Dunkirk: The History Behind the Major Motion Picture. Joshua Levine

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СКАЧАТЬ forty-five, they would then go and instruct new pilots and he was right there. He’s buried in France, and we went to visit his grave while we were making the film, which was very moving. He was in his thirties when he died and he was the old man of the crew, they looked up to him as a father figure. I mean they were kids. They were eighteen, nineteen.

      JL: Do you watch your films again?

      CN: I do, yes.

      JL: And when you watch them do you judge them? How do you watch a film you made several years ago?

      CN: You wind up watching them for various reasons fairly soon after you finish, for the video release, for this and that, all kinds of technical reasons. And these days my kids are interested to see The Dark Knight or whatever and I’ll sit and watch it with them. But the reasons go away over time and you stop seeing the films. It’s a very long time since I have seen Memento. There are filmmakers who never watch their films. But I’m interested to because they change over time as you get further away from them. You start appreciating them in a more objective way – what’s good, what’s bad – and they become a little bit more of their time, I suppose.

      JL: Yes.

      CN: Which isn’t a cheerful thought, because you don’t want to think of yourself as ageing and being very much of your time, but you are …

      JL: But how could you be anything else?

      CN: Yes, it’s what we all are. But your highest aspiration is to make a film that feels timeless.

      JL: Are you worried that the story of Dunkirk is going to be – certainly for a while, for a generation – your story of Dunkirk?

      CN: That brings with it a responsibility, yes, and I am certainly mindful of it. But it’s probably one of the reasons why the film doesn’t attempt to be comprehensive. We don’t deal with the politics of the situation. We don’t deal with the larger worldview around it because I think it would be too daunting a responsibility to try and own a complex piece of history that you can’t actually distil into a two-hour dramatic narrative.

      I’m comfortable presenting the visceral experience of Dunkirk and having that define for a period of time, for the next few years, people’s ideas of what the experience might have been. I feel qualified to do that, because we researched and we were able to film it comprehensively. But regarding the wider implications of the story, of the history itself, I don’t want to take that on. And I don’t think the film pretends to. The film has a quality of simplicity that allows you to imagine more stories. And that’s very, very deliberate. That’s part of the reason for the structure. We want to allow people the space to understand that there are many, many more experiences of these events.

      JL: This is something that I have written in the book:

      For every individual who stood on the beach or on the mole, or retreated clinging to a cow, there was a different reality. Set side by side, these realities often contradict each other. To take one element of the story; the beaches covered a large area, they were populated by many thousands of people in varying mental and physical states over nearly ten intense days of rapidly changing conditions. How could these stories not contradict each other? The whole world was present on those beaches.

      To me that feels like the essence. Do you agree with that?

      CN: Yes. I think the film is very much based on that same assessment of the illusive nature of individual subjective experience defining objective reality. Which is a connecting thread with all the films I’ve ever made. They are all about individual experiences, potential contradictions with objective reality, and the film tries very strongly to leave space for the seemingly infinite number of experiences and stories that would contradict each other or comment on each other in different ways. We tell three stories that intersect at a point. We show the point when they come together and they are very, very different experiences. Watching a Spitfire pilot ditch from the other Spitfire, it looks calm and controlled, but to actually go through that as you do later in the film is completely different. A massive contrast. That is something that’s always fascinated me about human experience.

      JL: We went on a trip round parts of Britain meeting Dunkirk veterans. What did you learn from that?

      CN: Absolutely vital things. But what was interesting was that although when we were talking to those people I was honoured and humbled, I wasn’t necessarily inspired or aware in the moment exactly what I was going to get out of these conversations. I knew it was a smart thing to do. We needed to talk to people who had actually been there if we were going to presume to portray their experience. It’s really only when I look back at the film now … when I look at the scene where they watch the guy walk into the water, I don’t know what that guy’s doing, whether he’s killing himself or whether he thinks he can actually swim out. But the reason I don’t know is because I think I even asked him [the veteran] ‘Was he killing himself?’ and he didn’t have an answer. This was a direct thing he had seen.

      JL: Did the man himself even know what he was doing?

      CN: I don’t know. Exactly.

      JL: We like to pin a certainty on everything – ‘This is what he’s doing’ – and actually we don’t even know why we do what we do half the time. And in a situation like that, where the pressures are unimaginable …

      CN: A lot of what I got from the conversations with those amazing people was confidence that things that we were intending to do were supported by people’s experience. Different people talking about being on the mole, people getting off the boat, the chap bringing water to Dunkirk, which meant getting off the boat and then not being able to get back on the same boat. It’s just this nightmarish feeling of chaos. Ordered chaos, I suppose you’d call it, or the almost bureaucratic chaos that was apparent on the mole. It’s very interesting listening to people talk about that. And also with that chap who, although he wasn’t a civilian, he’d come over from England to supply water – one of the things that fascinates me is the mechanics. This is why Tommy is trying to go to the loo at the beginning, because those things are interesting; the logistical things. Where are you going to get food from? Water? It’s something that was never planned and is being done ad hoc and so hearing the accounts of somebody who came over with water and saw all the fires from a distance and knew he was going there. That’s an omnipresent image in the film: heading towards these burning fires. It’s on the horizon. It’s the last place you want to go. There were all kinds of things I got from those conversations. They seeped in over time. I think it was very informative asking as you did what their interpretation of the Dunkirk spirit was, because there were such different interpretations. Three very distinct interpretations, as I remember. One was the little ships representing the idea of the Dunkirk spirit. Another was, I can’t remember the words he used, but he basically said it was complete bullshit. And then the last chap we were talking to, he related it to the people holding the perimeter who were left behind. And they were all three absolutely definitive in their own interpretation: that’s what it is, that’s what it means.

      JL: Absolutely. I remember one said, ‘You were only worried about yourself.’

      CN: Yes. I think he was one of the most interesting people to talk to. What he implied to us was that he’d gone through a set of experiences of which he was not proud, but which he firmly felt were in the norm of that situation for the people that were there. I felt that he wasn’t in any way saying he had done anything wrong or different, but that there were things which shouldn’t be talked about, which were best left there. And for me the whole relationship between Alex and Tommy and Gibson was that moment. It’s not meant to be judgemental of people. I felt that there was a window which opened up on to the privacy of that subjective experience.

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