Dunkirk will no doubt be a central point of discussion throughout the year in cinema (we’ve already had two differing takes) and far beyond, and for those looking to go behind the scenes of its making, today brings a number of wide-ranging talks with Christopher Nolan about his WWII epic (as well as one great conversation he moderated with Edgar Wright about Baby Driver). Ranging from the nitty-gritty technical details to the historical context (and why not a lot of it is in the film) to his thoughts on the future of filmmaking, all these are a must-watch after seeing his suspenseful thriller, preferably in IMAX 70mm if you have the opportunity.
“The idea was that you don’t depart from a very human scale of storytelling,” Nolan tells NPR. “You don’t cut away to generals in rooms with maps kind of, you know, talking about the politics or the history or whatever. You just stick with what people at the time would have seen and experienced. And so what I wound up doing is fragmenting the story into three different story lines that braid together, and broadly speaking that’s land, sea and air. So we really try to put you on that beach, we try to put you in the cockpit of that spitfire above the beach, we try to put you on a boat coming over to help with the evacuation. And the idea is that as the stories cross cut, we’re building up a bigger picture of the events for the audience who doesn’t understand or doesn’t know the story.”
Check out Hans Zimmer’s score below, along with all of the director’s extensive talks thus far.
If you haven’t listened to our discussion of Dunkirk yet, see below.