CHRISTOPHER NOLAN: There are 400,000 men trapped in one place, on a beach.
Their backs to the sea.
The enemy closing in all around them.
And it's just a matter of time before they face surrender
or annihilation.
The fact that the story does not end in either surrender or annihilation
is what makes it one of the greatest stories in human history.
And one which I've been wanting to tell for quite some time.
KENNETH BRANAGH: In the spring of 1940,
it became clear that the Germans would, in fact, be able to occupy France.
And in so doing, they squeezed out
the British Expeditionary Force of about 350,000 troops.
All the way to the coast.
TOM STRUTHERS: From the boundaries of Dunkirk when the Germans were attacking,
the French were very brave.
A lot of them gave their lives to help those British soldiers
to get off the beach so they could fight again.
BRANAGH: Those 350,000 are now, with the French soldiers, 400,000 soldiers.
Essentially trapped here with England that way
and the German army that way.
The German Air Force and German tanks back there
ready to, as one character in Christopher's screenplay says,
"Pick 'em off like fish in a barrel."
Then the question was how to get them back.
About 800 small boats came from the south coast of England.
Not just the Navy, but what seemed to be
the whole of England.
JAMES D'ARCY: It comes with
such an emotive feeling, particularly if you're British,
that out of this fantastic disaster, this huge retreat,
there was so much that constituted what we would call "character."
EMMA THOMAS: It's something that English people pride themselves on,
it's that sort of,
just put your head down and just get through it, whatever the circumstances.
This entire army of men who should have been wiped out
and somehow, really against all the odds, managed to survive.
JOSHUA LEVINE: There's nothing on the face of it
particularly glorious about it or successful about it.
It was really a defeat. It was a defeat
suffered by the Allies, by the British, the French, the Belgians, the Dutch.
LEE SMITH: Basically, the war was lost right there in Dunkirk.
And Germany was within a hair's breath of annihilating
300,000 British soldiers,
100,000 French soldiers.
LEVINE: If all these British troops had been killed or taken prisoner,
then Britain would have had no choice. Would've become a satellite state
of Germany.
And think how everything would've been different after that.
To me, Dunkirk is the epicenter of that point.
Of...
Of the world remaining free.
So it's incredibly important to be remembered.
NOLAN: I'd been interested in the history of Dunkirk
for many years, like most British people.
I'm raised on the mythical story of the little ships
and the evacuation and victory from the jaws of defeat.
Many years ago now, Emma and I went on a trip
across the Channel to Dunkirk in a small yacht
with a friend of ours who owned a sailing boat.
My plan was to catch all the tides.
And make it probably in the evening, late in the evening.
It was a very, very rocky crossing.
And it took us a lot longer than we thought it was going to.
CORNELL: I think we left 5:00 in the morning, 5:00, 6:00 in the morning.
We got in at 1:00 in the morning.
It was, I guess, cold, wet and painful, really, you know.
I think it was truly a defining moment for Chris and I.
NOLAN: What really stuck with me from that experience was
just how extraordinary the notion was of civilians taking small boats
across these very difficult waters,
knowing that they're heading into a war zone.
In approaching the story, what was interesting to me
was reading firsthand accounts of what people had gone through.
The difficulties they had encountered.
How to eat, how to sleep.
The basic physical premise of not being able to get to
the naval vessels that would have taken them home.
You're dealing with quite
banal details that suddenly become life and death.
I shared the script with Joshua.
He very quickly understood
the balance we're trying to strike between
the clarity of expressiveness and historical accuracy.
Once I was on board, it became important
to go a little deeper.
To get a sense of what it was really, really like.
And the only way you're really going to get that
is by talking to people who were there.
NOLAN: We went and met with some of the few surviving veterans
of Operation Dynamo.
It was a great honor to meet those people
and sit and talk to them and to hear their experiences.
LEVINE: You went straight to the beaches?
Straight to the beaches, yes.
And they were lined up along the waterfront over there.
LEVINE: Right. So there were in queues...
Yes, in queues along the waterfront.
And they were taking them out onto the mole.
It was just a wooden mole with planks across.
And, uh,
several hours before we got there they had
dive-bombed and hit it,
and made a hole.
VIC VINER: Not one day we didn't have...
We didn't have a Stuka of some sort.
I mean, there's nowhere to go.
You would get down low?
Oh, its... I mean, when they come toward us.
That's the most frightening thing at all.
Books about Dunkirk tend to be "the story of Dunkirk."
It's thousands, tens of thousands,
hundreds of thousands of stories.
NOLAN: You can't possibly get any kind of
comprehensive view of an event of this magnitude.
The best you can try to do is give people a really compelling
journey through this set of events.
It was very important to me to not try and portray it as
just another war film.
THOMAS: In the war films that I think of when I think about
British war films, there's always, you know,
the scenes with the generals in the boardroom
shoving ships around with a stick.
You know, I think that what was really interesting to me about
the script that Chris wrote was that
it's very much told from the perspective of the people who are taking part.
NOLAN: We're always in the cockpit of the Spitfire, up in the air.
We're always down with the guys on the beach,
we're in the water with them or we're always
on the Moonstone, crossing the Channel.
SMITH: As with all of Chris' films,
the script is so carefully crafted.
These timelines and the three stories
are incredibly detailed in the way they intersect.
NOLAN: It's a story of one of the most incredible races against time
in history.
And so, to me, the idea of telling that story as a thriller,
as a suspense movie, as a Hitchcockian experience,
really felt like the right way to approach that.
SMITH: I mean, with Chris' scripts, you normally just hold your head
and roll around and beg for mercy at the end.
Uh... This one, I found a great sense of emotion to the whole story.
And the fact that it is based on true events makes it all the stronger.
Because it's so freighted inherently with that sense of emotion,
I wanted to try and approach the story very objectively and really just
not tell the audience what to think,
not tell them how to feel, but allow them to,
firsthand, experience the events of Dunkirk.
We first scouted the beach for research purposes.
I, you know, I went there, uh, walked the beach to just
understand the physics of the real place.
And where people were, the geography and the geometry of the real situation.
I brought Nathan Crowley there to have a look at it.
Uh, really for reference. We didn't necessarily think
we were gonna shoot there.
CROWLEY: We could do the beach,
main part of the beach in Suffolk, in England or something.
Or in North Carolina or, you know, on the sand flats.
So, you know, you start sort of
treating it like any other piece of fiction.
But, of course, it's not a piece of fiction.
There are so many different accounts of Dunkirk.
The reason for that is because it happened over this vast area.
HOYTE VAN HOYTEMA: Visually, it has a very specific, specific feel,
and you really, and you really feel that history is still there
and you understand the vastness of the whole event
by just seeing those beaches.
EMMA THOMAS: Having looked around a little bit,
it became clear that it was going to be very difficult to replicate exactly
um, the beach look that we needed anywhere other than Dunkirk.
NOLAN: Seeing the reality of the place, and seeing the unique quality
that that geography has,
it became inevitable that we were going to shoot there.
We shouldn't split this and fake it. We should recreate it.
(MAN SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY)
THOMAS: To this day, there are reminders of the events of 1940
that show themselves all the time.
I mean, you know, when the tide is particularly low,
you can still see a shipwreck
um, right next to the mole, of a boat that went down in 1940,
and to this day, there are buttons and buckles
and so on are still being found.
Soon after the war, the people of Dunkirk
didn't want to talk again about the war.
And everything related to the war was very highly rejected.
More people today have
the intention to be here. And I think that
the movie we are talking about today
is going to bring a very high interest.
(STEPHANE RAISON SPEAKING FRENCH)
They wanted us there and they wanted it celebrated because,
you know, they still live with it every day
in a way that no one else does.
Come on, guys. Here we go. Start the boat.
OTERO: The movie is absolutely informed by the real place.
More than any picture I can think of.
It brought a reality to the film
that was otherwise unattainable.
I showed up on one of the first days of filming.
And there were thousands of soldiers.
And you could also see a destroyer out there
and various boats out there.
The burning smoke over Dunkirk from the refinery.
You know, it took on a whole new perspective.
I mean, my God.
What I had actually done was gone back
over 70 years in time. It was astonishing to see this.
THOMAS: Somehow, the fact that we were on that beach
on the anniversary just adds to the feeling, for me, of authenticity
about the film and the telling of the story.
KENNETH BRANAGH: The whole incredible effort that was made by France,
and by the men and women here,
and the people from back home is so profound.
Part of experiencing that
is to, with respect, with love,
if you like, with honor, to come to the real place.
I think it becomes, in a very positive way, a kind of a memorial
that is very moving, I think.
(PATRICE VERGRIETE SPEAKING FRENCH)
CILLIAN MURPHY: The people of Dunkirk were very affected by the fact that,
you know, Chris had chosen to shoot the film
on the beaches and in the town.
JANSSEN: We had the opportunity to meet few people from the production
and we could see that they were coming with a very
high level of attention for what was concerning the history.
And the local people were very proud to
talk again about that period of the war.
THOMAS: It's a really incredible place,
and I think that we were very lucky to get to shoot the film there.
EMMA THOMAS: If somebody had said to us
six years ago, "Go off and make a film about
"the evacuation of Dunkirk using only large format cameras,"
I think we would have thought that was an insane thing to do.
CHRISTOPHER NOLAN: Dunkirk is a huge story
and it demanded an enormous canvas.
And the idea of telling the story from a very subjective point of view,
putting yourself into the mind of a person who is involved,
that becomes the key to telling the story for me.
HOYTE VAN HOYTEMA: We straight away started talking about a big format.
We had big love for the big format.
Especially IMAX.
On an intuitive level, it felt like a very honest way to tell the story.
THOMAS: They are very loud cameras and so it was very difficult
to use them for big dialogue scenes.
JOHN LEE: In order for us to record dialogue,
we figured out that 65-millimeter would be
a great sort of replacement format
for the 35-millimeters that we'd been using before on Interstellar.
We've been on a journey since Batman Begins.
He's added a bit of IMAX in,
and then with Interstellar, we ended up shooting almost half the film in IMAX.
Dunkirk, he's like, "I want to shoot all large format."
LEE SMITH: Seventy-something percent of the film
is the full IMAX format.
NOLAN: The thing about the IMAX format is
it's based on creating such a high-quality image
that you get a very visceral, tactile sense
of being there as things were unfolding.
THOMAS: You're so in it with the characters.
There is really no barrier between you and them.
NOLAN: The huge challenge is the size and weight of the cameras,
so our feeling was if we could find a way to do it, physically,
the payoff would be well worth it.
