Christopher Nolan Says ‘Dunkirk’ Script Was Only 76 Pages, Reveals ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ Connection

In case you hadn’t heard, “Dunkirk” heads into cinemas this weekend, and not only is it as good as you heard, you can expect it to be an Oscar player. As you might know, the film is a bit of a departure for Christopher Nolan, his shortest film since “Following,” and even more, it delivers white knuckle thrills without much in the way of dialogue. In fact, the 106-minute movie had an atypically stripped down screenplay.

Speaking with EW, the director revealed he put his focus on visuals for this movie, to the extent that the script wound up being considerably smaller than the runtime (the general rule of thumb is that one page of script, equals one minute of screentime, but that’s usually with standard amounts of dialogue).

“It was about half the length [of the movie]. It was a 76-page script, a very short script. I really wanted to be telling the story through images, first and foremost. For me, this film was always going to play like the third act of a bigger film. There have been films that have done this in recent years, like George Miller’s last ‘Mad Max‘ film, ‘Fury Road,’ or Alfonso Cuarón’s ‘Gravity,’ where you’re dealing with things as the characters deal with them,” Nolan said.

Coming after the very exposition heavy “Interstellar,” the director is reluctant to say he intentionally tried to do something different, and actually points to a different film in his catalog as a point of inspiration.

“You try not to be too reactive to what you’ve done, but at the same time you don’t want to repeat yourself. You find things in a film that you want to keep expanding on. For example, at the beginning of ‘The Dark Knight Rises,’ where Bane is introduced, we did a complicated aerial sequence. I wanted to build on that for this film,” he said.

Indeed, not only was the opening scene of ‘Rises’ shot in IMAX just like “Dunkirk,” but Tom Hardy is back in the plane, his faced mostly covered, albeit this time piloting the craft. Sometimes, creativity hits from the unlikeliest of places.

“Dunkirk” opens on Friday.