Ep61 - Christopher Nolan / "Dunkirk"

can gonna play the Imax Prince on their old films. Yeah, it seems like they could do a film film like an Imax Film Festival if they wanted to. Just like, well, if I keep films about yeah, all right, if I should be good there for you, you just get a level real fast. Yeah, so I'll be talking about like this. That's perfect, perfect though. And also I've got all my contraptions around. These are my questions. That's in the sit in front of me and a backup recorder, so we're

covered on everything, hopeful on what well. I'm here today with the writer and director and producer of Dunn Kirk Christopher Nolan, the Oscar nominated director of Dunkirk. I should say thank you for doing my show, sir. I'm really apreciure. Let me start there. Actually, I'll go ahead and speak for myself, and I think a number of people that think that that particular recognition Best Director from the Academy

has been a long time coming for you. So I just want to know what what did it feel like to finally get that particular slice of recognition from your peers. Well, I mean it's terrific. I mean, the recognition of your peers is the thing. And I've been fortunate in the past to have had you know, d g A nominations,

which obviously always means a lot to me. But to get an Oscar nomination, I mean, you know, I grew up watching the Oscars on TV and grew up with the idea of that as being, you know, the sort of ultimate ultimate award in the in the filmmaking world. So it's it's really thrilling to be nominated. That actually brings a weird question. What was the first asker ceremony you remember? Watching? Wow? Gosh? I mean, I certainly remember once from the late seventies, there were different then the

way they put on the show and whatnot. It's much different product now somewhat, but I mean there's still a great sense of occasion, and I think there's there's more than most things on TV or most things and studdy, there's there's quite a continuity actually with the history of movies, and I think that's it was fun when the you know, when they take that into account and they deal with the history of movies as they often do, and I think that's one of the reasons why it maintains a state.

It's just such an honor for anybody involved with films because there is this sense of the people who have come before you. Yeah. Absolutely, well, congratulations on the success. There eight nominations. I believe this is your best film personally. I think it's a great culmination of everything that you've shown yourself capable of. I would love to start by talking about structure, because that's certainly the forefront when when

you think about this film. Uh. One of William Goldman books, he was talking about like a remake of Grand Hotel he was going to work on, and before he sat down to write it, he kind of just sketched out just with lines representing each character, like this character will come in here and we'll be done with the character. There. There's a bunch of characters and narrative threads. So he just wanted to kind of visually see what would the

structure be like. And I was just curious if you did anything like that, any kind of a visual aid to to kind of help you visualize the structure of Dunker. I mean, you don't have a ton of threads, but you've got three that are on different temporal planes, so certainly there's complexity there. Now. I do a lot of a lot of diagrams this film, in particular, with with the different time scales that the three timelines are running at. UM, I needed to know how they would interact, how they

would intersect. And I think with every project, and this one in particular, I'm always struggling to find tools for visualization. Um. You know, it's sort of elusive that the screenplay format itself is pretty inadequate in a lot of ways for showing you what a finished film is going to be, or allowing you to step outside the story as a creator and sort of see how the pieces fit together. Um, but it's the best best with God in terms of

how you move forward. Now you you step onto the floor to make a film, and I enjoy that format very much, But before I actually write screenplay, I do tend to look at other methods, various forms of notation, diagrams that explore the geometry of the story. I'm very interested in the geometry of stories and shape of them in different ways, um as you say, how characters come in and out, you know, and all the rest, and how the various elements of the structure will guide the

audience through a set of events. And with dun Kirk, it was the first time I was dealing with real life event, set of events, and so all the research I was able to do before writing screenplay, before figuring out how to tell the story, it gives you the world, It gives you all the big geographical movements that you're going to want to deal with, and and so plotting the course through that became very much questioned point of view, very much question of structure, And so those kind of

diagrams and the kind of explorations of how would a screenplay fit together actually assumed even more importance than they normally do. With why my work well, which you know, as you said, it's a very wilful structure. It's not the kind of thing you just stumble on and editing. So due to that, I feel like personally, your work as a writer on this particular project has kind of gotten some short short shrift because this was meticulously calculated

