Operation Dynamo is not well known in the United States. It is not particularly well known anywhere outside the United Kingdom. But that is a great shame – because it has huge international significance. If the BEF had been captured or destroyed at Dunkirk, Britain would almost certainly have been forced to surrender. She would then have become, as Churchill warned his Cabinet, a slave state, allowing Hitler to concentrate all his efforts on the Soviet Union. And without Britain as a partner, it is difficult to see how the United States could have opened a second front.
But let’s set any conjecture aside – because none is necessary. Had Britain surrendered we would all be living in a very different world today. My family would not be alive because all the Jews would have disappeared from Britain many years ago. And without Britain to preserve freedom and the rule of law, the totalitarian norms of Nazi Germany would have bled throughout Europe. Barbarism, intolerance and coercion would be the natural order of things.
The closing ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics featured a vignette of Winston Churchill, played by Timothy Spall, emerging from a model of Big Ben. Here we all are, the organisers seemed to be suggesting, enjoying a free Olympics, in a free United Kingdom, in a free world – and it’s all thanks to this man. Or thanks to this period, more accurately, these few weeks when Churchill held his ground and the British army got away.
That is the message at the heart of this book. The tale of the retreat and evacuation is not a parochial British story, that bit of history that happened before America and Russia joined in. It is the story of the global preservation of freedom, of the prevention of a new dark age. It deserves to be remembered.
And all this can be said before we have even discussed the return of the BEF to Britain. Once the ships were under way, the world still had a chance.
On ships on the way home, many men fell asleep. Some tried to find quiet corners where they would not be disturbed. ‘We’d arrive back in England, discharge everybody and get back to the beaches again,’ says Lieutenant Commander John McBeath of HMS Venomous, ‘and then a soldier would suddenly appear. He’d made the trip back to Dunkirk without knowing it.’
Leon Wilson, a French artilleryman, crossed to England on a destroyer whose captain welcomed the large French contingent on board with the words, ‘Come on, Frogs! Sit down and have something to eat!’
‘It was a good joke!’ says the magnanimous Wilson, who sat and ate properly for the first time in days. ‘I don’t think the Savoy could have given us such a meal.’
The vast majority of returning British troops understood that they had suffered a terrible defeat. Many felt that they had shamed their country. This attitude is demonstrated by the character Alex towards the end of the film. But a surprise was in store for those who felt this way. ‘In England, the reception was amazing,’ says Ian English, a Durham Light Infantry officer, who witnessed a public euphoria that made the returning soldiers feel like heroes. Humphrey Bredin boarded a train at Dover, fell asleep, and woke up at a place called Headcorn, where, he says, ‘the women almost gave us a party. They invaded the train with tea, coffee and buns.’ Anthony Rhodes was minding his own business when a complete stranger pressed money into his hand. ‘Well done, you lot! Jolly good job!’ shouted members of the Women’s Voluntary Service as Captain Gilbert White’s train passed by. Oranges and cigarettes were shoved through the carriage window at Private William Ridley. At one point he looked up to see ‘Welcome to the Dunkirk Heroes’ painted on the side of a building. When Sergeant Ted Oates had a chance, he wrote to his family: ‘We had a marvellous reception here & it seems as if we are heroes or something, I don’t know very much about all this.’*
For Bredin, the public’s reaction was embarrassing. ‘We felt, damn it, that we’d run away!’ Ridley, too, talks of feeling ashamed. And plenty of soldiers were angry at what they saw as betrayal, by the politicians, by their officers or by the army itself.
On 2 June, Anthony Eden, the Secretary of State for War, was loudly booed as he addressed troops at Aldershot. At around the same time, Basil Dean, head of Ensa, sat in a Bridport pub listening as ‘seething’ soldiers outdid each other with accounts of their experiences. One man complained loudly that the junior officers in his unit had grabbed the vehicles and fled to the French coast, leaving the NCOs and men to look after themselves. Others angrily backed him up. In mid-June, eighteen-year-old Colin Perry was told by a soldier of how his officers had deserted their men when their ship was sunk by Stukas. And seventy-seven years later, Maurice Machin of the Royal Army Service Corps remains furious about what happened: ‘They say Dunkirk was a victory. It wasn’t – it was a disorganised mess. If it hadn’t been for the British people coming to our aid, I would have died along with many more.’* George Purton is more subdued in his criticism, but his point is similar. ‘We were sent,’ he says, ‘into something we could not cope with.’
Yet the public reaction to the evacuation, whether miracle or disorganised mess, was neither contrived nor imposed. It was a spontaneous demonstration of relief. Friends and relatives were safe, and the war was going to continue. Nurse Eileen Livett began looking after returning soldiers at her hospital in north London. She considered them heroes ‘because we all realised, here at home, how tight the situation was . . . It was really touch and go.’ This was the mood that Winston Churchill tapped into so effectively when, speaking to the House of Commons, he admitted that wars might not be won by evacuations, but that ‘a miracle of deliverance’ had been achieved.
For some people, Dunkirk became a personal inspiration. It made Nella Last feel part of something ‘undying and never old . . . I felt glad I was of the same race as the rescuers and the rescued.’ For long-time pacifist Dennis Argent, it was the spur to changing his beliefs. He could now imagine the circumstances where killing an enemy ‘can be obviously and directly the means of saving the lives of civilian fellow-workers, and maybe even friends and family’.
In a speech given several months after Operation Dynamo, the historian Lord Elton described Dunkirk as the turning of a tide. People were now learning ‘that the things which really mattered were not the complicated and exclusive things. It was not the stocks and shares or exclusive nightclubs which mattered now, but having a roof and a meal and the sound of children’s laughter around one.’
Elton’s impression of Dunkirk as a national wake-up call may be slightly simplistic (and extremely sentimental) but there is no doubt that the British social and political climate began to change at once. Before Dunkirk, the government could not afford to provide free milk to mothers and children. On 7 June, it introduced a scheme offering precisely that. Money was suddenly no object.
Days later, Harold Nicolson, Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Information, delivered a paper to the Cabinet describing how the old order was changing. ‘Every effort must be made,’ he wrote, ‘to provide real equality of opportunity for the younger generation.’ In reply, Lord Halifax, a relic of another age, acknowledged that human values now seemed more important than financial purity.
If Britain were to survive, after all, she would need the help of her ordinary people as never before; she would need them to fight, to work long hours in factories, to volunteer their services in aid of the war effort, and to tolerate all manner of regulation and restrictions.
In return, there would have to be compensations. Her people would be offered better wages and increased protection. But their newfound importance would also gain them a greater stake in society. This was acknowledged, on 1 July, in a leader in The Times:
If we speak of democracy, we do not mean a democracy which maintains the right to vote but forgets the right to work and the right to live. If we speak of freedom, we do not mean a rugged individualism which excludes social organization and economic planning. If we speak of equality, we do not mean a political equality nullified by social and economic privilege. If we speak of economic reconstruction, we think less of maximum production (though this too will be required) than of equitable redistribution . . . The new order cannot be based on the preservation of privilege, whether the privilege be that of a country, of a class, or of an individual.
