Christopher Nolan names the greatest director of all time: “I’ve tried to emulate and really learn”
Christopher Nolan has cited many filmmakers over the years as being key influences on his work, with a vast filmography that ranges from science fiction to psychological thrillers and historical dramas. While known for his high-concept stories and exploration of meta ideas, the director has lent his name to more humanistic stories over the years, with the likes of Dunkirk focusing on the trauma and tragedy of the war and the stories of everyday people who were subjected to these horrors.
The 2017 film was praised for showing these experiences through a thriller-like lens, creating a suspenseful yet naturalistic portrait of the soldiers who were trapped on the beaches and harbour of Dunkirk, and when asked about the films that most inspired this one, he listed one filmmaker.
Alfred Hitchcock is one of the greatest directors of all time, and as the ultimate master of suspense, it’s no surprise that Nolan drew inspiration from the techniques used to build tension in his films. Nolan expertly weaves danger and hope between each moment in Dunkirk, creating a clash between the fear of what’s happening and the desperation to move forward and come out the other side.
When asked about how he created this, he cited the work of Hitchcock, saying, “My gamble with this film was to turn around and say, ‘What if we strip the conventional theatrics away?’ I wanted to produce a film that was almost entirely based on the language of suspense, which I think is the most visual of cinematic languages, which is why I think Hitchcock has always been held up as possibly the greatest director of all time. And what Hitchcock understood — and I’ve tried to emulate and really learn from — is that the audience can care about a character simply by virtue of what it is they’re trying to achieve onscreen in a physical sense, a task they’re trying to achieve”.
This is certainly something that Nolan achieved in Dunkirk – uniting us in the simple goal of staying alive, regardless of how many characters are on screen and who they are as people. In the films of Hitchcock, he uses a similar technique of creating tension through deeply connecting us to characters in high-stakes situations; we care less about their physical goals, and more about how they react to it.
Nolan expanded on this, saying, “We very immediately, as audience members, we lean into that. We find ourselves in their shoes very quickly, and I wanted to make a film that really snuck up on the emotions. The emotion … hopefully it feels earned by the end of the film; it doesn’t feel like something that we’ve been telling you to feel the whole way through the film”.
While the thrill of each action sequence sucks us in, we are ultimately moved by the raw emotion and relief of the characters as they try to survive. It speaks to the most innate human instinct and doesn’t rely on colossal effects or crazy concepts to make us feel something – we feel something because of the sheer strength of the human spirit in the face of adversity.
