the sand would muffle the explosion, so they were seeing a lot of damage from the air but they weren’t actually killing a lot of people. Thankfully. That’s the interesting thing about Dunkirk. Even in British culture, it’s gone from being a very simple, mythical story of guys in row boats going over, and rowing people across the Channel, which isn’t really what happened. It’s gone from that and the propaganda stories of the time to, in the eighties, there was a BBC program that gave a very revisionist point of view, where they pointed out, for the first time, that the civilians who went over in the boats were paid for it.

  JONATHAN Right. (Laughter.)

  CHRISTOPHER And, you go, okay, fine, but look into it from today’s perspective and you say, well how much
were they paid? Expenses?

  JONATHAN A nominal thing, but not enough to risk your life.

  CHRISTOPHER Absolutely not. There you go, we’ve missed the wood for the trees. Yes, it was a real human event with flawed and regular people. And there were people who were asked to participate who did not, famously. And there are all kinds of messy things going on. You’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people involved. So you can find cowards, you can find heroism. You can find a bit of everything. So the story, the symbol of Dunkirk and the idea of the Dunkirk spirit, becomes a Rorschach test. And when I went with Joshua Levine, our historical advisor, to meet some of the last remaining survivors of the event, one of the questions he asked at least three of them was ‘What do you understand about the Dunkirk spirit?’ And we got one answer which was, ‘It’s those little boats coming across and people pulling together.’ We got another answer that said, ‘It’s propaganda, it’s bullshit.’ Like, it’s nothing. Very violently said, I mean, bitterly said. And then someone else saying the Dunkirk spirit was the men holding the perimeter. And that absolutely was his understanding of what the Dunkirk spirit was. Nothing to do with the little ships, nothing to do with that. It was about the guys holding the perimeter, sacrificing themselves to let others escape.

  JONATHAN The men on the line.

  CHRISTOPHER The men on the line – of course, we’re not really dealing with that. Because that’s a whole other movie. Even the concept of the Dunkirk spirit is understood differently by the people who were involved in it. For the mainstream, it’s essentially about people pulling together, it’s triumph over terrible odds. But the one guy who was very bitter, just said it was a construct, it was propaganda – I think was the word he used.

  JONATHAN Right, it was a nice speech that Churchill made after the fact.

  CHRISTOPHER This was a guy who didn’t want to talk about everything he’d seen, but he’d clearly seen a lot of selfish behavior, a lot of really bad things and felt he’d behaved badly himself, perhaps. But, what you realize when you involve four hundred thousand people in one event, you’re going to find everything, you’re going to find every aspect. That’s what’s interesting about it as a story – all those things are true. All the interpretations are valid in a way, and, when we release the film, we’ll get all of that noise again. Because there are things that we are saying that people may not agree with. But I feel pretty confident about the broad historical strokes we put in, in terms of the research. It is well researched. It is clear in terms of what the main movements of things are.