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CINDY PEARLMAN
NYT Syndicate
One Sunday afternoon, Christopher Nolan decided to go for a ride."It was about 20 years ago," the filmmaker recalled,"and my wife Emma and I crossed the English Channel with a friend who owned a small boat."
They were headed in the direction of the World War II Battle of Dunkirk, but Mother Nature wasn't making it easy.
"The crossing was terribly difficult," Nolan recalled,"because the channel is extremely rough. It felt like a dangerous voyage, and this is without people dropping bombs on us."
There's a line, thin but discernible, that runs from that trip to Nolan's epic film Dunkirk, opening on July 21.
"I came away with a fascination when it came to the people who took part in the real evacuation of the troops at Dunkirk," Nolan said, sitting for an interview at the Barker Hangar airport facility in Santa Monica, California, as small aircraft flew overhead."Frankly, I wasn't sure why a modern film wasn't made of what happened at Dunkirk. Those are the gaps you're longing to put on film."
Written and directed by Nolan, Dunkirk stars Kenneth Branagh, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Mark Rylance and Harry Styles in the true story of the so-called 'Miracle of Dunkirk,' in which tens of thousands of defeated British and Allied soldiers surrounded by the German army were whisked across the channel to safety. Though military craft were involved in the rescue, many of the soldiers were saved by civilian boat owners like Nolan's friend, men who piloted their small boats across the channel in the teeth of Nazi machine guns and bombs to save the Royal Army and, ultimately, to make it possible for the Axis to be defeated five years later.
"Like most British people, Dunkirk is a story I grew up with as a boy," said Nolan, who was wearing a dark suit on a muggy day."I don't even remember the first time I was told about Dunkirk. As kids growing up in London, we received a mythic, almost fairy-tale version of what happened."
Nolan wasn't interested in making a fairy tale, though. He wanted to make a war film about soldiers who fought, lost and then were saved, to fight again, by civilians who had no business being where they were.
"For me the story has a particular meaning," he said."I think it's about communal heroism and the cumulative effect of small acts of human heroism. The message of the film is what we can achieve together in the bleakest of moments."
The film's action is split across three fronts: the beach, the air and the sea, where large ships jammed with Allied soldiers were being relentlessly bombed and sunk ... and where, nonetheless, hundreds of civilian boats sailed into the battle, piloted by men, women and even children, to save as many soldiers as they could fit aboard their small vessels.
"I wanted to tell this story on a very human, intimate scale," Nolan said."I call this an intimate epic. You stay in this intimate point of view of the soldiers trying to escape and the airmen trying to help, and the men and women on boats as the only way. What I wanted to do was build up to a picture of a very large event.
"What I didn't want was to cut to generals talking in rooms," he added."I didn't want to give the audience knowledge the characters didn't have."
Nolan shot the film with Imax cameras.
"I've been working with Imax technology for 10 years," the director said."With each film I've tried to shoot more of the project that way. This particular film felt like I needed to immerse the audience in the experience. I really had to take them there, and Imax is the best formula to do it."
Prior to shooting, as he often does, he gathered the cast and crew to watch films.
"We looked at Hitchcock," he said."We watched The Wages of Fear (1953). I like to cast a wide net of what to show the cast and crew. We watched David Lean films such as Ryan's Daughter (1970)."
Some of the film's most challenging scenes, he said, took place not on the beach but over it.
"We had real Spitfire planes," Nolan said."Just an actor, a pilot and a camera on the wings. I wanted everyone in that cockpit."
After the success of such blockbusters as The Dark Knight (2008) and Inception (2010), Nolan has a long string of A-list actors eager to work with him. Nonetheless he entrusted a key role to Styles, best known as the lead singer for One Direction, in his acting debut.
"My job as a director is to see the potential in people," Nolan said."I don't care if someone has never done a film before or they've done 100 films. You try to find actors who want the challenge.
"In this case I didn't worry about Harry's celebrity," he said."I believe that when an audience comes into a film, if we do our job right, they become invested in the character."
In a separate interview at Barker Hangar, Styles seemed still to be in awe of the experience.
"I heard that Chris was making this film," the young singer recalled,"and I was just excited to watch it. I would have been interested in this even if I had no involvement and would have watched it multiple times because, with each viewing, you always find something new in a Christopher Nolan film."
Styles plays a young soldier whose frantic efforts to get off the beach are thwarted again and again.
"I was in the sand, in the water and in the middle of big explosions," he said."It was a physical role.
"It's impossible to complain, on a set, when your director goes through the same thing with you," Styles added."Chris was on the sand, in the water and in the air. He was as cold as anyone else and not complaining."
Rylance, an Oscar winner whose film career extends back to the 1980s, made the same point.
"Sometimes, in modern films, the director is 100 yards away in a tent, hopefully not playing on a Game Boy," Rylance said in a separate interview."On the contrary with Chris, he felt very much there with us. At times he was rocking the actual boat. But you didn't just feel him physically ” you felt him there emotionally.
"And his notes were very gentle," the actor added."I was never asked to do anything but bring my own humanity to the situation."
A native of London, Nolan grew up with his father, an advertising executive, and his mother, who was a flight attendant and then an English teacher. He split his childhood between England and Evanston, Illinois.
He first stepped behind the camera at age 7, making a film with his action figures and his father's Super-8 camera.
He continued making movies as an English-literature student at University College London, where he also was president of the Union Film Society. After graduation he shot short films while working as a script reader, camera operator and director on corporate and industrial films.
His eyes were on Hollywood, but its eyes weren't on him.
"I collected a lot of rejection letters," he admitted,"but you must push on."
He ended up self-funding his first feature, the noir thriller Following (1998). It was seen at various international film festivals and attracted enough attention to enable him to line up funding for his second film, a screenplay he'd written based on a short story by his brother, Jonathan. Memento (2000), starring Guy Pearce as a man living his life backward and in snippets, became a critical darling and earned Nolan an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
Newly bankable, Nolan hit the ground running. First he directed the psychological thriller Insomnia (2002), starring Al Pacino, Hilary Swank and Robin Williams. Then he jump-started the Batman franchise with Batman Begins (2005), which became a global blockbuster and spawned two sequels, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises (2012). Around the edges of the franchise, Nolan also directed The Prestige (2006), Inception and Interstellar (2014).
Inception also garnered Oscar nominations as Best Picture and, despite the confusion with which it left many views groping, for Best Original Screenplay.
Nolan's films are family affairs: His brother often collaborates on his screenplays, and the films are produced by Nolan's wife ” Emma Thomas, whom he met at University College London when he was 19, and with whom he has four children through their company Syncopy Inc.
It's a safe bet that she'll be involved with his next film ” though Nolan insists that, at the moment, he has no idea what that film might be.
"For me it's always been about story," he explained."It's about finding a story that hooks me. I need the emotional connection that sustains me through the years of making the film.
"I'm single-minded on this topic, which is why I'm not good at planning what's next," Nolan said."I dive in and concentrate on one film for three years. It has to keep me enthusiastic for that period of time."
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17/07/2017
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