Christopher Nolan names his most radical movie: “It’s meant to be very intense”
You won’t be too liberal or generous with the word “radical” if you apply it to almost every Christopher Nolan masterpiece. Memento employed reverse storytelling with two timelines where one was moving forward while the other was going backwards. For Batman, the filmmaker went for a grounded, crime-thriller approach. And oh, of course, Inception. Dreams with multiple layers take place within dreams, all allowing different time perceptions.
But even though every Nolan film is a testament to his imaginative vision, like every filmmaker, he has a favourite. It’s not The Dark Knight Rises, which grossed $1.8 billion worldwide, or Inception, which still gets praise for its ability to twist its audience’s (even its lead actor’s) perception of reality. However, for the director, the one film that he is extremely proud of and calls a “very intense experience” is Dunkirk.
The historical war thriller has a unique plot structure where it merges three distinct points of view, all happening on different temporal scales — a technique that allows viewers to deeply feel and experience the tragic Dunkirk evacuation that took place during World War II. As Nolan explained it in a chat with NJ.com, this departure from traditional storytelling in cinemas was to quench his ambition to “challenge” himself with every new film he begins. But Dunkirk bypassed his need for it to be a challenge and turned into a tour de force.
It surprised Nolan. While working on how to frame the film’s plot, he decided “braiding” its three different time frames: the week spent on the Dunkirk Beach, where stranded British soldiers are trying to survive and escape; the day that saw civilian boats crossing the English Channel to rescue soldiers; and the one hour RAF pilot Farrier (Tom Hardy) devotes to fearlessly keep enemy aircraft distracted to protect evacuation efforts.
Nolan soon discovered that “it’s one of the great, unique things that film can do, manipulating an audience’s sense of time, and one I’ve spent a lot of my career experimenting with — in some ways, I think Dunkirk is my most radical approach to story structure since Memento.” But embarking on this experiment also meant ensuring that the story and its structure didn’t become so complicated that it became impossible for the audience to understand. “It’s meant to be a very intense experience. It’s not meant to be a crossword puzzle you have to work out,” he added.
It was Nolan’s own rather tedious experience across the English Channel that inspired this tripartite plot style. He was sailing across the channel back in the mid-1990s with his wife, producer Emma Thomas, as part of a relaxing trip. However, the challenging weather that only made the channel more dangerous to cross turned it into a difficult journey that stretched to almost 19 hours of travelling, which allowed the Oscar winner to assume a new-found appreciation for the Dunkirk evacuation.
What he truly learned from their perilous journey that stopped being risky the minute they touched land was how this wasn’t what awaited the civilians crossing the channel during World War II; they were bravely “taking small boats across these very difficult waters, knowing they are heading into a war zone.” Dunkirk assumed a high point in the history of cinema, not just for its innovative storytelling but also for its ability to depict the evacuation without erasing the deeply emotional human stories at its heart.
