94 DUNKIRK
Emma Thomas, hired a small yacht to sail the 26 miles from England to Dunkirk— a
Channel crossing that proved to be unexpectedly arduous. Almost 20 years and a
string of highly successful films (e.g., Memento, the Batman trilogy, Interstellar) later,
Nolan felt he was ready to take on an epic- scale war film. He started by reading
firsthand accounts by Dunkirk survivors at the Imperial War Museum and also
relied on Forgotten Voices of Dunkirk (Ebery, 2010): an oral history compiled by his-
torian Joshua Levine, who was hired as the film’s historical advisor. Nolan and
Levine also interviewed a number of el derly Dunkirk veterans in person. After
researching the battle, Nolan deci ded to make a film that would use fictive char-
acters and concentrate, à la Hitchcock, on building suspense insofar as the evac-
uation was a tense race against time. He also opted to emphasize chaos and
danger by creating a nonlinear narrative structure that crosscuts between three
perspectives— land, sea, and air— though not in the conventional way that would
indicate actions in each sphere happening si mul ta neously. To further concentrate
mood, Nolan kept the emphasis on visual storytelling; dialogue is so sparse that
the screenplay came in at only 76 pages, whereas the film’s running time clocked
in at a modest 106 minutes: Nolan’s shortest film to date.Production
In keeping with his preference for analog over digital formats and to achieve opti-
mal image quality, Nolan shot 75 percent of the movie using 15/70-mm IMAX film
(the other 25 percent was shot using Super Panavision 65-mm film). Nolan also
refrained from using computer- generated imagery (CGI). Other than a few “name”
actors (e.g., Kenneth Branagh, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy), Nolan deci ded to cast
young unknowns in key roles. Principal photography began at Dunkirk— with a
film crew of 200, hundreds of extras, and some 50 boats—on 23 May 2016, almost
76 years to the day that the actual evacuation began. After a month of filming on
Dunkirk’s beaches and dunes, the shoot moved to The Ijsselmeer, a closed- off
inland bay in the central Netherlands, to film scenes supposedly taking place at
sea. In late July the production then moved to Dorset, England, to film the depar-
ture and arrival of Mr. Dawson’s boat, Moonstone, at Weymouth harbor (set- dressed
to look like 1940). Related scenes of evacuees being put on trains after disembar-
kation were filmed at nearby Swanage Railway Station. Thereafter, some interior
filming took place at Warner Bros. studios in Burbank, California, while additional
exterior scenes were shot at Point Vicente Interpretive Center and Light house, Ran-
cho Palos Verdes, a location remote enough to allow for loud simulated gunfire
and explosions. Fifteen weeks of filming concluded on 2 September 2016.Plot Summary
[I. The Mole] Tommy (Fionn Whitehead), a young British private, walks the streets
of Dunkirk with fellow soldiers as German leaflets fall on them from the sky,
informing them that they are surrounded and should surrender. Suddenly shots
ring out. Though all of his comrades are killed as they try to seek cover, Tommy
makes it to an Allied- held street barricade. He soon arrives at the beach and meets
Gibson (Aneurin Barnard), another young soldier, who is burying a dead soldier