on the page. Ultimately well it was. I mean, I think the screenplay hasn't had short shrift in the sense that a lot of people have responded very well to the film and come to see the film, and it's the screenplay that allows that to happen. So in the in the larger scheme of things, I think it's been recognized and it has paid off in ways that are

very important. Um. The reality of how people tend to think of screenplays is something I've rubbed up against different projects over the years, because everybody tends to read screenplays the same way they tend to just read the dialogue. And I was a script reader for my first year when I when I moved to Hollywood, and I, like everybody else, tended to just read the dialogue, and you you get, you get sort of lazy in that regard.

The screenplays I've written have always depended as much on the stage of directions as the dialogue, and that's always been something of a source of frustration for me, and it sort of showing people screenplayers and trying to get them to sort of visualize what the film could be.

I remember seeing reading about something that Stanley Cuba could experiment with over the years, of shifting the layout of the screenplay format so that the dialogue would go wider in the stage directions would be narrower, you know, different ways of getting people look at differently on the page. But I don't think he ever came up with anything that was better than the conventional screenplay format, and I

think it is the best. It's the best tool we have, but you are reliant on people really taking a bit of extra care and attention to really pause the stage directions as well as a dialogue. Dunkirk, that was that was very much the case because I was interested in telling a primarily visual story. Everything had to be scripted and written up very carefully, but I didn't want to carry the ideas through through dialogue primarily. It reminds me

of film school. I think that that in film school, they're kind of just teaching you how to write scripts that can sell essentially, so they're telling you, you know, make sure there's a lot of white space, you know, a lot of dialogue, keep your your your action to like three lines, and then move to another graph just well. And you write different screenplays for the same film, almost

depending on what stage you're at. And screenplays are written to sell sometimes or they are written to attract actors or you know, find a place in the marketplace. I'm very fortunate with the success I've had that I'm able to write the screenplays for me as a director. So I'm as a writer who communicating myself as a director, and so I can try and hone a very pure approach where you don't write anything in the screenplay that you don't know how to communicate to an audience visually

or cinematically, i should say. And so I'm quite you know, it could be quite disciplined about about those kind of things.

And I remember when I was starting out, I got really obsessive about, you know, not naming a character until somebody actually said the name of the dialogue, which you know, it's probably taking things a bit far, but it was a useful discipline in terms of always just trying to know only what the audience is going to uh, you know, I mentioned that there's there's meticulous calculation in the script. Uh when action from the various thrands, are threads are

gonna intersect and whatnot. I'm just curious if that's part of the fun of being a filmmaker for you, Is just this kind of precision tinkering. Yeah, I mean there's a there's a sense of engineering about it. There's a lot of fun um. You're able to take advantage of the years that you have to plan and execute something that the audience will sit there for an hour and a half two hours and will flow over them in a linear way. So you have a very superior position

to the audience members. You have a huge advantage, several huge advantages, and you know, utilizing those to give the audience an unexpected or slight challenging or surprising experience. It's part of the fun of it, It really is. I think like putting on a magic show. In a way, you get to be the magician. You get to plan your illusions ahead of time and then and then you get to lay them on and see the audience experienced them in real time. And that I think it has

always been. It's something I've been asked about a lot, in terms of the number of layers that I try to put into the film, or certain aspects of things that are trying to get in there, where when you step back from it, you say, well, you should be doing those things, and you should be able to do those things, because I have years in which to put a film together that you're going to have two hours to watch, and so really ought to be giving you more than you can take in immediately or that you

can analyze in the immediate linear moment. Uh, this is your Lanist movie, since following it kind of demanded that for what it is, this ticking clock kind of thriller. You know, as I said to you at the Governor's Awards a few months ago, I was going to lose my mind if your editor, Lee Smith was not recognized this time around. I still can't understand looking at Exception and saying no editing nomination there. But happily you're both in the mix this time around. But yeah, as I said,

it's your Leanist movie. So I guess that kind of was dictated from the start, right, Like this wasn't going to be something that got big. Yeah, I mean, certainly for the screenplay. From the screenplay point of view, I wanted to it was determined to make it as short as possible and as stripped down as possible, because I knew that the imagery, the resources we were marshaling intends of what we would put in front of the camera.

