Dunkirk Read online

  JONATHAN At what point did you decide you wanted to tell the perspective of the expeditionary forces, the soldiers on the beach, and the privateer sailors, the ordinary people coming across to save them, and then, of course, the RAF. Land, air, and sea?

  CHRISTOPHER The process I went through – I’ve been doing this more and more over the years; I did it with Interstellar as well – was just spending months and months just writing notes. You know, not writing anything; I just wouldn’t let myself write anything for a very long time. Also, I was waiting for Paramount to do the deal with Warners, and it was an excuse not to write … So what I did with Dunkirk was I researched, I read first-hand accounts and I got to a point where I understood the scope and movement and the history of what I wanted the film to address, because it’s very simple geography. I remember saying to Emma and to Nathan, our production designer – he was on the film already, we got him at a very early stage just to talk about logistics and things. I said I don’t want a script. Because I just want to show it, it’s almost like I want to just stage it. And film it. And Emma looked at me like I was a bit crazy and was like, okay, that’s not really gonna work.

  CHRISTOPHER And I said: okay, fair enough. I did need a script. So, I approached it from a geographical point of view. I knew all the events I wanted to show, and I came up with a structure that let me show that. And I detailed the structure very, very minutely. Figured all of that out before I wrote anything. And then, wrote the script very, very quickly. I mean, weirdly quickly. I just sort of found myself finishing it. It’s a very short script, as well – 76 pages.

  JONATHAN Yeah, there’s barely any dialogue for the first twenty minutes.

  CHRISTOPHER That’s something I really wanted to do. I just wanted to push away from the kind of filmmaking I’ve been doing where everybody’s always explaining things in dialogue.

  JONATHAN (Laughter.)

  CHRISTOPHER I just got bored of it … no, not bored of it …

  JONATHAN It’s a professional point of pride here to defend dialogue.

  CHRISTOPHER Absolutely, but I will be coming back to dialogue. No, if I’m to be completely honest, the work I did on Interstellar, based on what you had given me, represents for me some kind of peak in terms of how to use dialogue to remind people of things, to make them feel things, to connect things. But I felt like I didn’t really have any further to go with that type of filmmaking. I felt genuinely, rightly or wrongly – this is just my subjective feeling – but I felt like I’d kind of mastered that form.

  JONATHAN Sure.

  CHRISTOPHER And done something with it that I was very proud of. It created an emotional story, using the dialogue and all the different bits, the poetry – all these verbal things. Of course, there was a huge visual component to it as well. But you wind up with a three-hour film, almost. With Dunkirk, as soon as I talked to people about the fact that I was making that subject, I think they imagined that type of filmmaking, because it’s traditionally what you would expect of that subject matter. But that wasn’t my interest. What I wanted to do was to go back to the silent films that I love, where they just find a way to use large images and the mass movement of people within the frame to make you feel something, or imagine something. That’s why All Quiet on the Western Front is a fascinating film because it’s got the silent-era mechanics with a little bit of sound. It’s right on that transitional phase, and there’s a very real sense in which sound ruined movies for a while – probably for ten or fifteen years. Really set them back, because of the technology.

  JONATHAN Cinematically, for sure.

  CHRISTOPHER Cinematically, you couldn’t move the camera. There were great things happening with dialogue, but films became like stage plays for a while. They become very written.

  JONATHAN Yeah, a proscenium-style approach.

  CHRISTOPHER And, I feel like we have a slightly similar situation with movies now – but reversed. That is to say, movies that are really justifying the big screen. There’s a lot of pressure on theatrical windows. And the films that are justifying it right now are the films that are primarily visual. Primarily experiential.

  JONATHAN Spectacle.

