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imagining putting myself in the shoes of one
of these young guys and reading this speech -
and as patriotic as they all were - imagine you’d
just come back from such a traumatic ordeal
and you’re reading something about your
Prime Minister saying you will go on, you will
fight, and the last thing you want to
do is go back.
“And of course Winston
Churchill was an amazing
speaker and writer who
really rallied people, but
for those individuals, I
think it must have been
quite tough to read that
they were going to have
to go back.”
Styles is at great pains
to explain how his pop star
status did not result in any
kid-glove treatment. Furthermore,
by no means was he a shoo-in for the
role, auditioning five times for
Dunkirk
before
landing the role of Alex, one of thousands of
soldiers trapped on the beaches.
And he didn’t whine about grueling 12-
hour days out on the beaches either, often
submerged underwater. “It was definitely hard
and physically draining. But I think everyone on
set was aware that - obviously in comparison
to what the real soldiers went through -
that it was nothing. There was no room for
complaining about any personal discomfort.”
Shot on the actual beaches of Dunkirk
Over nine days in 1940, 330,000 men
were evacuated from the beaches
at Dunkirk in an operation called
Dynamo. Hitler’s armies had swept
through France and threatened to
cut off Allied forces from potential
escape routes across the English
Channel. Christopher Nolan’s
filmic depiction of Dunkirk is in
cinemas now. Here are five facts you
(probably) didn’t know aboutThe
Battle of Dunkirk.
On May the 23rd, British General
Sir Alan Brooke wrote in his
diary, “Nothing but a miracle can
save the BEF (British Expeditionary
Force) now.”
Winston Churchill ordered the
evacuation and the Royal Navy
put out the call for help. Over 700
ships and boats responded and the
operation started on May 27.
Civilian seamen answered the
call heading to the beaches at
Dunkirk in fishing vessels, motor
launches, barges and even paddle
steamers whilst under attack from
German aircraft.
Over the course of nine days,
338,226 men were safely
rescued.
Two thirds of the men boarded
ships directly off a long stone
jetty. However, the other 130,000
soldiers had to wade out into
shoulder depth water for hours and
patiently await their turn.
013
FEATURE
CINEMA
where the evacuation
took place - their shooting
schedule even overlapping
with the Dunkirk
anniversary, he adds,
“What the film is and
where the film is set was
the main focus and no-one
was really thinking about
my leg hurts or I’m tired.”
Styles’ pop fans will
be in for a surprise when they discover that
his character is not as sweet and kind as the
image the heart throb portrays in real life.
“Alex seems nice but there’s also this edge
to him,” he says. “He comes off a little more
hardened than the other guys. Alex likes the
idea of being the rough guy but he’s also really
scared.”
While Christopher Nolan’s films typically
deal in a fantasy world, together with his
producing partner and wife Emma Thomas,
they felt a weight of responsibility in making
their first reality-based movie.
“It felt very different in the sense of
responsibility that you have to the real people
involved in the real story. We’ve made films
where people care a great deal about
the characters; talk to Batman
fans about what they want to
see in a movie and that’s a
weighty responsibility right
there,” laughs Thomas.
“But you feel it so
much more when there
are people who went
through what we’re
depicting on film and risked
their lives.”
For Nolan, making
Dunkirk
was personal - his own
grandfather died during WWII, and
he visited his tomb during filming.
“I never knew my grandfather because he
died during the war. He was a navigator on
a Lancaster bomber and did many missions,
and he was tragically killed right at the point
where he would have finished his missions.
I think, because of that, my father was
always fascinated by aviation and airplanes,
so certainly with this film I felt a huge
responsibility to achieve an authenticity to the
air raid scenes in the film."
With Tom Hardy at the controls of an RAF
Spitfire, he appears nothing short of heroic.
“I think with my family history it's
not in me to view a spitfire pilot as
anything but heroic. Tom is very cool
and iconic and I always imagined
him playing that part. I couldn’t
imagine anyone else doing it.”
Dunkirk
is in cinemas now.
Mark Rylance
Tom Glynn-Carney and Cillian Murphy
Tom Hardy
We shall
fight
on the
beaches...
...you feel it so much
more when there are
people who went through
what we’re depicting on
film and risked
their lives
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