It would need a certain rhythm, it would need time to breathe to tell the story visually, and so I didn't want to um overburdened the running time of the script. But also everything we were doing, everything I was doing as a screenwriter and everything Lea was doing as an editor,

was about suspense in the language of suspense. And I had written the screenplay and we edited the film according to this musical principle of the Shepherd term, which is a an audio illusion in music, whereby you create a piece of music that sounds like it's rising and pitched the whole time, but it never actually goes out of range,

and so it's it's a sort of corkscrew effectively. And I'd use that in music and in sound effects before and when I was writing the script with it, what would be very interesting to try and apply those mathematical principles, those geometric principles to the way and which actually wrote the script. So by the time we filmed it, by the time we're in the edit suite, we have three storyline that are always continually peaking in terms of intensity

or anxiety, one after the other. And that was aimed at creating a sort of tumbling forward quality to the narrative, kind of snowballing effect. And it's the kind of thing that I've been doing in primarily in the third acts of my longer films, and it's a form of cinematic storytelling. They're very much enjoy but it's also one that can be exhausted for an audience. And so I think Lee

understood why had written the shortest script. He understood why, even though we had an amazing amount of really remarkable material and the aerial unit and stuff on the beach and on the sea, but we didn't want to exhaust the audience unnecessarily. We didn't want to push it too far in a sense, we wanted to pitch it just right.

And I think Lee showed an amazing amount of well restraint, really, I suppose, in a sense of not not pushing things too far and really trying to to find exactly the right balance between you know, productive tension and exhaustion on the part of the audience. Let's talk about hoyt Van Hoytima spoken to him a number of times over the years. I have a top ten Shots of the Year column that he's like a mainstay on at this point. Uh, your previous DP was while he fister, he moved on

to be a director himself. Um. But you're obviously someone who sticks with your cinematographer. So whenever you went out looking for someone on Interstellar, what was it about Hoyta that collect Why is it? Why is this the guy? Well, a lot of a lot of your choices about who to work with a very instinctive. They're about getting in the room with somebody and seeing if there's a creative spark between you. Um. You know, I'd seen the work he'd done on other films. Let the right one in

in particular, made quit an impression on me. Um. But really it was about a meeting the minds creatively, just in in talking about cinematography, me and his approach to it and what I what I wanted in in terms of the photography and Interstellar, because it's more than that relationship is about more than just lighting or camera work. It's about storytelling, and you have to find somebody who will really be pulling in the same direction as you in terms of how to tell that story and what

the role of the photography will be in it. And so one of the more interesting things I think about what Hoiter did in Dunkirk, which is deceptively simple, is he didn't ever want to discuss the look of the film. He didn't ever want to talk about it as any kind of stylization. He had the confidence to let it emerge from the material and what we were actually going to stage and let that define the look, which I think for for myself as a director, I have a

lot of experience with large scale films, you know. I for me that wasn't maybe such a leap, but for the for a cinematographer to sort of say, we're going to put thousands of people on the beach, We're going to get these airplanes, we're gonna get these boots, and then we're going to see how that informs the creative process of the photography. Um So all of our conversations in pre production, rather than being aesthetic, they were technical.

It was Okay, this is the format was shooting, this is the type of lens we need, this is how we're going to move the camera around. Um And I think that one of the things that I'm happiest about with Hoy's work on the film is the sincerity and the naturalness of the way in which he achieved these remarkable images there from the heart. I mean, they're just somebody with a brilliant eye watching what's going on in front of us and finding a way to capture that.