A fight to resist Nazi iniquity, it seemed, made little sense if Britain failed to acknowledge her own inequalities. Dunkirk turned abstract ideas like freedom and equality into realisable goals, which the wartime government would shortly start to embed into British life. The sudden shock of Dunkirk was the spark for the creation of modern Britain.
None of this would have come as much consolation, however, to those taken prisoner in France, or brought back wounded. At her hospital in Barnet, Eileen Livett tended to men suffering terribly. One young man in his late teens, of whom she was very fond, had third-degree burns. He had been in such good physical condition before being wounded that the burns started to heal very quickly. But when Livett removed the bandages around the man’s head, his charred ear came away with the dressing. The following day, Livett was off duty, and when she returned to the hospital she was told that the young man had died. The dressing around his eyes had been removed – and he had discovered that he was blind. ‘Although he was healing so beautifully,’ says Livett, ‘the shock was just enough to really finish him.’
The fact is that Operation Dynamo did not bring home the entire BEF. More than 140,000 British troops remained in France. Some had failed to reach Dunkirk, while members of 51st (Highland) Division – sent to help man the Maginot line – remained south of the Somme, cut off from the remainder of the BEF by the German advance. The division continued fighting after Operation Dynamo, but was surrounded by the Germans and captured on 12 June at St Valery-en-Caux.
On the very same day that 51st Division was being marched into captivity, two fresh divisions – 52nd (Lowland) Division and 1st Canadian Division – were arriving in France as part of a second British Expeditionary Force, sent to help the French resist the Germans. This 2nd BEF, however, was never likely to succeed. Its own commander, Lieutenant General Brooke, wanted to evacuate his troops after only two days, but Churchill was so keen for France to stay in the war, and so concerned about the effect of another evacuation on French morale, that he ordered the divisions to stay where they were. Then, on 14 June, German troops entered Paris. It became clear that the French were truly beaten, and the order was finally given for the 2nd BEF to evacuate from Bordeaux, Cherbourg, St Malo, Brest and St Nazaire.
Astonishingly, just weeks after the first, a second chaotic retreat to the coast took place, again involving the abandonment of supplies, and ending in a further call for ships and boats. It also led to the greatest single maritime disaster in British history, as the Cunard liner Lancastria, bringing over 6,000 people back to England, was sunk by German aircraft as she left St Nazaire. Up to 4,000 men, women and children died, most of them drowned. Churchill refused to allow news of the Lancastria’s sinking to be released; the press had published enough bad news that day, he believed. Operation Ariel (the code name for the evacuation of the 2nd BEF) brought huge numbers of Allied troops to Britain.
On 22 June, France signed an armistice with Germany. The signing took place in the same railway carriage, in the same clearing near Compiègne, as the armistice of 1918. Hitler wanted his revenge, he wanted to humiliate the French, even if that meant ripping an old railway carriage from the wall of a museum and transporting it into a field.
Reporting from Berlin on 14 June, American journalist William Shirer noted that diners crowded around a loudspeaker in his hotel bar as news of the Germans’ entry into Paris was announced. They smiled and seemed happy. But there was no undue excitement, and they all returned to their tables to carry on eating. The next morning the Nazi Party newspaper, Volkische Beobachter, reported: ‘Paris was a city of frivolity and corruption, of democracy and capitalism, where Jews had entry to the court, and niggers to the salons. That Paris will never rise again.’
Shirer arrived in Paris three days later to find the streets deserted and the shops closed. At night, the streets he remembered as being full of laughter and music were dark and empty. But there were sightseers. Every German soldier seemed to carry a camera, and they acted like naïve tourists. ‘I saw them by the thousands today, photographing Notre-Dame, the Arc de Triomphe, the Invalides.’
The majority of French troops who had arrived in Britain as a result of Dynamo and Ariel, meanwhile, chose to return to France. One of those who stayed was Leon Wilson. Evacuated to Dover at the beginning of June, Wilson had been held at White City Stadium until he changed his name and joined the British Army. Stationed in Wiltshire, he was sent to a children’s school where he sat by the door almost every day learning English. ‘I didn’t take long until I started talking,’ he says, ‘and after a while I could speak quite well.’
On a break from school, Wilson attended a dance at the Astoria on Tottenham Court Road. There were more women than men present, and he noticed ‘one gorgeous young lady, very little, about five foot, but fantastic’. He asked her to dance, and at the end of the evening, walked her towards Hyde Park, where he tried to kiss her. This was how he met his wife.
In the meantime, he had begun training at various locations around England, and was sent to Egypt in 1943 as a lance bombardier. Months later, he was transferred to the Intelligence Corps, with whom he went to Italy. In August 1944, he arrived in his native city of Paris just two days after its liberation. He went straight to his old family home at 8 Rue des Bois, 19th Arrondissement. But Wilson’s family was Jewish, and much had changed in the city since he had been there last:
I rang the bell. I walked into the concierge, and when she saw me, she fainted. She thought I was dead! And I was in a British uniform! After a couple of minutes, I said I wanted to go up to see my parents, as I said I didn’t know what had happened to my family. And of course, while I was talking, somebody probably heard me, and they went up to the First Floor, and they alerted the people who lived there now. I went up there and I saw a plastic swastika on the right hand side. I knocked – the lady was crying and three or four kids were crying. People were shouting in the street, ‘Why don’t you arrest them?’
The new occupants had been placed in the apartment by the Nazis, but Wilson was not interested in them. He only wanted to find his own family. For several days he searched, but learned nothing. He went to the family’s old factory on Rue Belleville, to find it closed. In the end, he returned to the apartment and gave the concierge his address in London.
After a long wait, news arrived that his father and one brother had shown up in Paris. They had survived the camps together. But his mother, his grandmother and his other three brothers (the youngest of whom was only two years old) had died in Buchenwald.
Two weeks after he heard the news, Wilson’s father came to London – without his brother. ‘I’m glad he didn’t come,’ says Wilson, ‘because my father showed me a photo and he was just a skeleton and nothing else.’ His father told him that the camp guards had separated the men and women, but he said little more. ‘I’ve never ever asked my brother what kind of a life he experienced when he was deported,’ says Wilson, ‘because why restart it all over again?’
Since the end of the war, Leon Wilson has lived in England. But in 1950, he returned to Dunkirk. He wanted to visit a village outside the town where he and his comrades had stopped on the retreat and stolen bicycles from a shop. His bicycle had helped to save his life, but he had long felt guilty for taking it.
After searching for a while, Wilson found the shop. It was still there. He stood outside for a while. ‘But to be honest, I was a coward,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t go in to say that I was sorry for pinching some of your bicycles. But I was very upset for seeing the place that really saved our lives.’
Leon Wilson’s life has taken any number of turns since his evacuation from Dunkirk, but it remains the defining event of his life. The same is true for many of those evacuated and taken prisoner. But the importance of Dunkirk spreads beyond those who were there, or even those who can remember it. It is a cultural event, an icon, whose significance has changed over the last seventy-seven years as society has changed. And we are now approaching the point where Dunkirk turns from living memory into history. Soon there will be nobody left who can tell us what it was really like. The politicians, historians and journalists will be able to invoke the story completely freely, whether to confirm a prejudice, further a career, or present it truthfully for its own sake. And it is now that Chris Nolan has chosen to make a survival film, set during the evacuation. I wanted to speak to those involved in making it – to learn what they felt about Dunkirk the historical event, how they approached it as a subject, and how they went about turning it into a film.