Finding platforms to work with those cameras,
including engineering and building them
to actually attach to airplanes is, um...
Well, it hasn't been done.
And it wasn't simple.
NOLAN: We had various tracking vehicles and so forth to move across the sand.
But ultimately, I think for the type of
filming that we wanted to do in those situations,
there is really no better solution than hand-held camera.
I really wanted to make that camera work as
any other camera you would use.
Hand-held in underwater, in a very intuitive
and impulsive way that you can use a film camera.
They're very large and heavy
and he's got to do it in the water with stuff going on around him,
with wind, with whatever the situation is.
It's physically challenging for the cinematographer to be able to do that.
We made it work because
we just had a feeling we owe it to the subject
to just put the best format to the story.
You put so much effort, the crew
and everybody involved put so much effort into
these extraordinary, larger-than-life things that you have to reproduce.
The idea that you would compromise or worry overly about the convenience
of the format you're shooting on is absurd.
I mean, that's the easy part.
(MEN SHOUTING)
VAN HOYTEMA: Little bit of physical pain is...
There is nothing wrong with that. (LAUGHS)
NOLAN: It was very important that we be able to
shoot on this large-scale format, but not have it hamper
the spontaneity of the things we want to be able to do.
That required a lot of experience that we'd built up over the years.
Because we'd done so much of that work, we were equipped to do it
and we were able to maximize the format
and really get everything that we wanted from it.
CHRISTOPHER NOLAN: With every film you do,
you try and build on what you've learned.
This is certainly the most challenging film that I've made.
To try and stage these things for real requires a level of experience
and a team who have gone through a bunch of
films together and have a language.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
Large format cameras.
Shooting on location instead of on stage.
Reliance on special effects rather than visual effects.
Those are all things that we've done before
in our other films that Dunkirk just did in a sort of bigger way.
PAUL CORBOULD: It's like a military operation, really.
You've got guys miles away on the smoke machines.
You've got another team doing explosions foreground.
And then you've got the right-against-camera team.
(MEN SHOUTING)
NILO OTERO: In very much Chris style,
the best way to make a movie about something
is to get that something and make a movie about it.
(MACHINE GUN FIRING)
Chris Nolan always prefers to do it practically, if possible.
He'd rather do it in-camera rather than CGI.
NATHAN CROWLEY: We were on real ships, in the real sea,
with stuntmen in the water, big destroyers shooting.
That's very much the Nolan way. We're out here.
We're out here to work. We're out here to live it a bit more.
JAKE MYERS: It's fun.
It's fun to see. You stand on a battleship,
which is already crazy, and then a Spitfire goes by you.
We've lost that a little bit in film production
because so much is done digitally.
NOLAN: Action!
Nowadays, when you look through a script, you think to yourself,
"Oh, that's going to be CG."
When you read one of Chris' scripts, you know right from the beginning
every element, some part of it, is going to be done practically on set.
NOLAN: Andrew Jackson, he had a tremendous brain for
figuring out different solutions to
how to achieve things in-camera.
So he was never at odds with the live approach.
JACKSON: I just always feel like you get the best possible result from
incorporating as much real footage as you can.
And that works extremely well for Chris, because that's exactly his approach.
He ideally would like to use no visual effects at all.
And when he does have to, it's always going to be
merging practical and visual effects together.
Retaining a lot of the lighting effects and the dirt and scratches and flares.
All the little gritty bits and pieces that you get from the real world.
It was almost like theater, in a strange way.
You're watching this and you're like,
"These are actual real ships performing those real tasks
"and doing these maneuvers and..."
It was really something to see it.
We successful landed a Spitfire,
Mark 1 Spitfire, on the beach.
Which hasn't been done since 1940,
since the war.
No, there's no acting required here.
When you have a Spitfire literally...
To me, it was about that much over... (LAUGHS)
Over the boat, like, you know.
There's no acting needed there.
TOM GLYNN-CARNEY: That was insane.
When do you ever get to do that, as a human being?
And playing those situations,
literally, all you had to do was watch what was happening.
You're kind of scared that there is this giant boat next to you,
and there's flames here and this is blowing up.
I think just putting us into the situation,
rather than creating a fake one around us...
You don't have to act like you're struggling
to swim after a while.
LEE SMITH: [don't know why they work with Chris. He drowns them,
he throws things at them. It's crazy. (CHUCKLES)
I've done everything. I've been up in the air,
swooping around over the Channel with real Spitfires,
I've been covered in oil, I've been out in a boat for 12 hours.
I've been dunked under the water numerous times for an entire day.
I'd said this to Chris. I said,
"It's going to make every single job I do after it, um, boring." (LAUGHS)
HOYTE VAN HOYTEMA: Chris will never ask anybody to do anything
without having it done himself.
He's very concerned.
Not only by safety, but also about
feeling it, understanding it, and that kind of hands-on approach
is very motivating for everybody.
He's there in the water,
in his wetsuit, in his waders.
Living the movie.
STYLES: I remember the first day,
I got dressed and put my uniform on.
And he kind of checks me over.
He looked at me and said, "Your boots are laced wrong,"
and explained that the British did them looped rather than crisscross
and pretty much from that moment he kind of set the precedent of,
"I know my shit."
LOWDEN: It's almost that old-school definition of directing,
that he is moving the stuff in the frame.
He's actually making the film.
He is the definition of a filmmaker.
He lights up the imagination of
the crew and the actors in a way that puts something into that celluloid
that the audience in the darkened rooms will intuit.
The way that we shot the film, mostly doing it for real,
and doing as much in-camera as we possibly could,
I think really helps to create that immersive
cinematic experience for audiences.
(MEN CHEERING)
It was very important to me that we achieve a level of experience
for the audience in a way that has just never happened before.
That was the task set to all of the different departments
and I think they pulled it off magnificently.
(CLOCK TICKING)
EMMA THOMAS: The mole is a very distinctive feature
of Dunkirk and it played a very important role
in the evacuation.
CHRISTOPHER NOLAN: It's this kilometer-long bridge to nowhere,
this breakwater that these guys were all...
Thousands of guys were queuing up on.
There for days, hours and hours,
just not knowing at what point they get to the front of the queue.
And if they get to the front of the queue,
whether there's a boat there or not.
You have the line of men going
as far as you can see out to the sea.
Which is a phenomenal image.
THOMAS: When you see pictures of soldiers on that breakwater,
it's really very easy to understand
how incredibly vulnerable they were.
KENNETH BRANAGH: There you are, left on that mole
on that promontory out into the water, alone and isolated.
I think you are really struck by the scale of the event.
Nathan and I felt very strongly
that the mole is the most important
physical set, if you want to call it a set,
of the entire film.
That was where our effort had to be.
This is the mole.
It's been a mole for a couple of hundred years.
Back in the tall ship era, they put a white structure on top of it
to offload ships.
The bit that's accessible now
is all concrete, and it only takes you about a third of the way out.
This originally was wood, and they rebuilt
the end of the mole in 1937
in precast concrete.
The mole that existed's been taken away
or probably over the years, it disintegrated.
What we needed to do was
reproduce the concrete and wood structure.
This white structure that had been there originally.
JAKE MYERS: How do we alter the existing landscape
back into what it was,
because it's obviously had 75 years to change and modernize.
THOMAS: That was a pretty huge undertaking.
In pre-production, we spent a lot of time
looking at how far we'd be able to build,
and we initially thought, "Maybe we can go all the way out to the end,"
and then reality kicked in as we began to budget the film.
We only built halfway.
It used to go all the way to the end.
You can imagine how big it was.
No one's moored against this thing since the war, really,
so we had to dredge the whole channel
to get our ships in and there were some interesting worries.
One of the problems with shooting at an actual battle location is that
there's unexploded ordnance.
I mean, nothing actually showed up.
But you can imagine just the idea of shooting in a reallocation
has a lot of complications to it.
It has a history and you have to be careful of that.
We had about 12 weeks to put the pier in, which is not very long.
The original foundations of the mole were still there.
So we built on top of that. I think without those foundations,
we don't think we could've done it.
We had to work with the port of Dunkirk,
who gave us the original blueprints from when they built this thing.
Normally when you're building a set, you're just building...
It's not Styrofoam, but it's not meant to last.
We had to construct something that had to be both
structurally sound and take the pounding of the ocean.
NOLAN: The swing of the tide,
as indeed in the original events in the story of the film,
is a major factor because the swing of the tide is colossal in Dunkirk.
CROWLEY: We're at low tide. When the sea comes up...
Comes over these concrete dog biscuits,
it's quite dramatic.
We came up with a system where we prefab these
ginormous sections, 21 by 22 feet.
We'd have these tidal windows
where you'd have four hours on the foundations
to put in the sections of mole that we needed to drop in
and get bolted down before the tides came in.
Every day we had to get one of these in,
to make our schedule.
This was the giant structure that we needed to put in.
And you can see these big bolt plates on the ground.
And then this section was built on top of the sea wall.
So we were worried about weather and weather hangers.
So we knew if we built some of the wood mole
on top of the existing stone wall,
that we could always retreat to this as a safety area,
if it got too rough out here.
Of course, we got it all built.
And while we were shooting, we got hit by some pretty heavy weather.
The force of some of those high waves would actually get up onto the deck.
Ironically, we spent so much time
engineering the end bit that actually, when the big waves came in,
it ripped up part of this section rather than the other section.
THOMAS: We ended up on various occasions
coming in, in the morning, and finding that
bits of our mole had been washed away overnight.
MYERS: Water would just come in and get under it and push up
and the boards would just go.
And we were basically rebuilding the set while we were shooting something else.
This, to me, is one of my favorite images, this endless white pier
to nowhere.
NOLAN: The mole was a massive engineering task in another country
in another language, with a lot of complicated negotiations.
All of this weather dependent, as well.,
It was an incredible feat.
It is one of the hardest things I think we've ever built,
and we've built a lot of stuff.
(LAUGHS) On a lot of big films.
MYERS: I think from a set point of view,
you won't look at it and say, "Wow, that's an amazing set"
because it will just feel like part of the environment.
But from a film construction point of view,
I don't think you could ever take on something more complicated.
But it allows us to tell that stow.
MAN: All the way. Go, go, go!
This is the end of the mole.
So, here you go.
Next stop, downstairs. You want to come downstairs?
(LAUGHS)
We've gotten very used to seeing 40-year-olds playing
18-year-olds, or people who would've been 18,
as enlisted men.
And we were very determined to try
and be true to the actual reality
of what happened there, and how young these people would've been
when they went off to fight in this terrible conflict.
Some of them were really just kids.