There's no imposed style on the photography in the film, and in the case of Imax photography is what how it has done in the Imax format in this film was really unique and groundbreaking in my opinion. Um yeah, I think it's the best use of the format you've had so far. I mean, certainly, I saw one of the early screenings at the Universal City was felt like

I was just falling into the screen from the opening frame. Well, we had had a bit of practice by this time, We've been doing it for ten years, and Hoyt on Interstellar finally broke that barrier that we hadn't been able to of how to hand hold the camera basically about

just picking it up and toughing it. But he was able then suddenly to give me access to the Imax format as a spontaneous format, as an intimate format, and so coming to Dunkirk, where my aspiration for the film was an intimate epic, he is then able to put that lens right where the thirty five mill or go pro would be, you know, and and really give you that that intimacy with the characters, but on this incredible format that is so it's transparent in a sense, it's

not stylized. It doesn't have to tell him to look. It just lets the screen disappear and immerses the audience in the action. And so I think always really trusted the format and trusted his eye to just be there, follow the characters through and find the the look of the thing that way, rather than imposing a style on it.

And I think I think it's it's remarkable work that that answers my next question, which was I was curious if you guys pulled any references, if you looked at photography or any artwork, but obviously not, but in general, was that just for this movie or is that something that you're typically interested in coming into pre production? I

think it depends on the on the project. I've often done films where in the case of Inception, you know, working with Whalley, with different storylines that intersect or interact, you know, there is perhaps a temptation to say, well, we could do you know, this one in this particular color or this process, or put this look to it. I've always come down on the side of naturalism, and that's why it works so well with Molly Fister, It's why I think it works so well with Hot They're

naturalistic photographers. They sort of trust the material in front of them in a way, and so you trust that the reality of the physical differences of the different timelines will start to naturally achieve some kind of a look. And I've always tried to shoot on the highest quality format, the most transparent medium possible, so that you are really just giving the audience access to the look and feel of the world that you want them to respond to.

The tactile quality that you want people to watch Dunkirk in such a way that they know what everything would smell like. You know that that kind of tacticality that that's very important. Did you leave any cameras, any imax

cameras at the bottom of the English channel. Temporarily we fished them out again and now we did we There is a shot in the film where we when we crash landed a spitfire with an Imax camera mounted and a barrel on the side, and the things sunk much more quickly than we expected, and the housing for the camera, which we put together a bit ad hoc, it fractured and the entire camera submergen seawater for hours before we

can actually get it back up. But we sent the film to the lab in Los Angeles, kept it moist in the cans, you know. We called them uposite what do we do and they told us to, you know, put some damp rags in there with it in the in the cans we sent the film, They processed it, cleaned it and processed it, and the shots in the film it came out absolute perfectly, which you can't do it. You can't do that with a digital camera. Probably couldn't

have planned that either. If you, if that's what you wanted, set out to do. Um and I just saw this feature it actually it's half hour they put together that shows all of these like Imax cameras bolted onto spitfires and they just liked a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun. Yeah, it was like a lot of things in filmmaking. It was a lot of work,

a lot of planning. But then you have that moment where you know, you get your first dailies of you know, Jack loud and in a plane for real flying information with spitfires, and you just think, wow, we actually managed to do that. We actually managed to get that done. And there were a lot of moments, a lot of

things like that on this film. The biggest one, I think for me being standing on the beach at Dunkirk on the anniversary of the real evacuation and seeing the real little ships who'd actually been there in seeing them come back to recreate their journey for us on that anniversary. That was a really, really remarkable thing to be a part of professional connection to Dunkirk. And I wanted to ask you that, like, is there something in your family

had anything to do with the evacuation. No, I mean I had a great uncle who was evacuated a couple of weeks after that, and I had known of his experiences. But my connection with what WHTI is my grandfather was in the Royal Air Force and died a couple of years after that. But like most well like all British people, it's a huge part of our culture. It's a it's a history that everybody there knows. And we talked about the Dunka Expirit for example. You know, it's just a

very very well known part of British culture. Having said which, the version we grew up with is very very simplified. Um and finding out about the real history and and sort of delving into that and really looking at examining the reality of the events in nineteen forty your respect for what really happened is really in heart's greatly magnified, even even over the kind of if you like the fairy tale version whatever, you'd cool up. Yeah, Uh, it's

going back to the imagery here. I think, perhaps more than anything else you've made, I feel like this film has a notable silent cinema hallmark or debt to it. Uh. You know a lot of the movies you've made, a number of them anyway, and Prestige, Inception, Interstellar dealing sort of heady narrative material where you're sort of forced at some point to present exposition with this movie, you could

be a little more abstract. It seemed like you could have more fun, more fun but with with images and just letting them play over silence. I'm thinking about a man waiting into the channel, presumably to his death as they watch the shore, or even just like the cut too hard, Ease, spitfire after he shoots the German playing down the propellers stopped, and just just that cut over quiet just felt like a silent film moment in a way.