  CHRISTOPHER Spectacle, exactly. And so it’s a comfortable area to be working in, with the IMAX format and the big screen and everything. And I’m really trying to push that. When you apply that thinking to this survival story, what I loved about the first-hand accounts that I read is that they’re full of, I suppose you’d call it, geographical paradox. I mean the situation itself, on a beach so wide and flat that the big boats can’t get in. So you’ve got these guys queuing up into the water and they can’t get to the boats that are out there. Then you have the mole structure out to sea. It’s sort of a runway to nothing, a road to nowhere. And there are all kinds of great visual paradoxes, which just seemed very rich for that. Having people talk about who they were, or they’ve got a girlfriend back home or whatever – I wasn’t interested in doing that in this film. I really wanted to explore the Hitchcockian device of shifting allegiances, subjectivity, by virtue of the mechanics of the situation. There’s a famous bit in Psycho. You have the shower scene with Janet Leigh.

  JONATHAN Yeah, and then you switch …

  CHRISTOPHER Exactly, your whole emotional investment has been with Janet Leigh and she gets horribly murdered. And then somebody who is complicit in that murder comes in and cleans up the murder scene, puts a body in the trunk of the car, drives the car into the swamp, it starts to sink in the swamp and it stops. And he looks around, ‘Oh, am I gonna get caught?’ and you’re worried he’s gonna get caught. And that for me has always been the moment, since somebody pointed it out, I think I was reading a book that analyzed it, that brought it to my attention. I was like, wait, how did that work?

  JONATHAN Yeah, it’s a magic trick.

  CHRISTOPHER And the way it works is through the procedure of cleaning it up. The wonderful thing movies can do is visually align you to a character’s dilemma in the moment. And I wanted to build a whole script on that, so that it’s not about talking about who they were or inspiring sympathy for the characters by virtue of who they were off screen. It’s just who are they in that moment, and do I care about them – can they run across that plank? I wouldn’t want to have to do that, so I care whether they make it or not. It aims at some sort of idea of pure cinema. It’s not that it’s superior – I love dialogue in films and I love films that embrace those backstory ideas as well. But I thought it suited a survival story.

  The other Hitchcock film I looked at was Lifeboat, which is a less successful film, but it’s pretty interesting. The whole thing takes place on a lifeboat. You’re just there in the moment and with the mechanics of people in that moment. I think that’s the fascinating thing about survival – what it does to people. Treasure of the Sierra Madre, as well. A favorite of mine. That’s a very verbal film, but there’s great cinema, there’s great geography to it.

  JONATHAN Yeah, and then, at a certain point, your allegiance begins to shift.

  CHRISTOPHER In ways you don’t expect.

  JONATHAN So, not much dialogue, but a lot of sound. The sound is very important in this film. And music – when did you start thinking about it? Music is always an important feature of your films. But in this one it feels more so than ever before. You have some very specific, innovative ideas about music in the film. What point did you start thinking about that?

  CHRISTOPHER Well, I started thinking about the relation of the music before I wrote the script.

  I settled upon a structure. There’s a phenomenon in music called the Shepard Tone that I first explored with Dave Julyan on The Prestige. I had basically said to Dave, how do you create a sound for the music that is continually rising in pitch, but never gets anywhere. And he knew of the Shepard Tone phenomenon which is one where by emphasizing different frequencies in the volume of the playing, you do what’s called a ‘barbershop pole’, you have a corkscrew effect. So it always appears to be rising but
it never gets out of range. That’s an idea that I’m fascinated by. I like optical illusions and I like audio illusions. And so, if you watch The Dark Knight, the bat pod that he drives, the engine sound is a Shepard Tone.

