Christopher Nolan on his long crossing to Dunkirk: Howell

Look closely at a map of the coasts of England and France and the narrow strip of water separating the historic port towns of Dover and Dunkirk seems like an easy jump.

That’s what filmmaker Christopher Nolan thought, too, when he, his girlfriend Emma Thomas and a friend made the trek in a small sailing boat in the early 1990s. They wanted to recreate the English Channel crossing made by many brave Britons in 1940 during the Second World War, in the miraculous mass troop evacuation Nolan thunderously recreates in Dunkirk, his new film.

“We did it one Easter, just sort of before the time of year where the (wartime) events really took place,” Nolan says from Los Angeles.

“And it was such a difficult and arduous crossing. It was really, really tough; the channel is no joke. It took us about 19 hours to get there, much longer than we thought. We were absolutely freezing. It felt dangerous and impossible and that was without people dropping bombs on us and going into a war zone. And so that cemented for me an absolute respect for the people in real life who did this extraordinary thing.”

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It would be many years, films and experiences later before the London-born Nolan, now 46, would set his Dunkirk fascination to celluloid. In the interim he married and started a family with Thomas, who is also his production partner, and he’s crafted some of this century’s most celebrated films: Memento, The Dark Knight Trilogy, Inception, Interstellar and more.

The Friday release of Dunkirk finds Nolan at the top of his game and eager to talk about his film, and how he built suspense out of a story everybody thinks they already know:

Dunkirk is an amazingly intense experience. I felt like I was watching virtual reality.

It’s funny you say that. I call it “virtual reality without the goggles.”

The release of Dunkirk is being described as the largest 70mm film release this century. Is this true?

Yes. With Interstellar, I think we did 10 70mm prints, which performed very well. I very much liked the look of them. And then Quentin Tarantino and Harvey Weinstein were able to put together 100 70mm projectors (for The Hateful Eight) and get those out there. So we’ve been able to build on what they did and take it even a little further.

The sound design is also quite something. The dialogue sometimes gets lost in the roar of the war, but the intention and the emotion behind it always gets through.

That’s a very good way of describing it. I want to film a story visually, primarily visually, in the particular case of this subject matter. So I wrote a very short script and stripped out almost all the dialogue in places. So of any film I’ve done, this is by far the most visually told and the one in which the dialogue in a way matters the least. It’s there where it’s there, doing something useful. But I wanted to tell a story through sound and vision in a way that was less verbal and more experiential. I really just want to put you there, put you in it. Rather than explaining to you what something should feel like, I wanted you to feel it.

It seems that Dunkirk would have been a far different film if it had been made decades ago, when war memories were still fresh. There would have been a push to Hollywoodize everything, as has been the case with other accounts of the evacuation.

I think it’s true that storytelling varies over time and it changes with distance from the events it portrays. What we wanted to do was research the real events, to really look at the reality behind the fairy tale we grow up with. And what you find is, the more you know about what actually happened — like if you get on one of these boats and you make that crossing — the more impressive the story is, in truth. The real version of the story, I think, is so much more impressive than a fairy-tale version. I actually just got back from London, where we screened the film for some of the veterans who had actually been there.

What was their reaction?

I wouldn’t want to speak for them, and for their family members who were also there, but it was very emotional and very, very positive. I really can speak to my experience at that screening, standing there, looking at that row of guys who had actually been there. That was the most scared I’ve ever been at any screening situation, or anything remotely like that — I thought I was losing reality! There’s a sudden sense of awesome responsibility.

You approach the concept of heroism and its flip side cowardice in interesting ways in Dunkirk. The heroes in the film aren’t at all showy about it; they’re just getting the job done. And it’s easy to call someone a coward for jumping the rescue queue, for example, but he’s also desperate to survive. Definitions blur.

The film is not so much about individual heroism as the individual survival mechanism and a communal heroism. It’s the idea that flawed human beings are doing their best in the situation they’re in and dealing with their own survival, dealing with their own humanity. I think there’s tremendous optimism from the Dunkirk story that can all add up to a communal heroism of extraordinary magnitude.

You don’t show any politicians in the film. There’s no shot of Winston Churchill, for example, making his famous “We will fight them on the beaches” speech.

I wanted it to be experiential and true to the subjectivity of the storytelling. So these guys on the beach, they were not privy to what Churchill was thinking in his study. They weren’t seeing the generals in rooms with things being pushed around a map. And that’s one of the things that made the experience, I think, so terrifying for them. They didn’t know what was going to happen; they didn’t know what was being planned. And it was only after they got through this experience that they could then process it through the lens of the politician. The lens of culture. It’s like, OK, what have we just been through?

Speaking of missing characters, the German troops are barely glimpsed in Dunkirk. It makes them seem all the more threatening.

I spent a lot of time reviewing the mechanics of suspense, because this film needed to be all about suspense. The unseeing, the unknown, is inevitably more terrifying. The idea of shots coming, the sounds of planes coming, you can’t tell where they’re coming from, you can’t see them: that’s the real-life terror that these guys were dealing with. And that’s what I wanted to convey.