Clocking in at 1h 45m, Dunkirk will be Christopher Nolan’s shortest film since his 1998 debut Following. To put that in perspective, Inception was 2 hours and 28 minutes long, while Interstellar was a whopping 2 hours and 45 minutes in length. In film terms, that’s a significant cut. So what made The Dark Knight director decide to cut his movie down to a leaner time? Speaking to FOX 5 D.C., Nolan went into great detail on why he aimed for a shorter film to tell his upcoming WWII epic…
“I wanted it to be an intense an experience as possible and therefore as lean and stripped down and short an experience as possible. You can only sustain the degree of suspense and tension that we wanted from the film for so long before you exhaust the audience. I think perhaps people hearing that I was doing a film about Dunkirk, particularly British people who know the story already are thinking big historical epic, they’re imagining a three-hour film with a lot of talking and all the rest. What I did is I wrote a script that was 76 pages that is really half the length of my old screenplays because I didn’t want to tell the story in words – I didn’t want the theatrics of people telling the audience why you should care about them. I wanted to care about them just because of the physical situation they were in, and in that way build up a subjective experience of the events of Dunkirk that would hopefully have a cumulative quality, emotional quality through the course of the film that will pay off at the end of the film without ever being overly theatrical or sentimentalising these real life events. So the relentless pacing of it and the stripped down nature of it was something I was very determined to stick to with right from the beginning before I wrote the script.”
Longer movies feel like something that would come with the territory of being labelled a “visionary”. Like Steven Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino, Nolan’s films are now viewed as “events”, and it seems natural that the length of his films would reflect that. However, some stories are simply more effective with a “less is more” approach. It will be really interesting to see how Nolan’s “stripped-down” approach with Dunkirk changes public perception of the (well worn-in) historical war genre.
“Dunkirk opens as hundreds of thousands of British and Allied troops are surrounded by enemy forces. Trapped on the beach with their backs to the sea they face an impossible situation as the enemy closes in.”
Dunkirk is set for release on July 21st 2017 and features a cast that includes Nolan regulars Tom Hardy and Cillian Murphy alongside Mark Rylance, Kenneth Branagh, Harry Styles, Aneurin Barnard, Jack Lowden, James D’Arcy, Barry Keoghan, Tom Glynn-Carney and newcomer Fionn Whitehead.
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Originally published July 10, 2017. Updated December 17, 2019.
