The 11 movies that inspired Christopher Nolan movie ‘Dunkirk’
For a filmmaker who has refused to be pigeonholed into any one genre since first breaking out with 2000’s Memento, Christopher Nolan unsurprisingly draws his influences and inspirations from across the cinematic spectrum whenever he’s creating a new feature.
His World War II epic Dunkirk might be an intimate story told on a grand canvas that incorporates three individual narrative strands covering land, sea, and air – which proved so popular it was the top-earning movie set during the conflict until Nolan’s own Oppenheimer was released – but he revealed to the British Film Institute that the films he viewed as touchstones during its creation, development, and execution ran the gamut from silent dramas to explosive blockbusters.
That’s hardly out of the ordinary when his own filmography includes labyrinthine thrillers, murder mysteries, comic book adaptations, existential sci-fi, and massive-scale action, with the five-time Academy Award nominee never remaining in the same genre or storytelling arena for so much as two movies in a row.
Nolan’s curated list of movies to have played a part in the way he constructed Dunkirk makes for eclectic and informative reading, demanding that the film itself be revisited in order to discover precisely how his 11 picks made their presence felt.
Movies that inspired Christopher Nolan:
Greed (Erich von Stroheim, 1924)
Described by Nolan as “a silent epic”, it makes sense that von Stroheim’s psychological thriller would make the cut given its near-mythical status. One of the first films of its era to be shot on location, its director gathered a mind-boggling 85 hours of footage, much of which has since been lost to time.
Using boundary-pushing techniques, including deep focus and montage editing, it’s reflective of Nolan’s own desire to constantly push the medium of cinema forward. On the surface, the narrative of a housewife watching her life fall apart after she wins the lottery hardly has much in common with Dunkirk, but it’s the technical merits that make it a bedfellow.
Sunrise (F. W. Murnau, 1927)
In a similar vein to Greed, Nolan’s selection of Murnau’s silent romantic drama makes sense given the way in which the American debut of the legendary director embraced new technologies, in this case, a musical score acting in synchronicity with the images on screen, as well as a separate soundtrack for sound effect.
Winning an Academy Award for ‘Unique and Artistic Picture’ at the very first Oscars, Nolan was drawn to the way Sunrise conspires to “explore the possibilities of purely visual storytelling”, with the lack of dialogue hardly hampering the impact of a farmer falling for a woman who convinces him to murder his wife so they can be together, only for his intentions to end up turned on their head.
All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone, 1930)
Having already been rewarded with 1937’s spiritual sequel The Road Back and been remade twice – most recently with Netflix’s nine-time Academy Award nominee and four-time victor including ‘Best International Feature’ – there’s barely a war movie to have arrived in the last century that wasn’t indebted in at least some way to either Erich Maria Remarque’s source novel or its first feature-length adaptation.
In Nolan’s eyes, it remains not just the definitive telling of the tale but perhaps the most significant war film of all time: “Revisiting that masterpiece, it is hard to disagree that the intensity and horror have never been bettered. For me, the film demonstrates the power of resisting the convention of finding meaning and logic in individual fate.”
Foreign Correspondent (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)
Somebody with such a firm grasp on structure, storytelling, and twists as Nolan was always going to be heavily indebted to the work of Alfred Hitchcock, with Foreign Correspondent being designated as pivotal to how the Inception creator approached the staging of his seafaring set pieces in Dunkirk.
As Nolan put it: “No examination of cinematic suspense and visual storytelling would be complete without Hitchcock, and his technical virtuosity in Foreign Correspondent’s portrayal of the downing of a plane at sea provided inspiration for much of what we attempted in Dunkirk.”
The Wages of Fear (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953)
The pulse-pounding thriller that finds a quartet of characters hired by an unscrupulous American oil company to ferry two trucks loaded with nitro-glycerine across perilous mountain territory in an effort to stave off the destruction being caused by an oil well fire is another non-war film that ended up impacting Dunkirk.
Nolan praised The Wages of Fear as an “established classic of tension”, and it’s impossible to disagree when the nail-biting narrative remains more than capable of keeping audiences on the edge of their seats 70 years after the literary adaptation was first released.
The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
Praised by Nolan for “a timeless and affecting verité narrative”, one that “forces empathy with its characters in the least theatrical manner imaginable”, The Battle of Algiers occupies common ground with Dunkirk as a war movie shot in an immersively realistic style.
With the characters and their plight every bit as important to the overall experience as the set pieces, Nolan explains that “we care about the people in the film simply because we feel immersed in their reality and the odds they face.”
Ryan’s Daughter (David Lean, 1970)
It was inevitable that Lean would feature among Nolan’s inspirations when the monolithic director became synonymous with the sweeping and elegiac epic through classics including The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and A Passage to India.
As for its connection to Dunkirk, Nolan noted that the romantic World War I story left him emotionally moved by its “thrilling windswept beaches and crashing waves” and the way “the relationship of geographical spectacle to narrative and thematic drive in these works is extraordinary and inspiring,” calling it “pure cinema”.
Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)
A seminal sci-fi horror that was touted as a haunted house movie in space before living up to that billing and then some hardly comes across as something that would leave a mark on a World War II epic, but the acclaim to have greeted Alien ever since it first released has long since transcended genre limitations.
Referred to as an “established classic in tension” along the same lines as The Wages of Fear – albeit under hugely disparate parameters – Scott ratchets up the palm-sweating terror scene by scene as the confined crew of a drifting vessel find themselves with nowhere to run when there’s a Xenomorph on the lose.
Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson, 1981)
Much more than a straightforward historical sports drama, Chariots of Fire was a box office and awards season sensation, leaving that year’s Academy Awards with seven wins from ten nominations, including ‘Best Picture.’
Lavishing praise on its “visual splendour”, Nolan appreciates how the “intertwined narratives and aggressively anachronistic music combined to create a masterpiece of British understatement whose popularity rapidly obscured its radical nature.”
Speed (Jan de Bont, 1994)
Everything from the triple-pronged storytelling mechanisms to Hans Zimmer’s metronomic score makes Dunkirk feel like a race against the clock, which in turn helps explain the presence of the kinetic action classic as one of Nolan’s inspirations.
Neatly summed up by the director as a “ticking-clock nail-biter”, Speed’s sky-high concept and economical setup trim all the fat away from its action genre trappings to leave nothing but a lean, mean, energetic machine that hooks viewers from its first minute to last.
Unstoppable (Tony Scott, 2010)
Denzel Washington and Chris Pine halting a runaway train before it causes catastrophic damage to populated areas may not have much in common with Dunkirk on a superficial level, but Nolan nonetheless interpreted Unstoppable as an ingenious means with which to use a packed house’s reactions against them.
Calling Scott’s thriller “relentless”, Nolan was effusive in his praise for how it “explores the mechanics and uses of suspense to modulate an audience’s response to narrative”, something that’s prevalent throughout his World War II blockbuster.
