SANTA MONICA, Calif. _ Christopher Nolan has directed 10 feature films over the past 21 years starting with "Following" in 1998 and continuing through his latest, "Dunkirk." Those works have earned him a long list of awards and praise including three Oscar nominations, plus made tons of money, especially his "Dark Knight" trilogy.
That kind of directing-writing pedigree would suggest a more active career but that's not the way Nolan works.
"I'm very single-minded and only do one thing at a time. I'm not really good at planning what I'm going to do next," Nolan says during an interview in a hangar at the Santa Monica Airport that's been filled with props � including two large World War II vintage airplanes � used in the filming of "Dunkirk."
"For me it's always been about story. It's always been about finding the story that I feel I can have an emotional connection with. That will sustain me through the years of making the film. So I dive in and I concentrate on one film for two or three years, usually. So, it has to be a story I believe will hook me for that period of time and keep me enthusiastic about it."
He's known about the story behind "Dunkirk" since he was a youngster growing up in England. Events in Dunkirk unfolded in 1940 when a group of British civilians crossed the English Channel to help save 400,000 British and French troops trapped by the Germans on the beach at the small town in northern France. Nolan describes the recounting of those events _ when he first heard them as a child _ as being a "mystic fairytale version" of the moment in history.
It wasn't until he and longtime producing partner Emma Thomas made the Channel crossing 20 years ago in a small boat that he fully understood the heroics needed just to travel the choppy waters let along be headed into a warzone.
"I came away from that experience with respect and fascination for the people who took part in the real evacuation absolutely cemented. I have never understood why a modern film hasn't been made about it and as a filmmaker, those are the kind of gaps you are looking to fill," Nolan says.
The cast he's put together to fill the film gap ranges from veteran actor Kenneth Branagh to newcomer Harry Styles (One Direction). He's also turned to actors he's used in previous works such as Cillian Murphy ("Inception," "The Dark Knight) and Tom Hardy ('Inception," "The Dark Knight Rises").
Cast members applaud Nolan for his attention to detail, willingness to let them develop their role and devotion to the project. Styles found it hard to complain about the physical demands of shooting the movie when Nolan was beside his acting team no matter how cold and wet the conditions.
"He was the first one in and the last one out," Styles says.
Mark Rylance ("Bridge of Spies") calls working with Nolan a gift because he has such a laser focus on one project.
Rylance says: "It's very hard to be a film director. Many film directors have to take jobs and have careers that involve taking jobs to get somewhere else. But you felt Chris was not trying to get anywhere else than where we were on that day and enjoy that."
A split focus would have been disastrous because Nolan's script tells the Dunkirk story through the point of view of those on the land, sea and in the air. He takes those three solid threads and weaves them in a manner that rejects a linear time approach to better enhance the intensity of the story.
Nolan's approach was to find a way of maintaining a subjective storytelling approach but still building up a coherent picture of the events that happened at Dunkirk.
"So everything in the film is intended to be intense, suspenseful and subjective. You want to be on the beach seeing events these guys' points of view. But then you also want to build up a bigger picture so that requires a view from the air and on the sea," Nolan says. "I didn't want to give the audience knowledge the characters didn't have other than through the interaction of these three distinct story threads.
"The idea behind the structure and the way we told it is really by virtue of trying to tell it in a very human scale, and an intimate scale, to create what I refer to as an 'intimate epic.' You're trying to stay in a very, very intimate point of view with each of the story threads but gradually, over the course of the film, build up a cumulative picture of a very, very large event."
Styles knew that was the approach as soon as he saw the script. It read to him like all of Nolan's other movies that are so different in design they often require multiple viewings to fully appreciate everything that's happening.
Nolan's approach was so far away from the standard war movie blueprint that instead of having the crew watch movies about the military before filming started, he had them watch films that relied heavily on suspense such as the works of Alfred Hitchcock. Nolan also had the crew look at the works of David Lean, such as "Ryan's Daughter," to get an understanding of how to shoot the costal landscapes. His biggest influence was Henry-Georges Clouzot's 1953 feature, "The Wages of Fear," that follows four men who must transport an explosive cargo through a rough jungle terrain.
Keeping an intense focus on the project became even more demanding when Nolan decided to shoot the majority of "Dunkirk" in the large IMAX format. He had included some IMAX scenes in previous films but nothing to compare to the scope of this project. It was necessary for a special hand-held IMAX camera to be built to shoot many of the scenes.
He even strapped an IMAX camera to the wing of one of the planes.
"In planning the aerial scenes, it was important to try and achieve as much as possible in camera. So we were able to get real planes and really try to get the IMAX cameras where they have never been before. We wanted to put the audience in the cockpit of the plane. There was a lot of attention to detail," Nolan says. "I've been working with IMAX for about 10 years now. With each film, we've tried to maximize our use of it. Try to shoot a bit more film that way.
"This film felt more than any other picture I've made needed to try to immerse the audience in the experience and create a cinema experience � really take them there. IMAX is the best format to do that but it obviously poses production challenges but I think it was well worth it.
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