I just wondered about that. I mean, I know you've talked in the past about you go back to silent cinema a lot to inform what you do I do, but well, it's interesting as you, as I think about your question, sort to realize that. And it's something I've noticed about editing about other things, is I have always

been influenced by silent cinema. But I think what I hadn't realized in the sense is that the creative tyranny of dialogue and how that works, because when you edit a film, when you shoot a film, a conventional film, dialogue is everything you based your entire day around. Have we covered this line on camera? Did we get that line you get in the edit suite, and you control the time and the intensity of the film entirely with dialogue as the backbone, and then the images kind of

filling around that. And so this is the first time where I really thought it's one thing to be influenced by silent cinema, but to actually remove the dialogue and try and tell significant parts of the story without it really opens up that side of cinema in a way that you can't do just by being influenced by silence about if you have. In other words, dialogue tends to

trump everything. And I've had complaints in the past and my films where I've mixed the dialogue as a sound effect, so you can't necessarily hear it with great clarity, but it's part of an overall feel of things, And that too, is indicative of this idea that modern cinema, modern Hollywood cinema, dialogue tends to be the spines of running and defining everything. And I've been creatively very invigorated by removing that, and it shifts everything in your process and and how you

deal with things, and that immediately forces you. It forces you to not only find different solutions to things, but it also opens up some of those devices and solutions for the audience that when the dialogue isn't there, they're free to watch it in a slightly different way, just as we're free to make it in a slightly different way.

It's kind of like that thing where if you know someone who's blind, maybe there are other senses are more high and yeah, so if you take away an element that you used to in the cinema, it allows for you to really key into this other stuff. So yeah, yeah, you tend to as an audience member, you you cling to dialogue in the soma that there is a writer. You're cling to it to just get something across that

you can't figure out another way to communicate. And I've done films in the past that have required a lot of heavy exposition because I've been dealing with complicated structures, are complicated conceits. The wonderful thing about the story of done Kirk to me is how simple it is. It's an incredibly simple geography that you can explain and then you know, deal with the situation. It really is a very primal kind of ticking clock surrounded on all sides,

backs to the sea situation. It's very easy to get that across, so you don't have to spend a lot of time talking about it, you can just experience it absolutely. You started to talk about mixing there. I'd love to talk about the sonic quality of this film, and not just the score, which is amazing and as you say, builds on this idea of the Shepherd tone auditory illusion

at a looser re sense of ascension. But I want to hear your philosophies on sound mixing, uh in general, because as you as you mentioned, you know, with with Interstellar, there were questions about what were you doing with sound, what was the creativity behind it? And something I find interesting and correcting me if I'm wrong, you don't do Delby at most mixes. I haven't yet. No, I'm I quite like a tight sound coming off the screen. I'm

sorry to just just you know. When it comes to imagery, you're very keen on the immersive experience as it pertains to enveloping an audience with sound or multiple channels, not so much. Well, it's more about using the sound to enhance the most equality of the image, and so the images are creating the screens that we try to project them on as significantly as possible our prime UH exhibition locations. They're massive screens and the sound behind them can therefore

be massive. The problem with any kind of UM surround sound, and you know, atmoster is obviously the newest and more sophisticated version of that, but the sounds come off the screen, and there are ways in which to draw the sounds off the screen that helped with the immersive quality, particularly

with certain aspects of the music and things. But there are a lot of times in which spot effects, particularly you know, particularly sharp sound or knock or something, if it's placed off the screen, it becomes a distraction or it inherently tells you that the screen is smaller than you wanted to feel, because the sound is bigger than the screen. And so it really depends on which frequencies