We really were talking about
17, 18, 19-year-old actors,
and that concept was really energizing.
And I think I could tell that's where Chris' heart was,
like, "Let's do this with a bunch of unknown actors
"and young fresh faces."
And it was an exciting concept for us.
HARRY STYLES: I think for a lot of us, the younger guys,
there was almost like a sense of camaraderie going in because
it was a lot of people's first big project that they were working on.
PAPSIDERA: These are new kids going through this experience.
They've not been on film sets before.
You start exploding things around them,
you're going to get very real reactions.
In my first week, I was just so overwhelmed by
just the realness of the situation for the soldiers at the time.
And it's so easy to imagine when you come out on to the beach
and there's 1,500 extras,
water coming in, explosions going off.
It really just brings it home.
It's youth we're talking about. This is about
a generation of young people.
And in that sense, it's about the future, so...
You feel that incredible sense of youth
exposed and in danger and at risk.
Soto see real young people in the here and now
be part of that, that in itself, I think,
adds layers and layers to it.
ANEURIN BARNARD: The scale of this is quiet incredible, really,
and to put something like this together,
it's like a military operation in itself.
NOLAN: The reality is, it's very difficult
to photograph a very large group of people.
And that helps you
because you're able to break down the script and say,
"Okay, how many man hours do we need
"of extras on these given days?" And you look at it
and you go through it with the ADs.
And how we can have the ADs arrange the extras.
JAKE MYERS: From a production point of view,
it's exhilarating putting as many extras
as we can find in period costume.
And letting the scene happen in front of you,
which is not something that you get as much anymore.
NOLAN: So I look back at the silent era and how
Cecil B. DeMille, Griffith, how they are using their extras counts.
How they are using the movement of
humanity to tell you something story-wise.
So, in Dunkirk that becomes about
movement, a rippling effect along the line of people.
People hitting the deck at one point.
You're being told something narratively by the crowd
that you couldn't tell through an individual.
Then you're getting your biggest value out of your extras count.
Instead of doing digital extras for the deep background,
we basically built what we called "fences," which were,
for lack of a better description, cardboard cut-outs of
human beings painted and held by people,
and it's a great old school effect
and Chris had said a few times,
"Let's do it like they would've done it before the technology existed."
We called the costume department and they sent over
the costumer to dress up my guys.
So what we did is we photographed them with different sizes
and then put them together in Photoshop,
printing them out on our big printer over here.
And then we perforated it.
Once we rubbed the charcoal on the perforation,
so now it transferred our drawing that you saw over there
onto here.
Once we're done painting them,
we have to cut them all out.
And then attach this wire mesh to the back
so when we put them on the beach,
they'll stand up.
It was quite something seeing
soldiers on the beach and...
In theory, I knew that the actors were going to be young
but I think it wasn't until we actually started working with them
that I realized quite how young the soldiers on the beaches were.
When you really confront that, it's a very different thing than
reading about it in a history book.
STYLES: These guys were going in
and had no idea what they were going to do, really.
They were just thrown into the situation with a gun
and some boots.
WHITEHEAD: It made me empathize with the soldiers
in a way I never had before.
It kind of humanizes them and makes me realize
how terrible it was and the real struggle that they had.
NILO OTERO: For the guys who were the army on the beach,
the scale of the beach
made them feel as if they were at the event.
NEIL ANDREA: The beach was covered in extras.
I remember coming around the corner for the first time
and just stopping and taking a look and just being, like,
"Wow, this is unbelievable."
JEFFREY KURLAND: When Chris talked to me about this
and he was telling me what the movie was about,
he said it was the evacuation of Dunkirk.
And then I started researching,
and the amount of information I found was extraordinary.
CHRISTOPHER NOLAN: When talking to Jeffrey
about the wardrobe, we wanted to be
historically accurate and we wanted to be authentic,
but we wanted to skirt as close as possible to being
contemporary, to being relatable to today's audiences.
KURLAND: An audience is triggered to look at old clothes
and think of them as old clothes.
They don't look at it and think in the reality of it,
so there is a fine line that you walk
of what is actual and what is movie trickery.
And we did, we walked that line.
NOLAN: Hoyte and Jeffrey, in talking about it,
very much came to the conclusion that they just wanted to make the fabric
the real color that it was.
And we're going to let it react
in the different lighting situations the way it really would.
Letting it be real.
What Jeffrey was able to do was create uniforms, for the leads particularly,
that you could easily imagine yourself wearing.
KURLAND: Those clothes were new.
Just like your clothes are new now when you buy them.
Takes a while for them to age, so we were able to
age realistically most of the clothes,
'cause they've already been in months of battle.
Every individual piece was then dampened and taken down with a blowtorch.
Burning down the wool, and you can see just in
that spot right there, you can already see the weave happening,
and to get that any other way you'd have to shave it and use razors and all that.
This does it really quick.
It's like painting with fire, really.
And then you brush out...
You get a really good effect with it.
So all of the wool was taken down and then we went in
and aged on top of that.
We burned about a thousand pieces.
Jeffrey loved it 'cause it just took all these outfits from a brand new uniform
down to battle-weary
in the course of a day.
KURLAND: You know, With Chris,
I knew he wanted to put as many human beings
in front of the camera as possible.
Literally every officer that you would need in the Navy,
Air Force, Army and Merchant Marine, who were on the ships also.
We were in Dunkirk, we had this huge warehouse.
The height of it... It was like an aircraft carrier hangar or something.
We laid out... All these racks were put out in this huge space.
And there were different looks for the soldiers.
So, not everybody was in a complete uniform all the time.
Maybe you would have a shirt and pants and boots.
Maybe you would have the jacket and the pants and an undershirt.
Maybe you would have a coat.
And some of them would just
have to appear in underwear, which we also produced.
We would reuse clothes,
'cause the uniforms, of course, thank God, are the same uniform.
We were very frugal,
I think very smart in the way we created hundreds and hundreds of uniforms.
The World War ll soldier was this.
Which was shirt and tie.
A jacket, pants, puttees, boots.
I had enough money to make 500 of these.
I need to recreate this in some way, in a cheaper way, in a simpler way.
Why can't I recreate this with digital printing?
I take the fabric and I have it scanned
and then I print it on another fabric.
Could work.
And I thought, "Well, maybe a jumpsuit of some sort."
So what I did is, I found these.
This is cotton. Cotton is a very flat fabric.
There is no texture, much texture in this.
So what we did is put it in there
so that it would match that, so that it would be convincing at a distance.
When you're doing hand-held with the IMAX camera and such,
the shot was pretty much almost 360.
So I then started dressing the crew in these jumpsuits,
so makeup and hair was wearing these at all times.
They could be there
and we could disguise them. In some way, we could hide them.
Then we also used it for the ADs to wear
in the big shots so that they could handle the extras
in the deep background and they were all within that.
So these came in very handy.
As did these gas capes.
We used these also as camouflage for crew
so that everybody could move freely within the shot
and then duck out of the way quickly, but you never saw them.
It was a very handy kind of... All of this little invention
worked for everybody.
We were just so busy, but there were times...
On that beach,
I remember standing back and looking at it and being kind of awed
by the amount of humanity that was on that beach.
NOLAN: His approach to texture
and fabric choices, with the aging in particular, to soften them,
made the uniforms flexible and old and soft enough
that you could understand
what it would have felt like to wear the uniform.
KURLAND: I had done so much research and then been just so engrossed
and it was identical to the photos.
So when you looked at it, it was just like you were there.
(ALL CHEERING)
In today's era,
with GoPro cameras and the like, people are getting very used to
seeing very interesting subjective angles
on extreme physical events.
And so, as a filmmaker that raises the bar in terms of
trying to portray these planes from 1940,
in a way that modern audiences can respond to and understand.
HOYTE VAN HOYTEMA: You're always trying to, sort of, come up with, you know,
an original way or better way
to show or to shoot things. So you always end up
sort of thinking about things that are impossible,
and then, you know, trying to make them possible.
NOLAN: Getting the cameras right there to put the audience right there,
and give them that experience.
NATHAN CROWLEY: We had to create this air group in the film.
We needed the full range. We need Heinkels, Stukas,
Spitfires, Messerschmitts.
JAKE MYERS: You have to find actual planes that were the right ones.
You're at the mercy of like, what's available.
So logistically, we had to cast a huge net out into the world of
where are these things, and how can we get them there.
Do they still function?
CROWLEY: The Messerschmitt doesn't have any features.
We wanted to get a 109E, which is a very specific Messerschmitt,
but I think there was only one being restored in Germany,
it wasn't available to us.
We used Spanish Bouchons.
So, they are based on the Messerschmitt.
They have a slightly different placement of the air vents and so forth.
NOLAN: That's not a 109 from 1940.
But they're very, very close,
and it's a real plane that we could fly in a real dogfight.
Tom Struthers, our stunt coordinator, knows a lot about planes
and had a lot of very good ideas on how to approach
the aerial side of things.
True, Tom Struthers was able to get
a real Blenheim Bomber to fly over.
It's a very impressive thing to experience
a Bomber of that size in real life,
be in close proximity to it.
The same time I reached out to a man who...
Who is a phenomenal pilot,
and, just an incredible enthusiast. A man called Dan Friedkin, out of Texas.
Thankfully for us, Dan owned Spitfires.
He owns six Spitfires,
all flying. He's got two Mach-Ones.
Chris went down to look at the planes in Texas,
and Dan, he was willing to work with us and help us
and help Chris achieve the look
and the authenticity of what period we were shooting.
In the prep stage, we flew a couple of times, we flew planes.
We did the aerobatics in Texas with Dan Friedkin
who owns a lot of these old war birds.
NOLAN: You're getting somebody who could fly wonderful himself
and actually owned the planes.
That made it very much more practical than otherwise it would've been,
to take those planes over to France and to Britain, where we needed them.
And the fact that Dan was actually able to fly,
you know, the most important plane, himself.
He had an integration of the production
and he was very important to
getting those things done for real.
When you get an opportunity you've been lucky enough to do in this film
you get an extraordinary degree of respect instantly
for the people who are flying these planes
and enduring the conditions.
The degree of physical stamina, bravery, concentration,
that became a fascinating thing to want to portray.
VAN HOYTEMA: I think it was very important for us to grasp
how it actually feels to be in such a confined space,
pull so much G-forces and yet still understand
how your orientation works.
How you keep oriented, what kind of strength it needs.
How the light is changing in the cockpit.
So, for me it was a very informative experience
to understand the physiology of it.
So that we could portray the physiology of it.
An important kind of... When we started to design the dogfights.
