Dunkirk: The History Behind the Major Motion Picture. Joshua Levine

Quiet on the Western Front there’s a thread in war films of wanting to be sophisticated, wanting to humanise the enemy. But of course when you put yourself in the position of a soldier on that beach, for the vast majority their contact with the enemy is extremely limited and intermittent. Most of what you are seeing is bombs dropping. Most of what you are hearing is gunfire from a couple of miles away, which must have been more terrifying than we can really imagine as it gets closer and closer and closer. What we are trying to do with the sound mix right now is to figure out how to create that audio space, so that the battle appears to be ten miles away, then seven miles away, then four miles away, and how absolutely terrifying it would have been for the guys there on the beach.

      It’s what you don’t know that is important in the film. So, in the expositional scene we give hopefully just enough historical information. The idea is that [the characters] Tommy and Gibson wouldn’t know anything about what was going on and then they’d be given disquieting scraps of information like ‘we’re trying to get forty-five thousand people off the beach’, ‘there are four hundred thousand people on the beach’ and then you get that ‘OK, every man for himself’ feeling. I was interested in the idea of what people wouldn’t know rather than explaining everything we know now. If you’re inside an event, particularly back then, when you didn’t have smartphones and everything, it’s pretty difficult to get any perspective on what’s going on. One of the most moving things about the Dunkirk story to me – in fact, definitely the single most moving thing – is that when these guys finally were rescued, when they finally made their way home, they went home with a sense of shame. That they went home, the vast majority of them, thinking they were going to be a huge disappointment to the British people back home and then found that they were welcomed as heroes was to me one of the most extraordinary turnarounds, emotionally, in history, and it was because they didn’t know what was going on. So we have them reading Churchill’s speech in the newspaper. They wouldn’t have been in Parliament, they wouldn’t have been able to do what films do traditionally, which is to cut to Winston Churchill speaking to the Cabinet or preparing his speech. They were just going to get it from the newspapers, so they find out after the fact what it is that they’ve been through.

      JL: Are there any modern parallels? Are people going to see it as something that happened x years ago or are they going to see it as something that could happen again?

      CN: One of the great misfortunes of our time, one of the horrible, unfortunate things with the migrant crisis in Europe, is that we are dealing once more with the mechanics and the physics of extraordinary numbers of people trying to leave one country on boats and get to another country. It’s a horrible resonance but it’s very easy in our technologically advanced times to forget how much basic physics come into play. Reality is insurmountable. If you have a vast number of people in one place and they need to get someplace else and they can’t fly and they have to get on boats – to overcrowd the boats, with that human desire for survival … it’s unthinkably horrible to see it on our front pages in this modern day and age. But it’s there. With that going on in the world today, I don’t think you can in any way dismiss the events of Dunkirk as being from another world or another era.

      JL: So what war films do you like?

      CN: One of my favourite films – one of the films I most admire – is Terence Malick’s Thin Red Line. It has almost no relevance to this film whatsoever, but it has had relevance to a lot of my other films. I think Memento is heavily indebted to Thin Red Line. We did actually screen it before this film, but it wasn’t relevant except in one key textural, stylistic sense, which is that it is timeless. It feels very accessible and contemporary even though it’s about World War II, and that was certainly something that we wanted to try and achieve in the texture of this film, but as far as the artistic underpinnings and the way in which it tells the story it felt very unrelated. I didn’t look at too many war films. We looked at Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, which was also instructive because it has a horror movie aesthetic. It has an approach to intensity and gore that’s so absolute and successful that you realise that you have to go elsewhere. You can’t try and compete with that film. It would be like trying to compete with Citizen Kane. I mean it’s an absolute. That’s the horror of war right there. So we went more in a suspense direction. I didn’t watch too many war films because I read – I think it’s reprinted in the liner notes of the Blu-Ray on the Criterion Edition of Thin Red Line – a piece of writing about war films by James Jones, who wrote the novel of the Thin Red Line, and it’s humbling. This is somebody who had been at war and had written about war and he exposes the devices, the bullshit of war movies in a merciless way that to a filmmaker sitting down to write a film set during a real moment in history was extremely daunting. One of the things he says is ‘What more can be said about war after All Quiet on the Western Front?’ So I went back to look at All Quiet on the Western Front, which I had not seen in many, many years. It’s incredible how all-encompassing it is as a statement about war, how horrible war is. Even though the craft of filmmaking was more in its infancy than now – it’s black and white, it barely has sound – it’s extraordinarily well made. And by virtue of the fact that it’s about Germans but made in the Hollywood system, the anti-nationalist point of view is so powerful, so strong. And that’s what elevates it above any other anti-war film made since. It’s so relentless in its depiction of how awful war is, it’s so unsparing in its depiction of how nationalist myths, jingoistic myths, propagate the idea of war as glorification. I don’t think they’d ever have been allowed to do that if it was made about the Americans and the British.

      JL: So is your film a sort of successor to that?

      CN: No, not at all. Because I did that reading, that research, it pushed me further in the direction that I had already been heading, not making a war film but making a survival story because that was what I felt confident of doing. I have not fought in a war. It’s my worst nightmare. I can’t imagine doing that. So to me Dunkirk becomes a survival story. The terms of the success or failure for me are survival, and that’s why when one of the soldiers at the end says ‘all we did was survive’, the blind man replies ‘That’s enough.’ Because in the terms of Dunkirk, that was the definition of success. Which is where Churchill’s ‘Inside this defeat there’s victory’ comes from. That’s the particular situation I felt confident trying to tell.

      JL: Do you have anyone in your family who fought?

      CN: My grandfather died in World War II. He was a navigator on a Lancaster.

      JL: Good Lord. Do you know how many missions he survived?

      CN: He survived forty-five. He was meant to retire, but I think he died on the forty-sixth. After forty-five, they would then go and instruct new pilots and he was right there. He’s buried in France, and we went to visit his grave while we were making the film, which was very moving. He was in his thirties when he died and he was the old man of the crew, they looked up to him as a father figure. I mean they were kids. They were eighteen, nineteen.

      JL: Do you watch your films again?

      CN: I do, yes.

      JL: And when you watch them do you judge them? How do you watch a film you made several years ago?

      CN: You wind up watching them for various reasons fairly soon after you finish, for the video release, for this and that, all kinds of technical reasons. And these days my kids are interested to see The Dark Knight or whatever and I’ll sit and watch it with them. But the reasons go away over time and you stop seeing the films. It’s a very long time since I have seen Memento. There are filmmakers who never watch their films. But I’m interested to because they change over time as you get further away from them. You start appreciating them in a more objective way – what’s good, what’s bad – and they become a little bit more of their time, I suppose.

      JL: Yes.

      CN: Which isn’t a cheerful thought, because you don’t want to think of yourself as ageing and being very much of your time, but you are …

      JL: But how could you be anything else?

      CN: Yes, it’s what we all are. But your highest aspiration is to make a film that