Making Dunkirk as intense as it is regarded a great deal of professional intensity on set.
Christopher Nolan is a very serious and deliberate filmmaker, and his latest cast was only too happy to help create the environment and atmosphere on set he felt would make for the best possible finished film.
I asked Dunkirk actor Mark Rylance if Nolan has any directorial idiosyncrasies (listen to the podcast interview in full below), to which he replied: "Very much so; he's very particular about using film and everything being real in front of the camera, so there were a lot of old techniques used in this film to make it look real. The flames on the water and men swimming in them; he really wants to minimise the amount of post-production and CGI stuff.
"He does things like he doesn't like having chairs on set for actors or bottles of water, he's very particular."
Asked why these items, in particular, were banned, Rylance's co-star Barry Keoghan chimed in: "They're distractions - the noise of [the bottles], they're like toys almost, playing around with toys. [The lack of chairs, meanwhile] keeps you on your toes, literally."
Nolan is far from the first director to ask certain items not to be brought to set. Martin Scorsese, for instance, prefers that cast and crew don't wear their wristwatches.
12: Dunkirk. Assessing the hype and chatting to Cillian Murphy & Mark Rylance. Listen: https://t.co/NoKYFdZzVn + https://t.co/DRFzAEjlJh pic.twitter.com/Se5AbLw5Tt — Kernels podcast (@kernels) July 20, 2017
Is 'craftsman' a fair characterisation of Nolan?
"He's definitely into the craft of it, and serious," Rylance said, "he considers everything about it, he has his eye on every aspect of the creation of the film.
"And of course it's also very unusual and very pleasant that it's a husband and wife team, so there isn't a team of suited producers all fretting in the background, there's just Emma, his wife.
"It feels more like when you're involved in a student film and there's a couple. So even though they've become very successful and are able to harness all this resource, you still feel like you with a pair of film graduates who are making something that's personal, that they're enthusiastic about."
Tulipsandwindmills on July 28th, 2017 at 18:13 UTC »
Oh boy. I've got an anecdote about a plastic water bottle and an angry Christopher Nolan on the set of Dunkirk. They were filming scenes in the Netherlands that took place on ships standing in for the destroyers in the movie.
On that day it was mainly shots by a helicopter going overhead filming extras in full gear on one of the ships. Since the shoot took place for whole days at a time, there was a lot of a downtime aboard during which the extras could grab something to eat and drink before getting ready for the next shot.
So it's time to get ready again, the crew moves out of the way, the deck gets cleared, the extras get in position. Action gets called through speakers aboard the ship and the helicopter is flying right above the boat shooting in glorious IMAX format.
Right at that moment one of the extras on the front of the ship in full view of the helicopter takes a plastic water bottle out of his pocket, and takes a big gulp of water. Shot ruined.
After that Nolan supposedly yells via the speakers: who was that asshole with the water bottle?
I was an extra the next week and this story was told to us to explain what we absolutely didn't need to do during the shoot.
ThunderThorOdinson on July 28th, 2017 at 17:57 UTC »
Quentin Tarantino doesn't allow cellphones. Sounds like kind of an obvious one, but tell 200 crew with a fair amount of downtime during the day they can't have their cellphones and watch their faces.
pollyvar on July 28th, 2017 at 11:28 UTC »
What's that thingy Nolan's looking at in the picture at the top of the article? The one hanging around his neck?