NOLAN: There's a set of, sort of, production techniques
that people were used to,
in representing things like aerial dog fighting,
that we very much wanted to break away from.
NILO OTERO: Because the difficulty of working with these things,
the expense, the danger. All these things,
people tend to fall back on computer-generated imagery.
They go, "We'll just stick a digital camera on there," but...
Of course, with Chris, that's heresy,
you don't wanna do that. So everything's IMAX.
Most historical planes, you can't just drill holes and mount,
especially something to hold like a 75 or 80 pound camera.
CROWLEY: Chris wanted to strap IMAX cameras to the Spitfires,
so we had to figure how to do that.
STRUTHERS: When Chris explained to me what he wants to do, et cetera,
I started to reach out to people I know in the business of aviation.
And I was thinking, how can we best
show what Chris is trying to show,
and then we settled on an aircraft which is a Yak-52.
The reason we used the Yak instead of the Spitfire,
is the real Spitfire is basically just a single-pilot airplane.
It's also a little bit more, you might say, sacred.
You don't want to be drilling holes in a Spitfire. (CHUCKLES)
And we've got holes all over this Yak,
from different mounts and different canopies.
ANDY McCLUSKIE: Well, it started off as a normal Yak-52 tail rail,
we've tried to make it look
like a Spitfire, the front end, as far as can be done.
HANS BJERNO: We put a Spitfire canopy in the front cockpit.
Made the wingtips look like a Spitfire.
We could flare the nose a little bit. So we altered the Yak.
The front of the Yak. So, in camera,
it would look like a Spitfire.
We started to invent stuff, to make it possible
for us to put the camera on planes
and to start flying with it, just as they did in the old days.
We fabricated all the mounts for the plane
Multiple camera positions
on the Yak for different looks.
HOSKING: On the side here, we can mount a camera exterior
looks forward through the cowling through the propeller.
It's great for a dogfighting sequence,
chasing the Messerschmitt, I get to shoot him down,
he flows on the smoke, I fly right though his smoke.
And so that's real action in your face, kinda stuff.
That camera also turns around, points the other direction
So they can chase me.
Me trying to shake the Messerschmitt who's running around on my tail.
On the left side is
a camera mount that looks diagonally
into the cockpit we used for the actor when he was there.
You just can't hide that kind of realism.
You'll see it, you'll feel it. There's just no getting around it.
NOLAN: We just spent a lot of time, really, working with the Panavision guys
and the IMAX guys, really trying to come up with interesting ways
to be able to get a sort of nodal point of view,
get a lens where the head of the pilot would be,
look around and see what the pilot would see.
Which was an extremely difficult thing to do.
HOSKING: Put a mount that sets the camera right
in the center between the two cockpits.
And Hoyte developed
a special lens, we call it the mirror-gag lens.
The ultimate thing is to make it look like it's shot on a GoPro,
but with the quality of an IMAX camera.
So we had lenses that could pivot and rotate
around its own axis,
that we could put an IMAX body
somewhere and then have the lens pivoting itself.
You know, giving much more flexibility and much more turnability
in a very confined space.
HOSKING: And that allows us to set the camera right where
the actor's eye or head would've been
And that's been really fun, 'cause then that puts you right
in the cockpit, in a spot that's really too small for an IMAX camera to be.
It's not just, you know, "I think we'll have Spitfires fly in formation."
But you also have the helicopter,
the camera plane that's flying with it.
NOLAN: Craig and his team, they really needed to take
a lot of time on the ground to really plan things.
What the pilots would do is,
they would talk to myself and Hoyte on the ground about the sequence
and how we saw it playing out and what we thought the shot
that we wanted was.
They would then talk amongst themselves and walk a pattern, literally.
Pretending to be an airplane, you know.
Sometimes they'd even hold their hands out like wings, you know.
And walk this pattern.
You know, if it's a figure eight, whatever,
talk through where they would break
and where they would rejoin the pattern.
VAN HOYTEMA: How they fly, which path they take
in order to line up with the enemies.
And for the pilots to understand that,
they also went up in the air with a very clear assignment.
It was particularly important when we were
trying to integrate the action with the boats in the water.
And you're trying to coordinate
an entire gag, an entire stunt,
an interaction of multiple airplanes with a ship that's in sea.
To stage a huge event below, like,
when there's the fire at sea,
and have that all coordinate with each other.
NOLAN: That becomes the hardest form of coordination we had to deal with.
And walking though the patterns
and really talking it through, and talking about
what was practical to achieve, that became very important.
VAN HOYTEMA: Understanding that very precise requirement from them,
they could really push their stunts a lot to the limit, I think.
NOLAN: We've done a lot of work, integrating
ground-based vehicles, fast-moving cars, with helicopters for example.
But air-to-air, the scale,
the size and the speed at which things happen,
very, very much more challenging than what we've done in the past.
HOSKING: Well, it was just a standard TwinStar camera helicopter,
so we use these a lot in Hollywood.
What's not standard is the shot-over camera system
that they developed that actually will encase an IMAX camera
that's a compact format enough that we can still fly at a good, fast pace,
almost keep up with the Spitfires, but not quite.
The Spitfires will go upwards of 200 knots, so,
we couldn't keep speed with them.
The helicopters could only shoot the Spitfires passing.
But in order to actually be in formation with them, you know,
we're flying over the English Channel with the use of this airplane.
I had to find a way to basically mount the cameras.
We've used an Aerostar airplane
with a IMAX camera on the front
and the tail of the aircraft.
We had to beef up the structure of the airplane
and then build the brackets themselves, that the camera attaches to.
Then there are special housings we had to enclose the cameras,
to give it a bit of aerodynamic shape and form
so the airplane camera still performed well
It's cool 'cause we were able to shoot nose and tail at the same time.
We have mounted cameras, so basically wherever I point the airplane
that's where the camera is going.
VAN HOYTEMA: When you work with Chris, you're there where the camera is.
And if the camera is
1,000 foot up in the air, upside down, that's where you'll be.
I would say, almost every shot that's in the film,
I mean, up there, Chris and I were there.
Together with our aerial DP, Hans Bjerno
and Craig Hosking, our pilot.
One of the things that Chris Nolan brings to the film industry
is his love of film and wanting to shoot it for real.
That goes to the aerial unit as well.
HOSKING: The helicopter is,
the first time that IMAX has been fit in with gyro stabilized head
that can fly at the speeds this can.
This has been a completely new thing
that's been brought to the world of IMAX.
No one has ever put an IMAX camera on a fixed wing
and done air-to-air at 200 miles an hour.
Putting an IMAX camera in a very capable aircraft
that's capable of turning and banking
and flying aggressively just like the fighters.
And the Yak, nothing like that's ever been created.
So, really, the production team brought in
three tools that have never been used before.
VAN HOYTEMA: I think that comes again from that, sort of,
will to ground everything in some sort of a reality.
Those sequences, they were very much designed around that principle.
They had to feel real.
OTERO: Yeah, almost in an instant.
Yeah, you feel that in the picture.
And it's really, really impressive.
It feels like guerrilla filmmaking, more than anything else.
He's on me.
I'm on him.
Jumping-off point
for shooting the aerial sequences,
the dogfights in particular, was to look back at what's been done before.
And looking back at particularly some of the older films,
where a lot of air-to-air stuff was done for real in-camera,
the one thing that always seemed to let it down
was the cockpit interiors.
So we analyzed why that was, and we felt that really it was
because there was always too much control exerted
on the lighting and the photography of the closeups.
The instrument panel, the face of the actor and so forth.
So, we approached our cockpit scenes
from the point of view of trying to firstly achieve as much for real
as possible in an airplane.
So, we used our Yak to provide a platform
that could actually take the actor up for a closeup actually in the air
with different camera angles and camera mounts.
We really wanted to be able to get our actors up into the air
so that it would feel real.
CRAIG HOSKING: The stunt coordinator, Tom Struthers,
got the idea to take an airplane like this
and modify it to look like a Spitfire.
And it's been a great project.
TOM STRUTHERS: We could have a camera mounted on that aircraft
and Chris could have his cast in the aircraft
and then he could have a professional film pilot fly that aircraft.
Now, the shots that we're gonna do,
there's an airplane gonna fly up in formation on us, on the right side.
You'll look over, look at him.
ANDY McCLUSKIE: When we have an actor sitting in the front
with a fake Spitfire grip and the fake instrument panel,
it's flown from the rear seat, which isn't normal.
It's normally flown from the front seat.
We could be filming at the same time, safely, and shooting.
JACK LOWDEN: Craig, the pilot, is behind me.
And he's obviously in charge of flying the plane.
And all my controls are disabled
apart from a couple of very key and essential controls
that I have to keep an eye on.
Basically built an airplane that we could fly with two people in it
but believe you're in a single-pilot airplane.
LOWDEN: You can look over and there is a Spitfire
banking around next to you.
It is absolutely insane.
A real actor in a live airplane in formation
with Spitfires with an IMAX camera.
It's just beyond belief that somebody would shoot a movie like that.
NOLAN: Then the trick was to match into that photography
with the stuff that we needed to do on the ground.
With the shots of the instrument panel,
pick-ups of the actors and what have you.
There was some footage that we weren't
gonna be able to achieve in a real plane.
And so there was a certain amount that we had to shoot on a set.
We basically took the point of view
of not using any green screens or blue screens and trying
to shoot things in such a way that there was always a real background.
Real water, an appropriate altitude and real sky.
And natural lighting.
And Hoyte, in particular, has an approach to these things that I think
provides a feeling of reality.
SCOTT FISHER: We built a gimbal that we could counterweight
for the weight of the cockpit
and everything, and then it could be operated by hand.
- Rolling! - Action.
Bandit. One o'clock. Break.
For the most part, Chris and I operated just by adding and subtracting weight
for the camera or different positions
and we were able to pitch and yaw and roll.
HOYTE VAN HOYTEMA: It was a thing of beauty.
It was a thing that could rotate
in two axes in the rotation as the plane goes.
And I think the success of that gimbal for me is still
that it was hand-operated, not machine-operated.
A man-operated piece of equipment.
Looking at the Heinkel.
And very much Chris' style, we didn't just put it up
against a green screen on a stage.
We found ourselves a nice cliff.
So, the Pacific Ocean was behind it, because ocean is ocean is ocean.
It was crazy. That thing was very close to the edge of the cliff.
So, all of the ocean is real.
The physical G-forces of being in that plane are replicated.
All the light mismatches, 'cause the clouds are going in and out.
That's what it is when you go and shoot something.
That's what Chris was striving for.
It was incredibly complicated making sure
that we had all the correct moves
that would cut in with the exterior plane shots.