Emma Thomas is Chris Nolan’s producer as well as his wife. She has often brought ideas for movies to him in the past. ‘Ninety-nine per cent of the time,’ she says, ‘he might be intrigued by it but he doesn’t see a way into it for him as a director.’ But this time was different. Emma had been reading about Dunkirk, and she said there hadn’t been a recent film on the subject. ‘He saw the void,’ she says, ‘which made me very happy.’
Dunkirk is a story that Chris grew up with, and once Emma had reminded him of the story, he began to read around the subject. He closed himself away, just as he had done with Batman, another iconic and beloved institution. ‘Privately, in my own time, I find my feet in terms of the story that I think needs telling,’ he says. He needs to distance himself from pressures and influences.
But the process of writing the Dunkirk script was an unusual one. ‘I did a lot of historical research, I read many first-hand accounts, which I don’t usually do, whether I’m dealing with real life or not.’ This was because he wanted to understand the mechanics of the event. And then he started on how to tell the story. ‘Once I felt that I had the mechanics of the event in my bones, then I could put the structure together.’
But he didn’t pitch the idea to a studio immediately. He sat down and wrote the script first. And then he took a long walk. In Dunkirk.
Chris asked production designer Nathan Crowley to meet him there in August 2015. It seemed the obvious place to start, and nobody had any idea why they were there. Or, indeed, who they were. As Nathan says, ‘If you put Chris in a baseball cap, no one knows who the hell he is.’ But this walk would define the look and feel of the film. Nathan (who has worked with Chris on the Dark Knight films and Interstellar) has a wide-ranging job. ‘Anything you see in front of camera, anything physical, the production design team is responsible for it. From location picking, to the way the ships look, or whether the hospital ships have outlooks to the beach, the planes, the mole, the destroyers, half-scale destroyers – we’re responsible for everything. Except for costumes and special effects, we create the world that the film is based in.’
Nathan and Chris walked from the harbour to Bray Dunes, although they didn’t make it to La Panne. ‘We were a bit tired by then,’ he says. But the walk was essential to their understanding of the film. They tried to study the mole to establish what it was made of. And they soon realised they had to film in Dunkirk. ‘You can’t fake this, it’s unique,’ Nathan says, ‘the tide, the beach, the buildings in the town, the mole itself.’
But it wasn’t just the atmosphere of the place that they were after. It was also the integrity. ‘We just felt like we should shoot there, it was important.’ And then they started wondering whether they could get real Mark I Spitfires, and any Little Ships that had really taken part. ‘We felt there should be a sort of return. Get some of the original items, rebuild the mole in its original position. It was partly a search for accuracy – but it also seemed the right thing to do. For the movie and for the event.’
The further they walked the more they learned. ‘Seeing that tide go in and out, the scale of it – you realise it’s a really difficult beach to get off,’ he says. And once they started building, the difficulties piled up. ‘It was difficult to rebuild the mole, and we found it difficult to berth a ship at the rebuilt mole. And when we built our truck pier, that was really difficult too! You really start to understand the task, get a sense of what they had to deal with.’
Nathan is quick to stress that he and his team weren’t under shell fire, there weren’t any Stukas above them, and the enemy wasn’t attacking the perimeter as they worked. ‘We were just trying to moor boats on the mole. But we learned it’s not simple. The mole wasn’t built for that.’
This, in a sense, is what occurred to Captain William Tennant late on the night of 27 May 1940, and to many ships’ crews in the days that followed. ‘Recreating these real events gave everyone a taste of what the men went through at the time – and added to the sense of responsibility.’
The next stage for Chris and Nathan took them back home. ‘I set up a mini-art department in his garage,’ says Nathan. ‘Just me and him. Chris wants to figure out how to make the film before anyone else comes on board.’
Eventually Chris and Emma put the idea to Warner Bros. ‘We went to them with the script all ready,’ says Emma, ‘and we could say “This is how it’s going to be” and they were very excited about that.’ But Dunkirk is not only an event that’s little known in America. It’s a story of failure, of a military catastrophe. These were two elements likely to challenge any American film company. ‘But I think that the universality of the story, how relatable the dilemmas are, means that everyone can understand that wherever they come from.
‘It felt like the right time to do this,’ Emma says, ‘because we’re in a fortunate position.’ The fact is that Chris and Emma have made some hugely successful films, which places them in a strong position with the studio. ‘They tend to give Chris the benefit of the doubt – at the moment!’ says Emma. ‘It was similar with Inception, a totally unconventional film that it would have been hard for anyone else to get made, but Chris was coming off an enormous success. We were in the same position with this, and they got what it was about the story that excited us.’
So now, with a studio behind them, Chris and Emma assembled their team. They went to Nilo Otero, first assistant director, a man they’ve worked with before, on Inception and Interstellar among other films. Nilo describes his role: ‘I’m like number one on a ship. Chris, as captain, thinks about strategy and overall goals. I make the ship run. That’s the best analogy. I used to have a second assistant director who quoted In Which We Serve a lot, and would say to me, “More cocoa, Number One?”’
Nilo describes his first task on a film. ‘I get the script and I break it down into its components. For scene one, its description, what’s needed for it and where it’s going to take place.’ He then works out a series of ‘strips’ (they used to be actual cardboard strips; now the process is computerised), each representing a scene or piece of action, and decides how many strips will be shot on each filming day.
With this breakdown, Nilo and Chris create a provisional schedule – how to get the story on film in the time available. ‘We start horse trading,’ he says. ‘This day is too light, this one is too heavy, and in the process of going through the components as, essentially, individual manufacturing elements, we pound out a schedule.’ And they factor in geography. ‘Where are we going to do this? Where exactly on the beach at Dunkirk? What’s going to be shot in the UK, what’s to be shot on stage in the US, what’s going to be on the sea?’ This was a daunting project for Nilo, who has a passion for history and particularly for the Second World War: ‘I’ve been on the English Channel and it’s a difficult stretch of water. The first miracle of Dunkirk for me is the weather. What made it possible at all was the fact that it was this ridiculous clock-face calm sea – like the Channel never is. It was reasonable for Hitler to believe this evacuation could never succeed, because who would expect you could float across the Channel in a row boat?’
The team now grew to include, amongst others, set decorator Gary Fettis, costume designer Jeffrey Kurland, special effects coordinator Scott Fisher and props master Drew Petrotta. Each has a specific responsibility, but they work closely together and their roles interconnect. Gary Fettis explains that his team ‘provides all the details – the props and the dressing that define the characters and support the storyline’. There is typically minute attention to detail on a Nolan film; on Interstellar, for example, the young girl was living in a bedroom that had a wall of books, and Gary, Emma and Chris chose every single book on the shelves. But for Dunkirk, the process was a little more organic. ‘The emphasis was on the sweeping panoramic canvas of Dunkirk itself – the beach, the industrial areas, the mole.’ Gary’s primary rule is that nothing should distract. Rather, every detail should serve the story, the director’s vision, the actors’ imaginations. Gary says that Chris didn’t want to push the destruction and carnage of war to a level that would overwhelm. ‘His mandate was to keep it simple and lean. So the challenge for me was how to make a statement in those vast spaces where any military hardware could be easily dwarfed.’
