This thread to post and discuss (potential) spoilers before and after Dunkirk is released.
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I guess I will start with the sample from Dunkirk: The History Behind the Major Motion Picture that @AhmadAli95 found and shared with us. They are not big spoilers, but could ruin part of the surprise for some. Here are some cool pieces of information that we might not have known until now:
How Nazis are handled in the film
Expositional scene
Ending and Churchill's speech
Line from the end of the film
Structure
The guy who swam in the channel
Ordered chaos
Alex, Tommy and Gibson
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I guess I will start with the sample from Dunkirk: The History Behind the Major Motion Picture that @AhmadAli95 found and shared with us. They are not big spoilers, but could ruin part of the surprise for some. Here are some cool pieces of information that we might not have known until now:
How Nazis are handled in the film
Well, when I was first writing it - it was a crawl at the beginning, but it tells you what's going on - I used the word Nazi constantly and had people referring in the dialogue to Nazis. I wanted to continually remind the modern audience how evil and awful the enemy was and get them alongside. And then at some point - I think it was in my discussions with Mark Rylance, who first came aboard the project - I realized that because I had made the decision to never actually show Germans, even referring to them was pointless. You don't want to be in a middle ground. That is to say that you either have to try and address the entire concept of Nazi evil and ideology, or you have to completely circumvent by not showing them, by having them be subliminal creatures, in a way, having them as an off-screen menace. It's like the shark in Jaws, maybe you see the fin, but you don't see the shark. And that way your mind, and ever your ethical sense of who you are identifying with in the film, automatically makes them the worst thing possible out there.
So, in the expositional scene we give hopefully just enough historical information. The idea is that [the characters] Tommy and Gibson wouldn't know anything about what was going on and then they'd be given disquieting scraps of information like 'we're trying to get forty-five thousand people off the beach', 'there are four hundred thousand people on the beach' and then you get that 'OK, every man for himself' feeling. I was interested in the idea people wouldn't know rather than explaining everything we know now.
One of the most moving things about the Dunkirk story to me - in fact, definitely the single most moving thing - is that when these guys finally were rescued, when they finally made their way home, they went with a sense of shame. That they went home, the vast majority of them, thinking they were going to be a huge disappointment to the British people back home and then found out they were welcomed as heroes to me one of the most extraordinary turnarounds, emotionally, in history, and it was because they didn't know what was going on.
So we have them reading Churchill's speech in the newspaper. They wouldn't have been in Parliament, they wouldn't have been able to do what films do traditionally, which is to cut to Winston Churchill speaking to the Cabinet or preparing his speech. They were just going to get it from the newspapers, so they find out after the fact what it is that they've been through.
So to me, Dunkirk becomes a survival story. The terms of the success or failure for me are survival, and that's why when one of the soldiers at the end says 'all we did was survive', the blind man replies 'That's enough.' Because in the terms of Dunkirk, that was the definition of success.
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.
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 calms and controlled, but to actually go through that as you do later in the film is completely different. A massive contrast.
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.
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 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.
[speaking about a Dunkirk veteran] What he implied to us was that he'd gone through a set of experiences of which he was not proud of, but which we firmly felt were in the norm of that situation for the people that were there. I felt like 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 judgmental of people. I felt that there was a window with opened up on to the privacy of that subjective experience