Chris spent a long time working with Andrew Jackson
in the visual effects department
just to make sure that we had everything that we needed.
We started working quite early on with Chris on
laying out exactly what the action was
and what the planes were doing
during each one of the air battles that occur during the film,
so we'd pre-vized that and so we'd had that as a guide.
And action!
It's very nice to have that direct approach
and the direct relationship to what you're shooting
when you're shooting it.
That's, I think, what Chris is after with all the striving
towards using everything as real as possible.
The real objects in the real places.
It gives a credibility to the film.
A textural credibility to the film that is for the audience's experience.
NOLAN: In other words, we're trying to approach shooting all the stuff
from the point of view of not trying to control things
that we wouldn't be able to control
in the real-life photography, if you'd like.
And having an aerial platform
where we could actually film an actor pretending to fly the plane,
that gave us a base level of reality
to intercut with the real air-to-air photography
that had never really been done before in these kind of sequences.
And in that way, we really tried
to create a consistency to the dogfights
that the audience hasn't felt before in one of these films.
CHRISTOPHER NOLAN: There are no British Destroyers left of that period.
There is only one left at anchor in England.
It's a museum, effectively,
and there was no way that they were gonna let us pull that out to sea.
It wasn't practical, so we looked elsewhere
and we found a French Destroyer from slightly later.
It's a little bit longer than the British Destroyers,
but basically had a very similar design
and we were able to modify it
to make it match British Destroyers more closely.
NATHAN CROWLEY: Getting the Maillé-Brézé,
which came in quiet late in the day...
It's a museum ship in Nantes.
That was the full-size Destroyer. We needed one giant full-size Destroyer.
We had to do work.
We had to take all the modern '50s gear off it
and put some fake guns where they had rocket launchers installed.
When you're working on a 350-foot ship, the guns are massive.
The Maillé-Brézé wasn't under power,
so we had a tug on its side, away from camera,
to pull it out to sea and to bring it in.
The harbor authorities in Dunkirk were enormously supportive
and gave us enormous resources, and they gave us links
to tug boats to pull us, pilots to get us in.
They gave us an area in their dry docks
where we could have all our ships and work on them.
NOLAN: To me, the authenticity of having a real ship
that closely-enough resembles the British Destroyers,
that's the more important tonal authenticity, reality,
that we want to give the audience
so that they can feel that they're there.
So they can believe in the experience they're seeing in a tactile sense.
That, rather than the exact specifics
or CG telling the story.
Obviously, all those things can be made
as good as the research would allow.
But the overall patina of the film is going to suffer.
You're gonna have something that's somewhat removed.
Keeps the audience a little removed.
CROWLEY: Then we had to come up with, like,
"Okay, we need to find some ships
"that we can essentially scale to half-scale."
Half-scale ships just off the shore would look like full-size Destroyers
if we scaled down everything. Like, the windows,
we put window plugs, smaller guns, smaller rails,
and we'd have to clad them.
We'd have to paint these all battleship gray
and then we'd started a sort of layering of foreground, mid-ground, backgrounds.
NEIL ANDREA: The boats are out there and they're around,
kind of, but they're more like museum pieces.
Finding ones that actually had engines
and could do day-to-day tasks of filming
was a monumental task.
I mean, to say the least.
Not only just finding the ships and getting the ships
but dealing with the paperwork and the bureaucracy
and the red tape of moving them from country to country.
These are full-scale, large-sized ships.
CROWLEY: Some of the smaller boats, in profile,
look like Destroyers with a little bit of work.
The hospital ship, which mainly is the one that's docked on,
that was obviously full-size.
That was 270 feet.
JAKE MYERS: We found an old freighter
and we painted it with a big red cross on it
and we brought it down from Norway.
It came with this Norwegian crew of volunteers
that were really eager to be a part of the film
and have their boat used.
It's a big ship, so it really plays well into the scope of the film.
There were a lot of ships in Dunkirk that were rescuing those troops.
So that was our armada.
NOLAN: To me, it's always very important to try and work
with real things and real people.
That, to me, trumps everything else.
It's about a feeling of reality
rather than the pedantic, exact, precise re-creation
of something that exists historically in photographs.
CHRISTOPHER NOLAN: Weymouth was where we filmed the Moonstone leaving
and then arriving back at the end of this journey.
Two important parts of the story.
It's a very beautiful, very picturesque town,
and that allowed us to contrast
the sort of, lively, more friendly quality
of what was going on in England at the time
with the starkness of the beach at Dunkirk.
EMMA THOMAS: One of the moments in the film which really resonates for me
every time I see the shot
is the moment where the Moonstone sails alongside the big Destroyer
with all the hundreds of soldiers on it.
I think it's an incredible visual that sums up the idea
that just regular people, out on a weekend pleasure cruiser,
managed to really make a difference for the military.
That's one of the things that's most unusual, I think,
and exciting about this story.
JAKE MYERS: Moonstone's great.
As a principal boat in the film,
it's the hero boat that all the characters converge on to.
NOLAN: The type of yacht
we wanted the Moonstone to be based very much on,
a very common type of boat that was very prevalent
amongst little ships at the time.
We knew that we wanted to photograph
with the real little ships that we could bring over.
MYERS: Our marine department found this ship in Scotland
that was, kind of, of the style.
It wasn't actually a Dunkirk little ship,
it was an old wood boat
and the guy was selling it to us, you know, to give the money to charity.
NEIL ANDREA: We called him and asked him about it,
did the research on the boat, and it turned out
the Moonstone was made by a company called the Silver Shipyards
and Silver Shipyards had actually manufactured
a lot of the actual, real little ships
that had gone over and gone back.
It was period-correct, it was all original.
I went, turned it on, the original engine,
did a quick check on it, looked at it,
and went back and Chris signed off on it.
We had the boat shipped from Scotland to Dunkirk.
MYERS: We jumped on the chance. We bought it,
and it became the main location of the movie.
TOM STRUTHERS: When I first seen the Moonstone in Dunkirk,
it's a wooden hold,
old, vintage boat.
I took one look at it and I thought, "This is gonna be a hassle."
"If it doesn't bloody sink, I'll be surprised."
But, I was surprised.
That boat was indestructible.
We did some mechanical stuff on the Moonstone,
set it up kind of like you would with a car,
with a remote drive.
NOLAN: They were able to re-rig the steering,
so it could be steered either from the back of the boat
or from the wheelhouse,
depending on where the actor needed to be
and whether we needed a marine unit driver
to actually pilot the boat while the actor was acting.
Welcome to the wheelhouse of the Moonstone.
She's a motoring yacht.
The sail is just to provide stabilization,
but it's a motoring yacht.
Built in like, '35, beautiful boat,
you know, all wood inside.
We had to change the anchor and the sail,
we had to make our own sail.
Chris had mentioned in the production meeting
that Mark went through the boat,
and he wanted more personal details.
So, we did. We superimposed Mark Rylance's photo in some old photos.
There was a little sleeping quarters, and we put a lot of care in it,
to make it feel like that was his boat for many years.
MARK RYLANCE: Art direction is so fantastic in the film.
That's one of the things you enjoy.
Even, you open the drawers, and they've got props and things inside,
these beautiful old tins and things from the 1940s.
We've got a little single burner here for heating water to make tea.
RYLANCE: So, it's been an experience.
And, I've had lots of time to discover all their artwork on the boat.
NILO OTERO: We shot most of our footage at sea,
on the Moonstone itself.
You know, that's a 36-foot boat,
and to put a movie crew and your cast on there,
and shoot the boat without shooting yourselves,
uh, it got pretty acrobatic at times.
It, kind of, confined the space and brought us all close together.
MYERS: And the guys would go out on this boat,
and, you know, literally camera crew, and a limited people would be
in this small yacht, basically, all day.
NOLAN: We wanted to use the boat.
It's a real boat, we went out there and we shot it for real.
Hoyte and I both felt that the claustrophobia of the real boat,
even for the interiors,
rather than building sets, just being there,
that sense of claustrophobia needed to come across in the filmmaking.
HOYTE VAN HOYTEMA: The Moonstone had all these challenges,
very little space, very little crew,
you know, the will to have all those cameras in there,
just practically, working it with the actors,
you know, because, there's waves.
It was not always easy.
NOLAN: They all managed to find this boat that really fit wonderfully.
It was exactly the right type of boat
to be there alongside the real little ships.
I'm very, very pleased with the way the guys were able to that.
I think it's quite seamless.
STRUTHERS: It steamed ahead on every facet of what it did.
Chris' and the marine department, they had faith in them.
They pulled it out, they did it.
And it worked fantastically, it did a fantastic job,
that old boat, and I hope that it finds a home somewhere,
with someone who'll care for it,
after all the hammering that we gave it
on the film, and restore it to pristine condition.
Because it did a fantastic job.
I hope someone's gonna buy her and treat her well.
She maybe has become a big star,
the Moonstone.
JAKE MYERS: We had this whole section of the movie
that takes place on the English Channel.
We're not the first movie to be on the water,
we certainly wouldn't be the last.
But the common thinking is you go into a tank,
you get a green screen, you build all your ships.
Chris wanted to try to do everything practically
and that becomes challenging,
and, you know, even dangerous at sea.
Suspicions and fears about what was going to be possible
and what wasn't going to be possible.
If you can understand the reality you're faced with as a filmmaker,
you can then try and incorporate that into your methodology.
As opposed to fighting it.
MYERS: We brought our Marine department in and,
you know, could've talked to them about the traditional ways of doing that.
Getting boats out, feeding people on the water.
All of the things that you don't think about.
And then going on as many scout trips on the boats
with the crew, with my DP, with my designer,
with my AD.
And really experiencing the movement of the boats and what that would be.
And talking in great detail about how that's gonna photograph.
What's gonna work, what's not gonna work.
HOYTE VAN HOYTEMA: We did a whole bunch of scouts
and every time we went to scout, we always made sure we went in a boat.
Because always when we went out in a boat,
we learned about the waves,
we learned how logistically difficult it would be,
you know and how unpredictable it is.
TOM STRUTHERS: It showed how hard
it is actually to do a film on water.
It is very difficult.
Water movies are famously
frequently money pits.
They are very subject to weather.
NOLAN: Every time we went out on the water, we learnt something about
how we were gonna approach this.
The two basic philosophies that have merged
was to be on the boat with a hand-held camera
as much as possible because with a great hand-held cameraman like Hoyte,
that is your most stable camera platform.
That's your most versatile camera platform on a moving boat.