  It always ascends, it never stalls out, it never gets to the point where you have to reset it. When I wrote the script for Dunkirk, I wanted to play with the idea of doing that in the narrative sense, so that you have three different intertwined storylines, and you have them peaking at different moments, so that the idea is that you always feel like you’re about to hit – when you’re hitting the climax of one episode of the story … then another one is halfway through and the other one is just beginning. So there’s always a payoff. It’s something I’ve been doing instinctively in the third act sections of my films. Interstellar has that in the third act, where you get what’s happening on earth crosscutting with what’s happening on the ice planet. A lot of that stuff is done in the edit suite, but it’s also done at the script stage, where I was naturally trying to produce what I call a snowballing effect, where you’re trying to get things to be more than the sum of their parts, so they can get bigger and crazier and bigger and crazier to the point where you think you can’t stand it anymore. And the music has always been a huge part of that. The structure of the script is based on the Shepard Tone structure. And so has a rhythmic aspect to it as well, where things are continually feeling faster. They’re getting more intense and that’s the tricky relationship between the music and the script, which I’m still, still wrestling with.

  JONATHAN (laughter) In terms of large-format filmmaking – and this is all entirely shot on 65 and 70 mil – was that something you knew, going into it, that you wanted to do?

  CHRISTOPHER Our first conversations were that since you’ve got a big, wide, flat beach, the anamorphic 35 mil aspect ratio might suit it very well. I was talking with Hoyte van Hoytema, my DP, about what’s the best way to do this. I’d written a script with very little dialogue. And the thing that had always been holding us back from shooting an entire film in IMAX was the dialogue, because the cameras are loud, so you can’t record the dialogue effectively. And with Interstellar we’d gotten pretty far, because of the space suits and the microphones on the inside, so we could get more of the dialogue than we’d ever done.

  JONATHAN Clean tracks.

  CHRISTOPHER And we’d learned that Hoyte could hand-hold the IMAX camera and get a spontaneous feel to things. We said, well, there’s nothing stopping us at this point, so we should embrace that. We want the film to be spectacular, but we also want it to be experiential. IMAX is the best way to do that. So 70 percent of the film is shot on IMAX, which we’ve never gone anywhere near before. And then the rest of it is 65 mil 5-perf. So it cuts pretty seamlessly. And the finished prints are going to be all analog, which we’ve never done before. In the past we’ve had to digitize and then rerecord sections when we went from IMAX to the 35 mil and vice versa. We’re doing these all the old-fashioned way with optical prints. So, they’ll have the analog color, they’ll have that feeling of an organic kind of film. It should be pretty spectacular.

  JONATHAN Stepping back into your inspiration for this … At various moments I try to understand why I wound up working on one project or another – usually with good reasons. But just to track the path of your interest as a filmmaker and how that might have ended different places: do you have a memory or … I know that after Interstellar you went and visited our grandfather’s grave in Amiens, and you knew he’d been in the RAF, as a navigator. Does that connect to this decision?

  CHRISTOPHER I went to see his grave after I went to Dunkirk. The things definitely intertwine, in my mind. We always had a sense of history related to World War Two from Dad. There’s always been that strong connection to World War Two because it was so much a part of his life and in losing his father at such a young age.

  JONATHAN He used to be able to tell almost any airplane going overhead.

  CHRISTOPHER That’s in the film, yeah. Did you notice that bit?

  JONATHAN Oh, yes, of course. (Laughter.)

  CHRISTOPHER (laughter) That’s Dad. Yeah, it went straight into the film. But, as far as what drew me to this, when I look back on it, yes, that’s probably part of it.

  JONATHAN I’ve taken it for granted that everyone’s father can tell whether it’s a Merlin engine. (Laughter.)

  CHRISTOPHER Exactly. So you watch the film going, yes, of course he knows. He’s the dad, right? Most dads can’t tell that difference, engines on airplanes. But ours could. And so could Mr Dawson in the film. And, what Dawson shows of Dad is that you feel that he would have quite liked to have flown planes himself, but hasn’t for whatever reason. Yes, that aspect – which is why it’s nice that Uncle John is in the film and Auntie Kim and our cousins. There’s a strong family connection with our Britishness, and what that meant to us growing up. But, if I had to point to an individual element, it was probably Emma and Ivan and myself making the crossing to Dunkirk …

  JONATHAN Oh, way back when …

  CHRISTOPHER Many years ago, twenty-two years ago, yeah. It was unbelievable. I remember being glad. I had a terrible job at the time, in an office or whatever. And I remember being thrilled to be back at work on Monday after the weekend.