Jeffrey Kurland and Drew Petrotta, costume and props respectively, work closely together, as what they both do is personal to the film’s characters – how they dress and what they own, handle or use. Drew describes his job: ‘If you have a table in a room and characters are eating dinner, we wouldn’t do the table, but we might do the dishes and the food.’ In a historical setting such as Dunkirk, he must stay as close to what he discovers in his research as possible. ‘And in a military movie like this,’ he says, ‘it’s pretty much laid out what the guys had. We just had to think about quantities and that depended on how many people, and how much money, we were going to have.’
While Jeffrey had to organise the making of hundreds of costumes, even to the extent of building looms to weave accurate period fabric for the uniforms, so far as Drew’s department was concerned ‘there was not a lot of manufacturing to be done, other than some rubber guns and life jackets.’ Drew found real life jackets from the period, in different styles, and showed them to Chris who picked his favourite. ‘Then we recreated them as new.’
For Jeffrey’s department, using original costumes was out of the question. ‘With the wear the uniforms had to take, in and out of the water, blasted with sand, they would have fallen apart. It would have been totally impractical.’ Drew, however, could use original items. ‘We had some great binoculars that we used for a colonel on the mole – actual World War Two binoculars. We had some actual navigation tools too. And some of the rifles were real, from the period.’ His department also recreated the leaflets used in the opening moments of the film. ‘We showed some copies of the original leaflets to Nathan and Chris. Then they designed their own version – close to the real one, but with some things, like colours, augmented to help them tell a story on film.’ He laughs. ‘And then we made five thousand of them.’
Jeffrey and Drew also work closely with Scott Fisher on special effects. Scott is responsible for all the physical effects except those created in post-production through computer graphics. As technology advances, so Scott’s department evolves – but not in its dealings with Chris.
‘Chris wants to get as much stuff in camera as he can and then use CGI to fix the few things that you don’t get,’ says Scott. ‘For him, everything is traditional.’ Which means that Scott takes a different approach on a Nolan movie. ‘I’ll read a script of his very differently than I will for another director. With other directors, you can kind of assume that things will get done with CGI, but you can never make that assumption with Chris.’ It means that Scott has to combine traditional methods with new. ‘The basic stuff is tried and true. Then I use whatever technology I can to achieve what we’re trying to get.’ Recreating bomb explosions, for example, is very traditional and something that Scott has a lot of experience with.
Scott thinks CGI can change how a film feels to an audience. ‘It can be so heavy when it’s used in whole sequences,’ he says. ‘Everyone knows those movies – a computer-generated world has a very distinctive look. CGI’s a fantastic tool to go back and remove the wires from the stunt guy when he’s getting pulled out of an explosion, or if we’re missing a boat that should be there. But we have all these real assets in the shot – full-size ships, the mole, all the extras – that if we just add stuff in the back of the frame, it’s much less noticeable. It’s just cleaning up.’
One of the big advantages with shooting for real is the genuine impact the event can have on an actor’s performance. ‘Something happens to the reactions,’ Scott says. ‘With Interstellar, Chris wanted the robot right there on set delivering lines and interacting with the actor, otherwise that actor would be staring at a green screen, faking an eye line and pretending to interact.’ This is even more true, he thinks, when filming the impact of a bullet, or an explosion. The effects may be stage managed and completely safe, but the reactions are visceral. ‘I’ve been on shows where things were meant to be done with CGI, and we’ll stage something simple like a little air mortar, just for a reaction, and you’ll see a light go on in a director. They’re like “Whoa! That reaction was real!” So you start doing more and more of it.’
Scott also believes that CGI has a sensory and emotional effect on an audience – it can allow them to step back from the film. ‘People’s eyes are trained to it now. It can take you out of the moment because you know it’s not reality based. It changes it in your mind, I think.’ But for Chris and Nathan, the audience has to have an authentic experience, a first-person perspective. It has to be a soldier under fire on the beach, or a Spitfire pilot flying against the Luftwaffe – so anything that allows it to step back is unwelcome. Chris wants the film to have a documentary feel. As Nathan says, ‘We want to make it about being with them.’
The script features three storylines through four elements – land, sea, air and, crucially, time. In many ways, time is the most fundamental. There is a ticking clock running through the whole story which poses relentless questions. Will the men make it away? Will the ships survive? Will the planes run out of fuel? Chris and Nathan worked together on finding defining images for these four elements. Nathan started by making a model of the mole. ‘We realised that it’s a road to nowhere,’ he says. He first thought the defining image would be men sitting around on the seafront, but with more research and as their ideas developed, that changed. ‘There’s nothing new to that image, the public knows it already. It’s not interesting enough. So we were happy to open the film with it and then leave it behind. That was an early decision.’
The film starts with Tommy making his way through the perimeter towards the beach. ‘We defined the town of Dunkirk with the chase through the old, mysterious streets, the low buildings. Then you break onto the seafront, you understand the size of it – and you’ve done it.’ The key image for the land element was ‘the white mole with troops, three men wide, endless helmets as far as you can see, going to nothing, just out into the sea – that’s the desperation of the event. No boats. Just men on the mole. It says “This is the end of the road.” You’ve been chased to the water and there’s one bridge. But it won’t get you to England.’
For the sea, the defining image was of a soldier sitting on the hull of an upturned boat, stranded in the English Channel. The boat is derelict, its broken propeller rocked by the wake of the sea. It’s been bombed, too far from the beach to get back, too far from home to swim. For Nathan, this caught ‘the circular motion of the film, the never-ending Groundhog Day for those soldiers who got off the beach but their ship was sunk, and they had to keep coming back. And here’s this broken soldier sitting on a wreck in the middle of the sea. He’s exhausted, he’s giving up, nothing can save him. The man sitting between a big sky and a big sea.’
This image inspired another decision: ‘It helped us choose IMAX, because it’s such a good format to cover the sky.’ The Little Ships also define the sea element. The film features one in particular, Moonstone, a boat found on Loch Ness. ‘We’re with this small ship for an entire day of the film’s timeline,’ says Nathan. ‘It’s a well-known image but it’s absolutely key – that’s the really human part of the story, the Moonstone.’
For Emma, this is what makes the story so relatable. ‘Any film that is going to appeal to a modern audience has to be a story about humanity,’ she says. ‘You can watch any number of war films and feel distanced from them because you can think “I’m not in the army. I haven’t done military service and never will”, but what differentiates the Dunkirk story is it’s also the story of civilians. It’s the story of everyday heroism. That’s why it’s appealing as a film – soldiers waiting to be rescued and the people on the Little Ships coming across to save them.’ For Chris, civilians willingly going into a war zone is what makes Dunkirk ‘one of the great stories of all time’.
The Spitfire, meanwhile, unites two elements – air and time. Cameras were placed inside the cockpit to capture both a view of the pilot at work and the pilot’s view of the outside world. ‘It was about being with the pilot,’ says Nathan. ‘Rather than always seeing these planes from the outside, we wanted the audience to really experience this piece of machinery. The task was to get cameras on a real plane, which we did, and on the wings, and actually shoot banking over Dunkirk. When you bank over, you see the scale of the event from the plane’s point of view, rather than a “God shot”. It was always about being with them.’