In culmination with having a very efficient camera but with
the EDGE arm mounted on the stabilized head,
so that we could have a crane on the front of this boat
that could keep pace with the other boats
and stabilize above the water to different degrees.
So we could either see the movement of the boat or not,
taken out as we wanted to.
So we could shoot boat to boat in a very versatile way as well.
Those became our two most important approaches for how to work on water.
I think it was really the first time that the EDGE guys had
put together in partnership with such a large craft that's so maneuverable
and mounted the crane in such a way that it had great access to the water,
and yet was a very robust camera platform,
in that it could go out in very, very challenging conditions.
DEAN BAILEY: Most rigs mounted on a boat
are limited to what the boat does
and how rough the seas are and the swells and the chop
from the wind.
And this particular unit allows us to be perfectly stable,
in any of those environments.
Not only can you pan and tilt it remotely
but it also takes out the movements, the camera movements you don't want.
We would hold the IMAX cameras and it would be controllable.
And that boat really, you know, became a key tool for that.
It was a very, very robust camera platform
compared with I think anything anyone's every done on the water before.
NOLAN: What we made clear to everybody early on was
we didn't want the calm, flat days,
because they weren't going to look right.
We wanted to be out there on the days when it was difficult,
when, traditionally, I think a marine unit would stand down.
EMMA THOMAS: We were very lucky
that we had a fantastic main coordinator in Neil Andrea,
who, I mean... I don't even know how he did what...
What he had to do in this film.
Neil really managed to put together a very, very complex and ambitious
set of circumstances with a very large number of boats,
out on the water at the same time.
These are challenging conditions.
NEIL ANDREA: We had boats on the beach.
We had boats coming back from the beach.
We had little ships heading towards the beach.
We had a Destroyer with two full-sized tugs
keeping it in position, full of extras.
We had patrol boats, minesweepers, torpedo boats
in the, you know, 30-meter range,
zipping around on the middle level.
And then behind that, we had our full-sized minesweepers
and other military ships.
There was so many different assets that were in these shots at the same time.
Ships, planes overhead, interacting multiple ships, camera ships,
all the, you know, guys in the water.
You know all these things kind of working at the same time.
ANDREA: Not only did we have issues of shooting in a very large port.
You know, one of the largest ports in the English Channel.
But also we had 7-meter tides.
You would be shooting on the mole in the morning,
you would go to lunch and come back and now the ships are down.
Down 20 feet.
So, you know, we dealt with that.
Timing was very crucial. Tides played a big part.
And we also had to lock the boats in and out every night.
It was controlled chaos.
We had those challenges in Dunkirk, just to name a few.
It was much too rough and much too wild to work.
To get stuntmen in the water, we needed to go somewhere safer.
And the inland sea gave us that.
NOLAN: At Hoyte's suggestion, we'd gone to IJsselmeer,
which is an enclosed inland sea in Holland.
VAN HOYTEMA: At some point, I just remembered about the IJsselmeer
and I gave Chris and Nathan the idea.
You know, we wanted to be at sea. We wanted to do it.
We didn't want to work with green screens, et cetera.
NOLAN: It looks like the sea. It's open water,
and it rolls the way the sea does.
VAN HOYTEMA: It looked big and it looked gray
and we didn't see the horizon.
Figured out it was only four meters deep, in most places.
NOLAN: And in being non-tidal, we could anchor
sets to the bottom.
VAN HOYTEMA: Which was perfect, because we needed to rig set pieces in there.
We needed to crash planes in it.
FISHER: We had crane barges and we'd set anchors out in the water.
And for the ships as well,
it was easy for them to drop anchors and kind of
hold the ships in position.
OTERO: It was fresh water, which is much easier to work with than salt water.
It was just an answer to a lot of prayers.
ANDREA: In the English Channel, you kind of expect a little bit of grief.
In IJsselmeer, we 're like, "Okay," finally, breathing a sigh of relief.
I'm like, "Okay, it's going to get better from here. Now's the easy stuff."
And it was actually worse.
We had bad weather from the start and it never stopped.
The wind would hit 30 knots on a pretty regular basis.
And it would create these waves that had a super short period,
which means they were super close together.
And it was just really destructive on boats and equipment and people,
and it was just banging those boats around.
We spent most of our time on the Moonstone, the boat.
That meant for a tight, little group of people.
The Moonstone was like my greatest challenge because
I knew that the bulk of the dialogue of the movie was there.
Wanting everything to be real, Chris wanted the engine to be running.
And the marine guys, Neil and his guys, were so cool.
They worked really hard with me to get the boat quiet,
to put sound proofing where I showed 'em in the engine compartments.
I used a lot of wireless mics on the boat.
We tried to boom everything we could,
which was tough for my boom guy
'cause he had to try and stand up on that boat that's going like that,
and people had to hold on to Hoyte to work the camera.
OTERO: We're talkin' about hand-holding an IMAX camera which is, you know...
Or worse, the 65.
Which, as a sound camera, is even heavier.
STRUTHERS: Basically you've got a 70-pound weight,
that if it falls in and you go in with it,
you're both goin' to the bottom of the bloody ocean.
VAN HOYTEMA: Sometimes we shot on 65mm, which is a beast.
And then we would change it to IMAX, which is a beast as well.
So, we would have to transfer one camera set off and the other camera set on
and we had to be into the waves
in order to create a relative stability.
I wasn't sure who was gonna win the battle sometimes between
the camera and Hoyte on a rolling deck.
There is a feel for being onboard a boat
that's conveyed superbly.
NOLAN: To see a bomber of that size,
the dynamics of that coming low over the boat,
and the sheer physics of it.
Pretty impressive.
FISHER: The thing is With Chris is,
he wants to stay the course at all times, you know.
So, if you set up for it, we're doin' it,
until we can't do it.
ANDREA: To do these things the way that Chris wanted them
and to make them as real as possible,
you have to get creative in a way that you
rig things in terms of hiding lines and anchors.
Sometimes we'd set stuff up and then at the last minute
the conditions would change really rapidly.
ANDREA: If the weather switched or something,
you know, move slightly, you had to just pull the plug,
call it off and reset and make everything happen,
which we did plenty of times.
STRUTHERS: I had my guys in the water,
and we had this biodegradable, like, I think it's like
a vegetable-type-thing in special effects,
made it look like oil on the water.
IAN CORBOULD: It was all food-based stuff.
It was like the food dye and also food thickeners.
And that's all it was, basically.
There was nothing toxic in there at all.
PAUL CORBOULD: The fire on the water, that was quite a challenge.
You know, we had these massive barges with
liquid propane tanks that we had to take like, miles out.
They put gas underneath the water so that, you know,
when it bubbled to the top they could light it,
and it would burn off and start it with a flare.
The gas bars have to be the right height underwater.
If they're too deep you don't get enough out of them.
STRUTHERS: It's a process that was like,
"Get 'em in the water, roll camera and get it lit."
And then, you know, we had an airplane that was a special effects airplane
that we then crashed into the water to create the flames.
FISHER: The crashing Heinkel, we worked that into our event
where we already had our fire set up in the water and had done some shots there,
and then we dropped some additional anchors in the water.
Chris wanted to include the actual ship, like it goes over the ship.
So we positioned that in the foreground
and then we had another crane barge that we could put behind that.
PAUL CORBOULD: We got the biggest crane that we could get onto a barge,
and basically we sunk like a two-and-a-half ton weight
in the water and fixed a cable to it.
FISHER: The crane would go up about 140 feet,
and then the cable went from there to our weight in the water.
So, it was like a real extreme angle.
And then we winched the plane up to the top of there
and released it and as it hit the water, we did our explosion on the plane itself
and ignited the propane in the water.
So we got a little bit of each in the same shot.
We built enough planes with the intention of crashing
as many as we could.
PAUL CORBOULD: They just built the Spitfire' cause they had the molds.
The first problem we had was that it wouldn't support the wings.
So, we had to put a structure inside the Spitfire,
just to hold it all together.
And to support, you know, we put a massive big tube up inside it,
so we could fire it off of our cannon.
ANDREA: We had a scene where the Spitfire was launched off of a barge,
and it's supposed to skip and kind of land in the water.
It launched off of the barge okay.
It hit and then quickly went to the bottom before anybody could get to it,
with an IMAX camera attached to it.
Clearly by the time it hit the water,
in five seconds, the thing was on the bottom.
VAN HOYTEMA: It took, I think, an hour for the divers
to really start to unstrap the camera
and by the time that we recovered the camera,
of course the tank had filled itself with water.
The material was great, it was totally undamaged, it looked fantastic.
I hasten to add, no Spitfires
were harmed in the making of this film.
No real Spitfires.
MAN: Action! ALL: Three, two, one!
ANDREA: There was like full attention.
When we were doing a big stunt,
especially when there were people in the water,
talent, stunts, whoever it was.
We're about to do a stunt rehearsal,
going off of this boat, under that big Destroyer.
ANDREA: Everybody was in full participation
and really paying attention,
and you had to because there was a lot of stuff going on.
It was pretty wild.
STRUTHERS: The water was rough
and, you know, we're trying to work in the water and we're getting blown around
and tryin' to shoot it.
If you asked any of the marine department people,
it's probably one of the most taxing
and hardest movies on water that they've ever done.
We had as many as 62 vessels on one day.
ANDREA: The little ships week, which, in terms of marine movement,
not marine work, was certainly one of the bigger water days in filmmaking.
I remember at the end of the day,
I was dizzy and I was standing next to Nilo Otero
and standing next to Chris
and they called cut and Chris just calmly looked over at Nilo and I,
and Chris goes, "It was good."
And Nilo and I looked at each other and just sat back, we just started laughing.
I was recalling it in my hotel room that night and just collapsing.
It was cold, you know, big winds, big waves.
Everyone worked so hard to achieve what we did.
ANDREA: Typically when you would see a film
like this you would look in the background
and you could clearly see that it was VFX.
It was real from the sand to over a mile offshore.
It was just layer and layer of ships.
And all these boats working together in unison.
NOLAN: Neil found ways to safely do that,
which is not easy with a large group of boats and a large crew out there.
That was part of Chris' talent is that he knew exactly what he wanted.
NOLAN: With these two different approaches,
hand-held camera on the boat,
and then this very stable camera platform, which was very versatile
and could move with the flotilla,
we were able to get a wide range of shots to really
try and communicate the experience of the characters
interacting with the environment.
MAN: Torpedo!
(PEOPLE SCREAMING)
CHRISTOPHER NOLAN: The approach on this film was always,
"What can we do for real?"
What can we do in-camera? What can we do with real boats?
You would think sinking a boat is easy.
