Well in the mix of movies that are contenders to rack up more than a few Oscar nominations, the ultimate legacy for Christopher Nolan‘s “Dunkirk” might be its place as one of the most visceral WWII movies ever made. But before he rolled a frame of the 70mm reel, the director reached out to someone who had been in the trenches before: Steven Spielberg.
The man behind “Saving Private Ryan,” another intensely immersive WWII flick, lent Nolan a “pristine print” of his Academy Award-winning movie to show his crew. Spielberg also shared some advice with Nolan, too.
“Knowing and respecting that Chris is one of the world’s most imaginative filmmakers, my advice to him was to leave his imagination, as I did on ‘Ryan,’ in second position to the research he was doing to authentically acquit this historical drama,” Spielberg told Variety.
Nolan clearly took that to heart — there’s no “Inception” style smash-cut ending or other blockbuster tricks — but oddly enough, viewing “Saving Private Ryan” revealed to the filmmaker what he didn’t want to do.
“The film has lost none of its power,” he explained. “It’s a truly horrific opening, and there are later sequences that are horrible to sit through. We didn’t want to compete with that because it is such an achievement. I realized I was looking for a different type of tension.”
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“I needed suspense, and the language of suspense is one where you can’t take your eyes from the screen,” Nolan added. “The language of horror is one where you hide your eyes. You’re looking away. It’s a different form of tension. We constructed our set-pieces not around violence, not around blood, but around physical jeopardy.”
As Nolan has stated throughout this press run for “Dunkirk,” and what he emphasizes again, is “I didn’t view this as a war film. I viewed it as a survival story.” Indeed, the suspense in his movie isn’t the terror of what the young soldiers will face, but if they’ll make it out alive against impossible odds. And certainly, “Dunkirk” breathlessly succeeds in taking you on a white-knuckle ride.