Chris and Nathan flew in a Spitfire themselves, and this informed the film for them. ‘The fuel will only allow you to fly for a short time over Dunkirk, and there are so many other considerations – apart from being attacked by the Luftwaffe – there are so many other things you have to control to make sure you can get there and get back.’ Nathan thinks the challenges for a Spitfire pilot were similar to those of the men on the mole or the Little Ships: ‘It’s time running out, chances running out. People don’t realise how many planes were lost trying to protect that beach.’
As he did his research, Nathan was also struck by the industrial nature of the area. ‘It’s not a quaint seaside town, it’s a big industrial port. No one’s portrayed how industrial it is before. We wanted that in our story, the unromantic modernity of it.’ He says the original mole, built only two years before the event, was an extremely modern structure. ‘This was not about people in deckchairs, it was about this huge industrial area – and a lot of it on fire.’ They chose an area where the oil spills were burning for the Spitfire’s landing. ‘I was very pleased to get that brutalism into our film,’ he says.
Recreating the black smoke that hung over Dunkirk, and guided the RAF from the English coast, was Scott Fisher’s task. He did it by burning diesel, but the city of Dunkirk imposed restrictions. ‘Our permit to create that smoke,’ he says, ‘was based on which direction the wind was blowing because it was so thick. It wasn’t toxic, it was just so dense there were concerns for motorists on nearby roads.’ But the wind is an unreliable cast member. ‘There was a local factory and the whole building started filling up with smoke. They couldn’t work. And another time the smoke went into the town. So there were a few incidents where it was a problem.’ Scott and his team just had to keep working round it, ‘positioning the diesel in different areas until we got the desired effect’. The diesel was passed through a high-pressure pump and lit in a containment reservoir. ‘There were some days when the wind was blowing in a really bad direction and we just couldn’t do it.’
Nathan remembers that one day, foam suddenly appeared on the beach. ‘It was like Doctor Zhivago or something, these guys walking through this foam.’ Utilising such unforeseen moments was all part of making the film. ‘To us, this was how we wanted to tell the Dunkirk stories. The event itself was all about improvisation, organised chaos. There were so many different things happening, so many individual events, there are as many versions of Dunkirk as there were men on the beach. And there were the small ships, the mole, the destroyers, the minesweepers, the planes, Dutch trawlers, thousands of men – it was such an event! The film is all about being thrown into this event visually, not sitting outside it. Chris has these concepts in his mind, then I come in and just help him visualise the whole thing – that’s my job in the first six months.’
There is one last crucial element of the film that is both ever-present and permanently absent – the enemy. Chris understood that there was no personal contact between the soldiers on the beach and the enemy, and he wanted to reflect this in the film. ‘That is the way war is experienced,’ says Nilo Otero. ‘When you talk to old soldiers – they didn’t see the enemy. For one thing, when somebody’s shooting at you, you don’t stick your head up and look! You get in a hole and you stay there. It’s a frightening experience. I think that revelation of mortality is really what the picture’s about. That, and the simple effort to avoid dying.’
For Chris, making the threat faceless frees the event from its geopolitical ramifications – it becomes a timeless story of human survival. He didn’t want to take a classic war film approach because in so many ways, the story of Dunkirk is not the story of a conventional battle. ‘It was death appearing from the sky,’ he says. ‘U-boats under the Channel that you can’t see. The enemy flying over and rising up through the waves to pick people off, to sink ships.’ The soldiers cannot understand their own predicament, and the audience experiences the same horror. This is why the action never leaves the beach. ‘If you’re continually showing the Germans as Germans and generals in rooms talking about strategy, you are lifting the veil.’ The audience would then be more informed than the soldiers. ‘Standing on a beach, trying to interpret what’s going on, “How do I get out of here? Should I stand in these lines? Should I go into the water?” That’s the experiential reality I want the audience to share. You see herd behaviour, primal, animal behaviour – people standing in lines in the water because they see other people doing it, not because they know there is a boat coming. I think that is fascinating and frightening.’
Emma agrees. ‘The enemy is scarier when you’re not seeing them. You don’t need to see them. It’s such a simple notion, what these people were going through – tanks and soldiers over there, planes above, submarines and mines below – that’s all you need to know really. When you think about Jaws, you don’t need to see the shark to understand the threat of it.’
Rebuilding the mole was one of the first tasks for the production department. Despite research and studying photographs, Nathan felt he hadn’t understood the mole until he got to Dunkirk and saw what is now left of it. ‘The concrete part is still there,’ he says, ‘and we rebuilt about a thousand feet onto the end of it.’ Emma remembers how difficult the process was. ‘The work on the mole was massive and time-consuming. It involved all sorts of work, dredging around the mole, rebuilding. We were incredibly lucky in that the city of Dunkirk were very helpful. They’re very film friendly, it made all the difference.’
Even the process of rebuilding the mole was influenced by how Chris wanted the audience to feel. ‘What had been there in the first place was a mixture of wood and free-cast concrete – those big Xs that you see on all the photos,’ says Nathan. ‘We had so much trouble finding out what it was originally made of. If you took a boat out to the end of the pier, you see that it’s concrete, but people also talked about wood. We decided to build the part we added on out of wood for two reasons: we needed to get it up in a decent amount of time but it was also a cinematic decision. We could have faked concrete using wood but decided not to. Chris and I both thought we didn’t want the audience wondering what we’d done, “What is that made of?” So we decided to play it as wood.’
In the end, they didn’t want to draw the audience’s attention away, to remind them they are in a cinema. So the trademark crosses were made out of enormous twelve-by-twelve timbers, harvested from a local forest. Each beam was milled and pre-cut and had to be put up with steel plate. ‘It was the biggest challenge of the entire film,’ Nathan says, ‘because we were dealing with the tide. There is a three- to four-hour window to put your base plates in and then to crane the structure in place. We built it in sections on the side of the dock, and using a crane barge placed each section. But with only four hours to actually bolt it down, to get it secure from the sea before that tide came in – that was hard.’
During filming, a storm damaged the rebuilt mole and ripped off the wooden walkway on top. ‘The sea is hard out there,’ Nathan says, ‘which we found out. It was a huge worry. Our Warner Brothers engineer said, “This is an incredible structure, stronger than most permanent piers I’ve stood on.” But because it was an open structure, the waves crashed in underneath and punched the boards off.’ Extra boards had been set aside in case of emergency. ‘It was all fixable,’ Nathan says, ‘but it was about getting out there in safe weather and putting them back so we could carry on filming.’
Chris and his crew did not have the miraculous good weather of the evacuation – but they were pleased artistically if not historically. ‘Rough weather looks much better on film,’ says Nathan. ‘Having sun on film is no good even though it was more historically true.’ And the bad weather made it a very difficult beach to work on. ‘We tried hard and we had lots of problems – the mole, the truck pier. And it’s not easy to land a priceless Spitfire on that beach.’
