Christopher Nolan’s biggest inspiration on ‘Dunkirk’: “The most direct influence”
It would be hard to argue that Christopher Nolan isn’t the biggest director on the planet right now. After years of plugging away with acclaimed, idiosyncratic movies like Interstellar, The Prestige, and the ‘Dark Knight’ trilogy, he finally won the big one when his 2023 film Oppenheimer swept every major awards board going. It won ‘Best Picture’ at the Oscars, scored two acting prizes for Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. respectively, and finally admitted Nolan to the hall of ‘Best Directors’.
The film he made immediately before this career high point was Tenet, a highly confusing, highly indulgent attempt to convince everyone that he could direct a ‘James Bond’ movie if he wanted to. Prior to that, however, he had made something much better. In 2017, Nolan put out Dunkirk. This was the director’s version of the famous World War II moment from the titular French port, during which hundreds of thousands of Allied troops were rescued from the Nazis by a fleet of civilian boats.
Not everything about Dunkirk works. The interweaving of three concurrent storylines gets a bit much in places, and most of Tom Hardy’s dialogue is inaudible due to a heady mixture of muffled sound and silly vocal choices. That being said, there is great acting, top-notch sound design, and Nolan’s typical brand of jaw-dropping visual effects to keep you satisfied.
Speaking with the Associated Press about the film, its director revealed a major source of inspiration behind the project. “[The] Wages of Fear was the most direct influence on how we went about shooting the film,” Nolan revealed. “in thinking about things in suspense terms.” Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, Le Salaire de la peur (in its original French) chronicles the journey of four men as they attempt to deliver a highly-unstable load of nitroglycerin across a dangerous mountain route. It was famously remade by William Friedkin in 1977 as Sorcerer, one of Stephen King’s favourite movies.
This isn’t the only place Nolan looked for inspiration, however. “Steven Spielberg very kindly lent us a print of Saving Private Ryan, his own print,” he revealed. “It’s just lost none of its power. You look at the horror that’s presented in that film, and as a filmmaker, you go: OK, we don’t want to chase that in any way because he’s done it definitively. You also say to yourself: The tension that I’m feeling watching Saving Private Ryan is not the tension I want for Dunkirk… We need this story to be about survival and suspense.”
Spielberg’s blood-stained tale of a group of US Soldiers sent to rescue the final surviving Ryan brother during the dying days of World War II is widely regarded as one of the greatest movies ever made about the subject. As Nolan states, whilst Dunkirk is technically set during the same time period, it is trying to achieve something very different. There isn’t nearly as much violence in his film as in Spielberg’s; his story is one of a last-ditch escape, rather than a final assault.
A student of the game on every level, Nolan’s ability to draw inspiration from two very different movies to make his own is admirable. Dunkirk probably ranks somewhere in the middle of his overall output, but it’s still a well-made presentation of one of the war’s most extraordinary moments.