you're you're talking about. With low end frequencies, they tend to not have specific imaging, which is why you can put your sub different places in your room and it won't make that much difference. Um So with these low end frequent is you can do a lot in terms of immersing the audience. When it comes to higher end spot frequencies, even in the music, you have to be

very careful about the imaging. For me, the most powerful form is a very tight, powerful sound coming from behind the screen and reinforcing the images that you're actually seeing

there on screen. And if you look at the history of sound mixing, and you look at every time there's been a new innovation, um, you know, six tracks sound and seventy mil prints and the surround sound, you know, these kind of things, that tends to be a very pronounced and obvious use of those technologies for the first couple of years that they're around, and then ultimately filmmakers tend to then sort of received somewhat let that let that more obvious or flashier use of it come back

to something that's a little more behind the screen. And so there are a lot of great mixing options. At my particular favorite is Imax because it has a a filtered sub and that has a really interesting set of low frequencies that you can you can play with in the relationship between the means of the sub is really

really fascinating to play with. Um Ultimately, I want the image to be primary, and I want the power and the force of that image to be bolstered by the sound, and so sometimes wide imaging or very very deep imaging

fights out of it. Yeah, I'm glad you touched on the IMAX mix because I just I've always wanted to ask you this is such a sort of gearhead question, But you know, is there anything problematic about the idea of the sub the low frequency information, not having a dedicated discrete channel and all kind of pumping through the other channels, Because to me as someone just as a listener and a viewer, and with someone like you who can be creative with your sound usage, stuff feels like

an get lost in that soup. Sometimes I think the reverse is true. I think when you have a yeah, when you have a filtered sub, we have a derived up a part of me um as you do in IMAX. You get more of low and information contained in the mains as well, and so there isn't this absolute cut off between your sort of higher end information in the mains and then there's kind of down below. There's more of a sliding scale. It's more of a spectrum, and

I actually prefer it as a as a sound. And indeed the way we mix for thirty five mile and for DCP and stuff, we actually somewhat take that philosophy over to that mix as well, and try not to put stuff we tend to for example, will switch the subs off and listen to the mix. Sometimes you just check that we've got enough of the low end information contained in the mains, and that's a sort of important

part of our process. Um. There was a tendency when when five one first came out for the sub to be treated very you, very separately from the rest of the mix. And I think that that is a less realistic type of sound. So what what that derived some allows you to do is have have a slightly more realistic spectrum down from the mains into the sub. Interesting. Well, while I'm here and talking about immersive qualities, let me

ask you about virtual reality. Actually you've called dunker virtual reality without the headset, so I know where your head is at. You want to make movies that people feel like they're actually experiencing. Uh. But is this is the idea of the proscenium still a fixture for you in that light? I mean, is virtual reality something you would ever dabble in because of that? You know? I mean

I would never say never. But there is a particular form, this particular medium to what what a motion picture is that has a very particular relationship with the audience. And one of the reasons I don't like three D for example, or stereoscopic imaging in movies is it tends to shift your sense of empathy with the rest of the audience.

So I mean to get technical about it, but it's like when you're wearing three D glasses, your brain can't understand that the person if you're at the back of the theater, can't understand that the person on the front of the theater is seeing the same thing as you, because the stereoscopic imaging is putting the image behind their their head effectively. Um, it's one of the reasons why they don't tend to do comedies in three D because the sense of audience empathy is so important. But I

think it's important for any film and so individual. A sense of individual and isolated immersion gives you a different empathetic relationship with the rest of the audience than a large scale image that you share with the rest of

the audience. So whatever I want to do in the future, and I would never say never, I'm interested in all types of sentiment, all types of storytelling, But I very much value A four or me hum like IMAX two D that can give you a tremendous sense of subjective emotion without in any way compromising the empathetic relationship you have with the rest of the audience. There's something of a sweet spot there that I think is really really powerful and important. Did you happen to check out the