And it is if you wanna just blow it up and have it sink.
EMMA THOMAS: One of the great things
about shooting as much as possible out in the water
with a real Destroyer
is that when you then have to cut to a set,
it sort of sells the set.
HOYTE VAN HOYTEMA: To start there means that
you're grounding everything in a certain reality,
and that reality becomes your guidance.
We had a hospital ship out of Norway.
Stravanger. It was a 1930s cargo ship.
NOLAN: Can we take a full-size hospital ship
and smash it into the dock?
You wouldn't think you could,
but with enough persuasion...
And with effects, I was able to build a section
of the dock that was safe to do it with.
We are able to actually do something like that for real.
That boat is very much crashing into the mole.
It's as real as we can make it.
Those Norwegian guys were game. We hooked up the back of the boat
with a huge rope to the pier,
and they just gave it the gas and it rocked the whole boat
in and out of the pier. It was pretty amazing.
We originally planned to do more high explosives in the water,
but there was ecological concerns,
and so we really started experimenting with high-pressure air mortars.
That way, there wasn't any fear of shock
that would hurt animals or the ships.
Each water cannon had about 500 liters, about half a ton
of water in them. So we strapped three together
and we made a raft.
I think it makes the look more menacing,
what's actually going on in the background.
Eventually in the film it sinks and we had to build a miniature one
that we then sank into the harbor.
That was done on a massive crane, biggest crane we could find,
and basically just lowered it into the water.
ANDREA: This is in Dunkirk harbor.
These are things that you typically do in a tank somewhere
and here we are, right there on the mole, and we made it happen.
The sinking trawler was a thorn in my side.
MYERS: The trawler wasn't so easy to put down.
Except for when we got to Holland the first day,
we took it out to the sea 'cause that's where it sinks.
It literally got out to the water, and ocean's strong.
Just broke it in half.
We needed this slow, controlled sink.
We rigged the system where we had airbags,
these huge basically big pillows full of air that we had rigged
on valves and we could lower and raise the water.
We weren't doing this in a tank.
This is all in the open ocean,
so we had to try it a few different times
and I think finally on the last day we got it.
I was happy to see that thing go.
NOLAN: We were able to get quite a lot in-camera.
Then combining that with tank work
using forced perspective sets,
we were able to build very, very convincing reconstructions
of parts of the Destroyer as if it were to sink.
CROWLEY: We knew that we would have to go to a giant tank
and roll a ship at some point
but we needed to do more than just one ship.
On any film, you're always trying to do things as cheaply
and efficiently as you possibly can
and we had a brilliant set that was
kind of a Frankenstein version of two different boats.
I called it the "Frankenhull."
One side of the ship was one ship,
and one side was the other ship.
It was on a gimbal, and they could twist and move it
and make the whole thing move around. It was pretty incredible.
Something I had never seen before.
FISHER: There were some scale issues
because the ships that we had were much bigger.
Portions of the ship were full scale,
but then other parts were at a little reduced scale, so that way
when you got back and looked at it, it looked correct.
CROWLEY: Looking at it in Falls Lake in Universal, which is where we put it,
people would come by and it's like,
"What on earth are you building? It looks terrible."
It looked like we were the worst set builders in the world.
But when you were actually on the deck,
it actually became a 350-foot Destroyer.
THOMAS: It was great to be able to use a tank here in LA
in a very controllable environment
where the weather was a lot warmer than France and Holland.
Rode a few gnarly waves.
What a relief! There was no rain.
VAN HOYTEMA: On days like this,
Chris and I would look at each other and say,
"I don't like this."
It's warm, the water is acceptable in temperature.
This is all too convenient and it's all too nice,
and it's something you have to learn to live with.
MYERS: At Warner Bros., Stage 16 is the biggest stage, I think, in LA,
and hidden under the floors,
because the floor hadn't been pulled up in 10 years or more,
is this big water tank.
We did interior tank work for some of the night scenes
and for the Trawler itself and for the Destroyer interiors.
CROWLEY: We built this set in the tank so we could
use huge dump tanks and flood it.
I think everybody at Warner came to see the thing filled again.
'Cause it's kind of like a rite of passage,
a little bit of old-fashioned Hollywood.
MAN: Action! Cut!
Stand by.
FISHER: We got big hydraulics cylinders that could shake the entire set.
And then we had big dump tanks and then
we could fill it as if it was sinking.
That was a lot of fun 'cause it was in a controlled area
and we would fire water
to these specific areas where the torpedo had hit and buckled the walls.
(PEOPLE SHOUTING)
We drained it back down and then put the Trawler in.
NOLAN: Scott Fisher and his guys, we had to design an approach with Nathan,
a set that could actually sink,
where we could pump water in and do this safely but feel like
we are in tremendous, tremendous jeopardy.
It was a very, very complicated thing to achieve.
CROWLEY: There was nothing simple about this film.
If you weren't in the sea
or on a boat or on a beach with crazy tide,
you were underwater in a tank on a stage,
so there was no avoiding getting wet.
FISHER: There was a lot of continuity stuff with all the ships.
The Trawler was one of those where you did the exteriors on the beach.
The tide comes in, it starts to float.
The soldiers start to shoot at it, then as soon as it's afloat,
we're back in LA, we do the interior,
the same shots are going through the hole.
Water is pouring in, it's sinking. Once it gets to a point were it's full
and they have to abandon ship, we're back in Holland.
Then it goes rest of the way down.
Almost every asset on the movie had that sort of a life to it.
NOLAN: Each shot in the sequence has a different technique
and a unique technique, so hopefully that way the audience isn't able to
see the trick of what we're doing, 'cause the trick is always changing.
Chris is very good at doing the geography changing.
He's got a good mind for being able to cross-cut that geography
and make it completely seamless.
A lot of these techniques are things that were
quite prevalent in filmmaking
up until really the rise of computer graphics in the '90s.
There's a great history to all this stuff
and there's lot of knowledge out there
in the filmmaking community.
If you just challenge people, you just dig a little deeper and say,
"Okay, what would we have done
"20 years ago and what can we learn from that and bring to that now?"
JOSHUA LEVINE: I think Dunkirk has gone down as the event it is
partly because so many different kinds of people were involved in it.
So you had the Army, obviously, who were getting away.
You had the Navy, who were coordinating that escape.
But then beyond that, you also had civilians.
You had ordinary people whose boats were coming across.
It was truly something that captured the imagination
because such a wide spectrum was involved.
NOLAN: We contacted the Little Ships Association
very early on in the process
and we were able to put out the feelers for who will be willing to
bring the boats over for our shooting period.
When we heard about Christopher's film
and the idea of using real Dunkirk vessels,
that became quite exciting.
Part of the reason or owning these ships
is to try to remind people
of the history of Dunkirk and how important it was.
I think it's absolutely amazing that,
when they are making a film like this, they have actually
taken the decision to actually use the boats that were there at that time.
There are so few little ships left. There were over 900 originally.
There's reckoned to be 100 or 150 still in existence.
So at any one time there's probably only 50 that are seaworthy.
BERNIE ROWE: This is Mimosa,
which is a 1935 Thornycraft.
Um, she was built at Hampton Wick on the Thames as a gentleman's cruiser,
but in 1940 she was taken by Lieutenant Commander Dickson
three times over the Channel
to rescue troops off the beaches in Dunkirk as part of Operation Dynamo.
PALMER: Hilfranor was built in 1935
as a twin screw gentlemen's motor yacht.
She went across from Ramsgate to Dunkirk.
Elvin was built by Mr. E. L. Vincent, hence her name.
1937 gentleman's motor yacht.
She went to Dunkirk in 1940, one of the last boats to leave.
She landed back in Ramsgate with 38 people on her way back.
PAUL GILSON: When the boats were called up in 1940,
she was one of six boats that left Leigh-on-Sea,
that's Essex, England, with their crews.
They answered the call and came to Dunkirk to evacuate the troops.
This boat was an admiral's pinnace,
which means it was designed to ferry the admiral back and forth to the Navy ship.
DRAPER: This boat was built to go into St. Ives Harbour, which is sand,
and she can sit over on the sand quite safely.
She was one of the ones taken to come up the beach
and take men directly off the sand.
GREG McLEISH: New Britannic was instrumental
in rescuing some 3,000 soldiers.
It's credited by the Dunkirk Little Ship Restoration Trust
as saving the most amount of soldiers off the beach.
So it holds the record for that.
The Princess Elizabeth was actually there,
which was a Thames paddle steamer.
So then that was actually on the mole.
This is the Princess Elizabeth, we just pulled it out today.
It is actually an original Dunkirk little ship.
Has no engine and it's been
in the center of the harbor for a couple of years now,
and the town let us borrow it, we pulled it out, uncoupled it
and used a bunch of tugboats to drag it out here on our pier
and shoot with it today, but it is one of the boats
that was actually there in 1940.
CROWLEY: There was a certain satisfaction
in rebuilding the mole and having a ship
that was actually on the mole at that time.
Chris was very conscious about
making sure that the little ships were handled with white gloves.
You know, these are not only historically significant,
but a lot of them have had hundreds of thousands of dollars in renovations,
so it was important that we really, really took care of these boats.
They've been very mindful of our boats.
They are 80-year-old boats.
And I think the crew have just been very, very special.
Looking after us, but more so looking after our boats.
GILSON: One of the things that it's brought home to us
is how lucky they were with the weather
on the day of the evacuation.
That word, "Miracle of Dunkirk," definitely came into practice.
McLEISH: We have been filming out off the coast near Dunkirk
and we're really just doing maneuvers
to copy what the boats did 76 years ago,
which was driving into rescue the soldiers off the beaches.
Just seeing the soldiers,
we went right up to the beach and took them on board Elvin,
and it really makes you appreciate the risks that they were going through
and how the country just all pulled together.
SAMANTHA: I don't think I truly appreciated
what I'd bought until we went to Dunkirk.
Just the overwhelming sense of pride and honor and that the fact that
we would never have won the war if it wasn't for the little ships.
ANDREA: Being part of that little ships' week
and seeing the owners of those boats
make the effort to come across the English Channel and be part of
the film was really unbelievable.
Everybody left with a really, really good feeling, was really proud.
It made me want to cry, it was so humbling.
It really is humbling. It's great.
ROWE: This boat is already 80 years old and as much I'd love to think
she's gonna do another 80 or 100 years,
you gotta accept, it's made of teak on oak frames
and she might not last that long.
So it's good to have it in the can and people will be able to look at it
in another way. And that's really why we're here.
For the boat, rather than for us.
McLEISH: It's an incredible story to have
338,000 soldiers rescued by the little ships.
