Trailer
Plot summary
By the summer of 1940, the Allied armies have retreated to Dunkirk, where hundreds of thousands of soldiers wait on the beach for ships to carry them across the Channel. Tommy, a British soldier, loses his squad and reaches the sand, where he and a fellow soldier named Gibson bury a body and come through a bombing run by German aircraft. Commander Bolton of the Royal Navy oversees the mole, where the deep-draft ships can dock. In England, the Navy requisitions private boats, and the mariner Mr. Dawson takes his own vessel, Moonstone, with his son Peter and their teenage helper George, pulling a shell-shocked officer from the water. Three RAF Spitfires fly toward Dunkirk to cover the evacuation.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Dunkirk (2017)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Harry Styles was cast for what Christopher Nolan called his "old fashioned face"; he won the role after auditioning against hundreds of candidates while Nolan was unaware of his fame as a singer.
- Dunkirk was the first feature film to use hand-held IMAX cameras, a technique Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard advised as the best way to shoot on vessels.
- Sound designer Richard King sent two mixers to record Spitfires at the Imperial War Museum Duxford with twenty-four microphones, and, unable to find a Stuka dive-bomber siren, reverse engineered one from old photographs.
- The original heavy wool uniform fabric had not been produced since 1940, so it was made from scratch for the main cast and over a thousand extras; the uniforms came from a factory in Pakistan and the boots from a shoemaker in Mexico.
- Because French authorities had banned pyrotechnic charges to protect marine life, the production used air cannons instead, and six thousand extras were needed in France.
- Owner Dan Friedkin piloted the Spitfire filmed landing on the beach in Dunkirk; those takes had to be done within forty-five minutes, before the tide came back in.
- For intensity, the script was written around the auditory illusion of a Shepard tone, previously explored in Nolan's The Prestige, and the score used the sound of Nolan's own pocket watch, which he recorded and sent to Hans Zimmer to be synthesised.
- The character Dawson was inspired by Charles Lightoller, the Titanic's second officer and the most senior crewmember who survived the sinking, who took his yacht Sundowner to the Dunkirk evacuation.