The Spitfire landing on the beach is a crucial moment in the film. Dan Friedkin, a Spitfire owner who flies his own aircraft, was prepared to attempt it and the area was walked many times in order to find the right place to land. The RAF pilots in 1940 discovered that Dunkirk beach made a surprisingly decent landing strip. ‘That tide washes the beach pretty flat, and it’s hard-packed sand, so it’s pretty good,’ says Nathan. ‘The chosen area was cordoned off and the pilot did many “touch and go” practice runs, all of which we filmed.’
Nathan vividly remembers the moment of landing: ‘To see a Spitfire Mark 1 land on Dunkirk beach – incredible.’ But after landing, the aircraft stuck in the soft sand. The tide was coming in, and everyone had to run and help push it out. Suddenly, the Spitfire’s safety became everybody’s concern.
Two major issues were crowding in at once – the relentless twenty-foot tide, and sunset. And this was significant because the pilots had to get back to their airfields before dark. Nathan was at a distance when this happened. ‘I just saw this commotion, people running to the Spitfire. You can push a Spitfire around, you can lift it out with enough people. So a lot of people went down and got it out. It took off and got home before sunset. But I’ll never forget seeing a real Spitfire land on Dunkirk beach.’
As far as the Spitfire’s German counterpart, the Messerschmitt Bf 109, was concerned, Nathan made an artistic decision. ‘I really needed to use the yellow nose of the Messerschmitt,’ he says, ‘even though it’s historically inaccurate. They didn’t have them until August 1940, and Dunkirk happened in May and June.’* But it was a visual consideration. ‘We have to be able to identify them quickly, because if we’re with the pilot and these things are moving so fast, we have to understand who’s who. The obvious thing to do was stick a big yellow nose on the enemy. And also, it looked much better.’ They decided not to specify the Spitfire squadron. Nathan found genuine squadron numbers that hadn’t been used. ‘The numbers on the Spitfire were real. When the war was done, they had spare squadron numbers at the Ministry that hadn’t been used yet. So we had real numbers.’
After rebuilding the mole the next great challenge for Nathan was recreating the truck pier. ‘There’s no account of how to actually build one,’ he says. ‘We tied the trucks together, real, solid truck bases – there were logistical concerns even about that. We had to take the oil out because the city didn’t want any chemicals in the water. But when we towed them into the sea and the tide came in, we realised, “Oh shit, they’re floating!” The first tide that came in, two of them floated off!’ Nathan and his team had to think fast. ‘We got our knives out and stabbed all the tyres before the whole lot went. So it was an enormous learning curve.’ This was pretty much the same learning curve undergone by the Royal Engineers on 30 May 1940. They too had to deflate the tyres – although, back then, the city was in no fit state to issue restrictions on oil pollution. ‘You appreciate it’s not easy building a truck pier,’ says Nathan, ‘there are so many unforeseen details and it’s got to be long enough to reach the tide, which is enormous.’
Nathan was very keen to get hold of HMS Cavalier, a 1943 destroyer, now in dock at Chatham Dockyard. Although not at Dunkirk, she was similar to ships that were, but she couldn’t be brought out of dry dock. The team did get other original ships but they had to disguise any later developments. They also made half-scale destroyers. ‘We have ships that get sunk in the film,’ says Nathan, ‘and we wanted to make sure they had accurate markings. I felt that I needed to make every number you see on a ship, to recreate a ship that was actually there.’
He was also very keen to use original Little Ships if possible – and any paddle steamers that could be found. ‘Our first day walking the beach,’ he remembers, ‘we saw the remains of Crested Eagle out there. Then you go to the end of the mole and at very, very low tide, you see the remains of Fenella. It was very important to get a Thames paddle steamer because it’s such an oddity to see one moor up. It didn’t have its engines but they towed the Princess Elizabeth out for us.’
Gary Fettis remembers how much work had to be done on the boats to make them historically accurate. ‘There was always so much to do,’ he says. ‘Even for the smaller craft. And then there were the hospital ships, all the Red Cross supplies. We did a lot of re-rigging with rope ladders.’ The amount of work needed led to some interesting collaborations. ‘The big fenders on the ships, they use giant rubber balls nowadays, but back then they were made out of rope, woven in thick hemp. We had to make about ten of them.’ They found a Dunkirk man who had re-rigged a ship for a local museum. ‘He knew how to weave these bumpers. And he employed prison labour to make them. First-time offenders, kids, they weren’t hard-core criminals. I hope the producers know,’ Gary adds, ‘because we saved a lot of money that way.’
Gary also needed a team on the beach, known as ‘set dressers’. ‘I have to be ahead getting the next set ready,’ he says, ‘so I can’t stand around where they’re shooting or I won’t get tomorrow’s work done. So we wanted set dressers, but not having the budget, we found this local hockey team. It was in between their seasons, and they were great – nice, intelligent guys, we gave them direction and they were unbelievable.’ Later on in the shoot, when Gary and his assistant, Brett Smith, were driving through Dunkirk they saw a poster featuring the hockey team. ‘They were like local movie stars! We had no idea. But they took direction so well, and they said it was an experience they’ll never forget.’
One of the biggest sets for Gary to dress was the interior of a destroyer. This set was built on stage in Los Angeles, in a huge water tank. His assistants sourced components for the interior from the largest ship-wrecking yard in the United States. ‘It’s in Texas,’ says Gary. ‘They brought back all these parts, doors and valves, bunks. And it’s only a page and a half of script, but it’s a key scene.’ Then he had to dress the interior of a trawler with fishing gear. ‘But with the exteriors, on a war movie, there were a lot of sand bags, and artillery, ammunition crates, trucks and parts.’
Gary had also to recreate the human carnage. ‘We used a lot of dummies for long shots. Chris would lay actors and extras closer to camera.’ Gary confounded Chris at one point; he had dressed the beach for the first reveal, near Malo-les-Bains, as Tommy first arrives. ‘We had dressed forty trucks and ammunition crates from the point of view of the camera in the dunes. To stretch it out, we used a forced perspective. We had a walkie-talkie so we could tell the person on the beach, “Move this, move that” until we got it just right. When Chris pulled up in his car, he walked straight to me, like a man on a mission. He looked at the beach and what we had dressed and he said, “When I was driving down the beach just now, I saw this stuff spread out and it meant nothing. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. It looked sporadic. But now I understand – you made it work for the camera.”’ Gary says this is how you compose a frame. ‘You take a position, and you start stacking things and spreading them out. You can cheat with things fifty feet apart, but from the camera’s angle they look like they are closer. It makes your eye feel there’s more there. We did that several times in different areas to get the bang for the buck.’
Scott was responsible for organising the sinking of ships, explosions and shootings. He used more high-yield explosives on this movie than normal. ‘All those World War Two explosions have such a distinctive look, you need a lot of explosive to replicate that. We used those more in the distance and as we got nearer to the actors, we used air mortars so we could be right on them and still be safe.’ Air mortars are tanks of air connected to high-pressure air guns that blow the surface of sand or water. ‘It’s very repeatable,’ says Scott, and being able to reset an effect is a crucial part of his work. ‘It’s safe so you can have a stunt man or actor in close proximity, we can test it and work in a little closer, and there’s no worry of anything dangerous hitting anyone.’
