Although we're about four months out from Dunkirk, there's very little we know about the film beyond what we've seen in trailers and what we know from, well, history.
In an interview with French film magazine Premiere, Nolan dropped more than a few tidbits on his upcoming World War II epic that point to an altogether different experience from what we may have seen before. "It's less a war movie than a survival drifted by suspense. I wanted to be in the present moment, to find the immediate intensity to share the experience of these soldiers."
"The film recounts a series of paradoxical situations. The most obvious: the army is stuck on this beach and must cross the Channel to return to England. But from there, there are others: will a soldier succeed in reaching the mole? Will the pilot be able to carry out his mission? And the film focuses on suspense sequences that are reduced to a human dimension."
As well as this, Nolan confirmed that the film is split into three different viewpoints - from the beach, from the sea and from the air, with Harry Styles on the beach with the soldiers, Cillian Murphy and Mark Rylance out at sea and Tom Hardy in the air as an RAF pilot. "For the soldiers embarked in the conflict, the events took place on different temporalities," explained Nolan.
"On land, some stayed one week stuck on the beach. On the water, the events lasted a maximum day; And if you were flying to Dunkirk, the British spitfires would carry an hour of fuel. To mingle these different versions of history, one had to mix the temporal strata. Hence the complicated structure; Even if the story, once again, is very simple."
Most interesting of all, however, is the fact that film has - according to Nolan himself and his editor, Lee Smith - little dialogue. "The empathy for the characters has nothing to do with their story. I did not want to go through the dialogue, tell the story of my characters. The problem is not who they are, who they claim to be or where they come from. The only question I was interested in was - will they get out of it? Will they be killed by the next bomb while trying to join the mole? Or will they be crushed by a boat while crossing?"
Going by the trailer, it looks as though Dunkirk isn't going to leave much of anything on the table. Already, Nolan has used actual naval destroyers for filming and apparently even crashed a $5 million restored World War II-era plane for one shot, so we're guessing it's going to be pretty intense, to say the least.
Dunkirk hits Irish cinemas on July 21st.
Via Premiere