Those ships were boats that had actually come across.
We were shooting at the same time of year,
in the same place that they came to.
And there were moments there where you looked at
a very large re-creation of the events,
and that felt quite extraordinary.
I think this all stemmed from Chris Nolan and a watch.
(WATCH TICKING)
CHRISTOPHER NOLAN: We wanted to have a rhythm
derived almost entirely from the ticking of a clock,
using a recording of one of my watches.
He had Hans record the watch
and that was the basis of the idea.
NOLAN: My gamble on this film
was always that in trying to tell a story
of immediate present-tense tension and nothing else,
that, over the course of the film,
it would add up to an emotional response.
When the events are as freighted with emotion
as the Dunkirk story is,
you don't need the same familiar Hollywood theatrics.
EMMA THOMAS: Chris had a concept
for a way that the music would be able to amp up the tension
of the overall story of the film.
We wanted to only have the music play
the visceral sense of tension in the film.
There's a musical structure called the Shepard tone,
which is a sort of audio-illusion in music.
It was used in The Prestige.
You've got a tone that is continually ascending
even though, obviously, it can't continuously ascend.
But it feels like a magnetic drive that pulls you forward.
NOLAN: Just as the Shepard tone is increasing,
I wanted to try and have a series of more and more intense set pieces
that are interacting.
So, as one storyline is climaxing, the other one is just beginning.
And in that way, try and put the audience
into a very heightened state for as long as possible.
I like to cut without music.
So in the past, I've always cut without music.
This time, we had to have a very tight integration
of musical rhythm and editing
that we'd never really had to do before.
(TENSE MUSIC PLAYING)
It was a complete reinvention,
I think, of the way we do it,
and incredibly challenging to put that mechanism
on top of something that is already complicated.
NOLAN: Hans managed to put together
a very long tempo map for us,
so that we could actually cut
with some sense of how the rhythm and the music was gonna work.
SMITH: We were trying it in a very crude way.
And then we finally laid it up on 20 minutes of the movie,
and we played it to different people and everyone said the same thing.
They didn't know what was going on but it was, like...
Made them incredibly tense.
NOLAN: Gradually, the music was built up from those tempo maps.
That process took months and months
and had to happen in parallel with the whole editing of the film.
THOMAS: The score, I think, is a very integral part
of why, when you watch the film,
you get to the end and feel like you've run a marathon.
(TENSE MUSIC PLAYING)
I wanted a very, very specific integration
of sound and music.
SMITH: When you listen to it, the boat's always accelerating.
We didn't want anything rhythmic in the movie
that ever felt like it was static or slowing down.
(ENGINE WHIRRING)
What are you doing?
You do know where we're going.
France.
Into war, George,
I'll be useful, sir.
All these motors, by the way, are in sync with the music,
like, exactly framed perfectly.
JOHN LEE: They had the idea that it would be a 100-minute musical piece
that goes from the beginning to the end.
So, obviously, if you take a frame out of reel one,
even if it's a frame,
it's like, "Okay, now you've ruined all the other reels."
Chris is the master of making a completely chess-moved script,
where if you move the wrong way, you're gonna get killed.
NOLAN: When you have a script that's structured in this way,
every change to one area has a massive effect on the other.
It's three-dimensional chess
and it's a real, real puzzle for the editor.
SMITH: We screened this film to ourselves so many times.
Everything affected everything else, so it was just pointless.
You couldn't just look at it in isolation.
NOLAN: The challenge was how to balance
the apparent subjective time
of a Spitfire pilot in the cockpit of a plane,
with somebody who's on the beach for a week
with these civilians coming over for one day on a boat.
One very long, intense day.
Keeping all the stories alive was vitally important
because the last thing you want is to pop back into a scene
and have it run like... Forget what it was that they'd left.
MAN: Action!
LEE: I'd gotten the script and I went through
and I wrote a whole document that said
when we see everything from whose point of view,
like, what scene it is.
And then when Lee was cutting, I could say,
"That scene is also seen from the deck of the Moonstone later."
The point where the three story lines connect,
where that Destroyer tips, do we see that from the boat first?
And then, does Tom Hardy see it from the plane?
Because everything's starting to come together at that point.
We experimented quite a lot with that
because you wanted the emotion to come at the right moment,
not too late, not too early.
Normally, you would cut fast for action.
LEE: [remember on Dark Knight we were very worried about that.
Lee was worried, "Should I cut slower?"
"Should I change the rhythm for the IMAX?"
NOLAN: With IMAX, you let the audience find what's in the frame,
you let them experience what's in the frame for that little bit longer.
And so, you have to find other ways
in which to affect the pacing and rhythm of the film.
SMITH: It's not a quick-cut film.
And yet, people who see it are breathless at the end of it
and they're all commenting on the relentless pace.
But you look at it, there's nothing quick-cut in this movie,
at all.
(GUNS FIRING)
I think Lee did a remarkable job holding it all together
and allowing us to very quickly try different versions.
Yeah, it's been an amazing experience
and people were very emotional at the end of this movie,
which was, you know... Means it worked.
LEE: Every time we do one of Chris' films
it's harder than the last time, which is a lot of fun, I gotta say.
Because it's just a real challenge.
An ordinary movie seems too easy, you know?
SMITH: The most amazing thing
is that you can make a film like this that is complicated,
yet doesn't appear complicated.
You can watch this movie and get out of it what you will
and still get to the end of it and be totally satisfied.
EMMA THOMAS: When I look back at the shooting of Dunkirk,
I think of it in some ways as being three films rolled into one,
because we had massive logistical issues going up in the planes
and standing out on the beach.
Being sandblasted, being out on the boats for days on end.
It's hard work and it's a lot to ask of a crew.
But I think it was worth it
and I hope that all the crew will feel that it was worth it.
GARY FETUS: That's like swashbuckling, old-school filmmaking.
How can you not be moved by that?
We're all in a foreign country working as hard as we can
but we know the end result is gonna be something beautiful.
JEFFREY KURLAND: It was a really kind of great crew.
We were like this family.
We just hung in together. Everybody shared everything with one another.
Everybody was helping everybody out.
It was terrific because we were all kind of there
doing this one thing, very earnestly.
Film crews are very particular. They like to make good product.
They like to make product that's challenging.
You know, none of us wants to go to work and be bored in that way.
All this stuff might be logistically difficult,
but that's exactly what we thrive on. We relish it, a film like this.
It doesn't come along that often.
I think this was a rare one in terms of what it asked us to do.
It's a once-in-a-lifetime thing.
THOMAS: It was quite a special thing to be a part of.
The moments where it really came home to me
were actually the moments where I was feeling worn down
by the physicality of what it really is like
to be out in the elements on that beach for days on end.
But, of course, I was able to go back to a nice warm bed at night.
And there were definitely moments where I thought,
"Gosh, I just can't imagine what it would be like to be out here for real
"and really having people attacking me." It was quite something.
KENNETH BRANAGH: It's very hard not to be moved by,
in this case, the recreation on the anniversary
76 years on from this world-shattering and world-changing event.
World history would not have been the same
if Dunkirk had not played out the way that it did.
And its place in our military, social, political and emotional history
can never be underestimated.
HOYTE VAN HOYTEMA: A lot of World War ll movies
have been slightly unrelatable for me.
And that was interesting about going to Dunkirk,
that it was actually something that was extremely familiar.
In the streets where I would walk as a kid,
there's always this sense of Second World War still around.
It's an honor and a pleasure to be part of bringing that to the screen.
It's our very recent history,
and a little bit too much people are already forgetting about it.
FIONN WHITEHEAD: I think the whole business of making historical films
and making films about events like this is
it's kind of cathartic in a way, it's kind of therapeutic.
The experience of screening the film
for veterans, for people who were really there,
is a very daunting thing.
To look at an audience and see people with their medals on.
Sitting there ready to see your telling of their story.
It was a very moving thing to go through.
We went along to meet these veterans.
We asked them, you know, "What was 'Dunkirk Spirit' to you?
"What did it mean?"
And what was so interesting was that they gave different interpretations,
different memories, different viewpoints of what it was that they'd been through.
When I was growing up, I used to hear this phrase, "Dunkirk Spirit."
And for a long time, I didn't understand what it meant
and why people brought it up.
And then I began to find out that it was to do with never giving up
in impossible situations
and actually clutching a victory from the jaws of disaster.
When I think about "Dunkirk Spirit," I think of triumph over adversity.
And it's something that English people pride themselves on.
It's that sort of grit and determination in the face of really awful odds.
I think it's also to do with the value of amateurs.
People who are not professionally trained.
It's something... Can sometimes be really valuable and helpful.
That spirit of "One for all and all for one,"
I mean, it's a spirit we really need again.
I always interpreted it
that it was about always having hope that it would turn out okay.
I think that's what the lads on the beach had.
They had to have. Otherwise, what was the point of waiting for a boat to come?
Especially when you know how many people did lose their lives here,
and how many soldiers were sacrificed but how many were saved.
It's such a great achievement.
And for me, that's the spirit of Dunkirk.
That even as deep and as low as we were at that point,
we managed to save so many people in an element of complete destruction.
It transcends the fact that this is an English story.
It's a world story.
It just shows that humans, when pushed,
will never cease to surprise you.
TOM STRUTHERS: It was a "can do" attitude in those days.
They didn't rely on someone else to do it for 'em,
where I think sometimes now
we rely on other people to do things for us, rather than all pitch in.
Going back to the film crew, I think we all pitched in, so to speak.
We didn't rely on someone else to do the job for us.
It was a team effort that brought this film across the line,
from everyone down from Chris all the way down,
the best was brought out in everyone.
NOLAN: The "Dunkirk Spirit" means different things to different people.
For some of them, it was the little ships coming across.
That coming together of society.
For others, it was the men on the front lines.
The rear guard who held off the Germans while the evacuation took place.
And for some others, they saw it as more of a concept from Churchill propaganda
and didn't believe in it as much.
What it's come to mean for British people
is the idea of a pulling together of community,
of the tremendous things that can be achieved when we stand together.
And that's why the story resonates,
because it is one of the great stories that gives you this incredible message
of hope.
This incredible message that in the face of seemingly-insurmountable odds,
a community can pull together and achieve extraordinary things
that could not happen individually or through the actions of individuals.
I think one of the great myths of fictional movies
is that individuals can completely save the world,
change the world, whatever.
I think the story of Dunkirk, as applied to movies, hopefully,
gives us something different. It's a different type of story.
It's a story in which a wide range of people come together
with a communal spirit and achieve something extraordinary.