The men being blown through the air work with Tom Struthers, in charge of stunts. ‘Tom has a crane with a wire rig. He can ratchet the stunt man away incredibly fast, as if it’s the power of the explosion. But it’s his rig doing all the work and he’s in charge of them.’ Back in the States, on set, there were ‘dump tanks’ filled with water to film both the sinking of interior holds and the exterior portion of a ship that could roll over by about ninety degrees and sink to twenty-five feet.
Scott had to create the effect of bullets striking the sides of boats. This was a challenge, as Chris wanted bullets to blast through the trawler’s sides and water to enter through the holes while sunlight came through above the water’s surface. It was a complex effect. Scott’s team drilled holes in the side of the boat and filled them with disguised squibs that could be blown out on cue. Behind the wall, they built a clear tank that they filled with water, and behind that they carefully positioned lights.
Squibs are also used to create the effect of a man being shot. ‘They are really tiny,’ says Scott, ‘just for the movie industry. You always want to have as much continuous action as you can, so we link the squibs to remote control devices. At the start of the movie, there are guys running down the street, they get shot, they go down, they continue on, climb over a wall, then bullets hit the wall.’ The squib is shielded from the actor’s skin and packed with fake blood or red dust, and it has enough power to blow through the material of their shirt. ‘You can trigger it remotely, fifty, sixty feet away if you want, so you can be behind camera when the thing goes off – or two or three – however many you want on a person.’
Dealing with the actors and extras were Nilo and his team of assistant directors. ‘You’re painting with people,’ he says. ‘Chris is loath to use CGI, so there’s a lot of art involved on set, a lot of fooling the eye.’ On the biggest crowd days, there were 1,380 extras. ‘And they are all human beings,’ Nilo says, ‘they wander off.’ He remembers saying, in a production meeting with other department heads, ‘You may think we’re doing Dunkirk but to me this is two hundred pairs of pants!’ ‘What I meant was, with our budget we had two hundred pairs of correct British Expeditionary Force pants. In order to be close up, in other words to see people, we could use two hundred guys at any given time. We have to pay a man to attend a costume fitting for this uniform, and they only had enough money to do two fittings each. So this is a movie about vast numbers of people and we have two hundred pairs of pants, two fittings each – you’re going to have the same four hundred guys in front of the camera all the time – you’re going to see the same faces too often! I just kept repeating this, in one context or another, “This is two hundred pairs of pants, guys. That’s the movie we’re making.”’
Nathan Crowley and his production team created ‘fake men’, a row of soldiers painted onto canvas that could be rolled out and pinned in position with stakes in the ground, to fill the frame. ‘If you have a living, moving person at either end,’ says Nilo, ‘in the middle and in front or behind it – that changes everything visually. Because it’s all about fooling the eye. It’s all about how people perceive things.’ Nilo remembers how the beach ‘ate’ men. ‘It was daunting. The scale just swallowed them. And when you look at the pictures of the real event, the sheer density of people, especially on the boats, we just couldn’t do that safely. Even if we’d had the people, we couldn’t do it safely.’ This made him think about the realities of war. ‘You can’t do what people do in war. You can’t fly aeroplanes the way they flew them, you can’t operate ships the way they operated them. You can’t have men flinging themselves to the ground the way they did, because it’s dangerous. It turns out war is a very dangerous thing! And the only reason people do these incredibly dangerous and risky things, is because the alternative is being killed.’ Certain things, in other words, can never be entirely recreated.
The size of the beach created practical, as well as artistic, difficulties. ‘The scale is hard to register on film,’ says Chris. ‘Walking to scout the various locations, you can walk seven or eight miles just to get to the next location along.’ This had to be made clear to the team of assistant directors responsible for ensuring that the cast and supporting artists were where they needed to be in good time. ‘I had to explain to the assistant directors that the fact you could see the mole from every point along the beach didn’t really make the beach one location. To go from where we were shooting one scene to the base of the mole, for example, was what we call a “company move”. Everybody had to be put in vehicles, driven up onto the roads and into the town to come back out. So the simple geography of a beach setting is paradoxical, because it feels like everything is close and should be in one place, but it’s not.’ This made Chris focus on the 1940 Dunkirk experience: ‘Entire little communities, temporary villages of people on the beach appearing and forming during the evacuation. Then people just disappearing, individuals disappearing.’
Chris has described the characters in this film as ‘present tense’, since they do not have pasts and back stories, and this meant that fine character differentiation was something for Jeffrey Kurland to work up in his costume design. ‘It is my job to give a director as much detail and reality as possible,’ he says, ‘then he can do with it as he feels best.’
Jeffrey started by researching the uniforms for historical accuracy. Then he thought about the characters as individuals – who these boys were, their ages, their experience. ‘I tried to humanise them,’ he says. But, of course, by the time they had made it to the beach, a lot of the soldiers had been retreating for a fortnight. Their uniforms were dishevelled, kit had been discarded, weapons lost. This gave Jeffrey room for character. ‘There’s an ease to the character of Tommy, reflected in the way he wears his uniform. And that’s different to the way that Alex wears his – he’s more of a “tough”, for want of a better word.’ And then there’s a character who wears an ill-fitting uniform. This is not accidental. It is part of the story-telling – and the essence of Jeffrey’s job.
Casting the film, meanwhile, was an unusual process because it required unknowns for the younger characters. ‘Our casting directors, John Papsidera and Toby Whale, put actors’ auditions on tape, and we looked at that material,’ says Emma. ‘Then Chris met in person with some of the actors he liked.’ Emma found putting together the ensemble for this film to be one of her most interesting casting experiences. She has a degree in history, the subject has always fascinated her, and she felt as though ‘we were bringing history to life with this film, with its rich tapestry of characters and faces.’ But meeting these young actors brought home to her one of the realities of Dunkirk. ‘It was shocking to me how young everybody was. When we met Fionn Whitehead, he’s wise beyond his years and incredibly mature, but he’s very young, he’s only four years older than my oldest child, and it really made it clear to me how young some of these people were, caught up in these terrifying events.’
As well as the newcomers, there are some very experienced actors in the cast – Kenneth Branagh and Mark Rylance, to name two. There’s a sense that these men play the reliable old warriors, while the newcomers play the untested young kids of the BEF. Emma acknowledges the parallel. However, although one actor in the film may be making his movie debut, he is currently one of the most famous young men on the planet: Harry Styles. Was it a risk to cast someone so well known, and yet such an unknown quantity? ‘It didn’t feel risky at all,’ says Emma, ‘because he auditioned the same way everyone else did. Over the course of days of coming back to audition, giving it his best, Harry was absolutely right for the part, and it didn’t feel any more a risk casting him than it did casting anyone else.’ Emma appreciates that his fame might get in the way for some: ‘there’s always the risk that people can’t get past the persona, but the truth is he’s a great actor. I think when you watch him in the movie he utterly sucks you in. He’s not Harry Styles any more, in the same way that Fionn isn’t Fionn Whitehead any more – he’s Tommy.’
For Nilo Otero, the chance to work on a film set during Operation Dynamo was the chance to indulge his interest in this period of history. Or as Chris put it in his thank-you note: ‘At last you got a chance to put some of your arcane knowledge to good use.’ Nilo says, ‘I’ve been a distant student of war my whole life somehow.’ When he first did a breakdown of Chris’s script, it was brought across the US and hand-delivered by Andy Thompson. The script was codenamed ‘Bodega Bay’, as Chris is very protective of his scripts.