  JONATHAN (Laughter.)

  CHRISTOPHER Because it was a very arduous crossing. It took nineteen hours.

  JONATHAN We need some more color there. You guys got stuck in the shipping channels at various moments. Why … there was no wind?

  CHRISTOPHER On the way out, there was terrible wind against us, very big seas on the Channel. It was freezing. It was the coldest I’ve ever been.

  JONATHAN Did you guys go all the way across?

  CHRISTOPHER Yep.

  JONATHAN Pulled in, had a glass of wine, got back on the boat …

  CHRISTOPHER Went all the way across, spent a whole day – we were going to go back the next day, but we were like, no, we’ll stay an extra day because we were exhausted. So we spent Easter just eating, basically because we hadn’t had much food. Because we’d planned for an eight-hour crossing, but it was nineteen hours.

  JONATHAN So you guys went into Dunkirk?

  CHRISTOPHER Yeah. In fact, it’s almost that time of year, right now; we were a little earlier in the year, it was Easter time. When I think back on it, it was slightly naive: Oh, well, let’s do the crossing to Dunkirk, like they did back then, you know?

  JONATHAN Right.

  CHRISTOPHER And of course it was a very humbling experience because you realize how tough it was. And then, we’d used so much more fuel than we realized, motoring under sail all the way out that we ran out of fuel on the way back and there was no wind and we were stuck in the shipping channel. I mean, it – the whole thing – was mad.

  JONATHAN (laughter) How many hours did it take you to come back? Nineteen hours to get there …

  CHRISTOPHER I don’t remember, but we had to spend the night off Ramsgate because we didn’t have any way of getting in to the harbor and everything was closed. It was the bank holiday Monday. All the fuel stores were closed, so Ivan eventually came into Ramsgate under sail, which is a very tricky thing to do and he did it very well, but it was a hairy experience. I remember being so thrilled to be back on dry land. The impression it made on us was indelible because it’s something that when you read it in the history books, when you hear it as a story like: ‘They got on a little boat and they went over to Dunkirk,’ and then you do it and go, no that’s a monumental …

  JONATHAN It’s pretty serious.

  CHRISTOPHER A very serious undertaking. The Channel is not to be trifled with. And that’s without people dropping bombs on you! The idea, for example, that you’d get £200 for fuel or that that would motivate you to make that crossing into a war zone – anybody who’s ever made that crossing on a small boat, the respect they will have for the people who were involved in these events is massively enhanced, massively.

  I think one of the r
easons I wanted the film to be very, very intimate is because the things I remember about that crossing are the waves, the way the boat would move, how difficult it was, frankly, to go to the bathroom or something. Just being below decks – just all of that, all the stuff that isn’t generally in the history books, but you get from first-hand accounts like the ones that Joshua Levine had put together, which is how I came to know Joshua. But, when you read the first-hand accounts, those are the things that people do remember. It’s like how do they go to the bathroom? How do they eat? That’s why the film has the bits with them trying to open the tin of pineapples and drink the juice. It’s just how do you … It begins with a guy looking for a place to go to the bathroom, you know?

  JONATHAN Yeah.

  CHRISTOPHER It’s like all the stuff that generally we don’t think that much about in those situations. But they are the things we remember. They’re the things we would most worry about, simple physical survival. Simple physical comfort. How do you keep doing this? How do you keep going on? You talk to guys who were there who stood in the water for hours at a time, up to their chest in water. For hours and hours. It was interesting when we did all the discussions about how long can the stunt guys be in the water? How long can extras be waist deep in water with wet suits? I was quite worried about the water temperature and then at some point I realized that we were shooting at exactly the time of year that the real evacuation took place. So that answered that question immediately. They did it. And they were getting bombed. So, yeah, they didn’t have wet suits. We’re gonna have wet suits. We’ll be fine, you know?