Carnate Arena? And I haven't had a chance to yet, but people in the accademy we're telling me, I've got to got to go. It looks gonna It's interesting. I mean, it's it's interesting to see, like what you'll do in the moment, because for me, I just kind of stood back and forced a percentium, like I wanted to just observe. I'd like to go back because maybe I could be more participatory about it, But just that first instinct was, let me just stand back and make a movie out

of this. Yeah, just different things I'll be interested to see. Uh, just a couple of last things here. I don't know if you've ever made it out of an interview without someone bringing up Batman. But I had Christian Bale on the show a few weeks ago. I had Gary Oldman on the show. We've had a bit of a Batman

reunion and Christian. One of the things that he and I talked about, which was interesting, was, you know, he's such a private person and just the idea of tackling those movies as a bit of a mixed blessing, you know, it opened a ton of doors, but it also exposed him a little bit. And I've always been curious, given that you're someone who's so guarded about what you're making and how you're making it, yet those movies were about

the most popular pop cultural figure in many ways. Uh, do you feel similarly to Christian that it was a bit of a mixed blessing that it kind of exposed because now fans are just desperate to know exactly what you're doing. You know, what are you making, what does the script? All of this stuff? So now I think it's very different if you're behind the camera than if

you're in front of the camera. You're not you're not dealing with that that um loss of anonymity if you like that For an actor, a serious actor like Christian is so important actually to this process to be amongst

people and absorbing what people do. UM for filmmaker's very different and your biggest struggle as an independent filmmaker is getting an audience, just getting your work seen and knowing that it's getting out there and so um, success on the scale that we had with the Don't Right trilogy

is just a massive advantage to me. And it's one of the reasons why I'm able to take on a British story like dun Kirk that wouldn't be a traditional fit for a studio summer temple release, um, and and get that done and get that scene and have people be interested in it. So for a filmmaker, it's really all about about eyeballs in a sense, about about anything they can get you attention, and so people being interested in what I do, I would never begrudge that. That's

a that's a fantastic privilege to have. It's very different for a director than it is for an actor. And then just to wrap it up with Dunkirk, here is there? You know, it's obviously a timeless theme. What's going on with Dunkirk. It's about pulling together in the face of insurmountable odds and you know, surviving the torrent Essentially just curious, is there anything about that story of Dunkirk that particularly resonates in the modern climate for you. I think for

me that the residents have fine. I mean, it wasn't really something I was self conscious about it making the film, but when we finished the film, we put it out. It's really a question of what does the Dunka experience mean. And what it means to me is the possibilities of what can be achieved when people pull together as opposed to what we can achieve individually. And I think that movies traditionally have celebrated individuality and individual acts of heroism.

I think that's something that's fit the narrative paradigm of of movies, and so a lot of what we've done editorially, photographically, and all these things we've been talking about that they're all aimed at trying to drawl the audience, I mean

into a different type of heroism, of communal heroism. And I think we live in times that possibly over value you know, individual achievement at the expense of what we can do, you know, together, So I think I think for me, that's that's the relevance of of Dunkirk, and I think it's the reason that the story itself will always be this incredible shining example of what society can achieve working together. Ye well, well put. The movie is called dun Kirk. You should see it if you haven't,

hopefully on the biggest screen possible. I think Mr Nolan would prefer. And good luck at the Bathtoor Awards this weekend. It's thank You're certainly a source of pride over there, so hopefully you have good luck there, and thank you again for doing my show. I really appreciate it. Sure, thanks very much. What has happened to the colossal military disaster? You shall go on to the end. You should never surrender. The cool went out. We have to go to dun Kirk.

Ready on the stern line. We do it here where we're going into ward George, I'll be useful, sir. Or about he's on me. I'm on l it's about to me. They need to send more ships every nine the only British contract covactivated the civilian boats. We need to destroy it. Where were you going down, Kirk? I'm not gonna bay. We know they will die your weekend, sayous of the bloody Navy told be at home. There's no hiding from

this sun. We have a job to do. Turning around for fighting beaches, to fight from the landing ground which will never surrenders. Where is the bloody airport