‘I’m from San Francisco,’ says Nilo, ‘so I just ran with that. And it became the Germans invading northern California. If I’d been captured with my schedule and interrogated, that’s what it would have looked like.’
Nilo scheduled twenty-five days of filming on the beach. They finished in twenty-three. ‘I’ve done a lot of military movies,’ he says, ‘and you often have serving officers acting as advisors, and for the first couple of days they laugh at you. But after four or five days, they sidle over to me and say, “This is a lot like what we do.”’ Nilo is aware of the crucial difference between war and war films, but he points out the similarities. ‘You have a working unit of people who go out and perform a very specific job, in varying circumstances and environments. This unit must be flexible enough to adapt but be specific to what you’re doing that particular day.’ The shooting days on the beach were eleven hours long, with everyone exposed to the weather. They had to wear goggles to protect their eyes from the sand. ‘There aren’t many jobs now where you are absolutely at the mercy of the elements,’ he says, ‘and with two tides a day, that beach appears and disappears. I was astonished because the photos show vast numbers of men on the beach – well, let me tell you, that beach disappears! And all those guys had to keep moving back and forth.’
Nilo is probably, in the last seventy-five years, the man who has come closest to understanding how to organise an evacuation from Dunkirk; he has dealt with large numbers of people, the tides, the weather, limited resources, the challenge of bringing ships into the mole and onto the beaches, the truck piers – the list goes on. He was in no danger of dying, but he was under pressure to work within a time frame, effectively and safely. And while he would be far too modest to mention the names Tennant, Ramsay or Wake-Walker, his job was not entirely disimilar to theirs. In effect, he’s trying to coordinate thousands of people. ‘I am a field guy,’ he says, ‘and I depend on good staff work. Which is what the production manager and line producers do. I schedule the things in micro time, as it were. It’s that minute-to-minute working your way through the day, that’s what I do. And in the process of that, I run a film set.’
Nilo is interesting when he discusses the meritocracy that formed at Dunkirk as units were broken up and men had to manage their own survival. It is reflected, he believes, in the microcosm of a film set, which also has its own natural order. His authority on set is granted to him for the same reasons soldiers follow leaders. ‘You obey your officer because he’s the guy who’s going to save you. You don’t obey him because you’re afraid of him. At Dunkirk, the environment was one of total chaos and everything was unknown – who knows if enough ships are going to come? It’s absolute uncertainty and therefore acting with an interest in the future is very difficult to do. I’ve worked with directors who come to me the first week and say, “Should we fire somebody just to show that we’re serious here?” People do that! And it’s foolish! You don’t flog your way to a good ship. You lead by example.’
Nilo believes that in real combat, when everybody has a gun, the army becomes fiercely democratic. ‘Anyone who thinks he can put people’s lives at risk because of the insignia on his hat – that guy’s going to get shot in the back of the head.’ When he thinks about how the evacuation was conducted, he is in awe of the BEF and the Royal Navy. ‘I’m so impressed it didn’t turn into horrible chaos. It’s an example of discipline, but not the discipline of the army in peacetime. It’s the discipline of circumstance.
‘Chris commands a film like no director I’ve ever worked with,’ Nilo says. ‘He’s the best, he really is. He knows his material inside and out, he has a very clear idea of what he wants.’ Even though their relationship is that of captain and number one, Nilo offers suggestions to Chris if he thinks they’re useful. ‘A lot of assistant directors are really just assistant producers, they worry about a schedule and a budget. I pride myself on actually being an assistant director. I’ve been at this a while and I know the job of directing is a lonely one because only the director is worrying about the story. Chris and I trust each other, and he understands that you can’t micro-manage making a film. Eventually you’re going to be standing there with some actors and a cameraman and it’s going to be a collective process.’ He acknowledges that ultimately, it’s Chris’s vision that everyone is there to serve. ‘But if you want things to be exactly the way you want them,’ he says, ‘go paint. Chris has as certain and focused a cinematic vision as anybody I’ve ever worked with and at the same time, he can experience what is going on in the moment and adapt that to what he originally desired, in a way that’s just a joy. It’s wonderful to be able to contribute occasionally. And he is open to it. Or he’ll just say, “No, never mind that.”’
Gary Fettis says, ‘Chris just loves movie-making. He’s in love with movies. And this movie wasn’t easy and there were times when he thought he had a particular series of boats and then all of a sudden found out, “Well, I can’t have those two, because the harbour isn’t dressed”, or whatever it was. And he looks like this kid that’s just sad for a moment. Five minutes later, he’s re-directing, saying “How do we solve this, how do we . . .” He’s moving forward. And you have to jump, you have to be on your game to keep up with him.’
Even though this is a multi-million-dollar film, as Emma notes, ‘There is never enough money. We actually made this film for a lot less than people will realise when they see it.’ When Chris and Emma pitched the script to the studio, they simultaneously asked for the amount of money they needed – and it was significantly less than their previous films. ‘We thought the studio would go for that. But it meant we definitely had to be imaginative. It’s a vast story and scope, and we had to do an awful lot for the money we had and we had to be clever about how we scheduled things and shot things. We had to be incredibly efficient.’ Emma believes having such an accomplished and resourceful team made a huge difference, but also that financial limitations can be creative. ‘Setting yourself a challenge like that, in some ways, it frees you to come up with interesting ideas that you wouldn’t have if you could just write a cheque.’
The very first films Emma and Chris made together with a pittance of their own money may seem very different from these movies made for many millions of dollars, ‘but ultimately it’s all the same. On those very small films, we had no money and never enough money. But honestly, you never do, because you’re always trying to push the limits of what you’re able to do within the parameters that you have. And so the experience of making all of those films is remarkably similar.’
One of the things that struck Nilo Otero as he worked on the film was how semi-religious Dunkirk was as an experience for the British people. ‘It was the first time anything went right in this fucking war,’ he says. ‘It literally was a miracle. An actual miracle. And I think the British people took it as a sign that this can go right.’ He thinks that an American audience will spot this (‘How can they miss it?’ he says) but believes it’s compelling drama either way. ‘War brings out the best and worst in men. If you’re going to make a movie, you have to make two hours worth watching – nobody wants to watch two hours of people eating dinner, unless it’s a really great meal. You need to make those two hours an incandescent two hours of human experience. And war certainly fits that bill.’
He thinks the fact that Chris has not chosen to give a history lesson and has told the Dunkirk story as a survival movie, adds to its impact. ‘When you’re in the middle of what turns out to be history, you don’t know it’s history. It’s not history for you. It’s another day for you, it might be a more dangerous day than usual, but it’s a day. And then you hear Winston Churchill talking about you and your life. Turns out that you were present at the beginning of something.’
Chris hopes that by distilling history into a personal experience for the audience, the film will become something of a Rorschach test. He does not want political interpretations to be forced on the audience. That is not something that interests him. As Dunkirk moves beyond living memory, and veterans become fewer, he wants to make a universal film that places us in the shoes of the protagonists. That way, he says, ‘people will find the Dunkirk that they want to find.’