Dunkirk vs. Saving Private Ryan

[spb_text_block pb_margin_bottom="no" pb_border_bottom="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] DUNKIRK PODCAST Dunkirk vs. Saving Private Ryan: What is Your Screenplay About? by Jacob Krueger This week we are going to be looking at Dunkirk by Christopher Nolan. On top of being an extraordinary cinematic experience, Dunkirk is a particularly interesting script to look at as screenwriters, because it breaks pretty much every rule that you’ve likely been told about screenwriting or about filmmaking in general, or certainly about the war movie genre. When we think about big budget war movies, we generally think about movies like Saving Private Ryan, movies about great heroism and winning the battle against incredible odds. And yet this is a war movie that (for the most part) isn't about winning but about losing. This is a war movie about a retreat, about a surrender, but also about the kinds of miracles that happen when people care about each other. This isn’t a typical Joseph Campbell Hero’s Journey about one great man, one great woman who saves the world. This is a movie about a lot of little individuals. Some of them are behaving bravely, and some of them are behaving cowardly. Some for their own survival, and some for the survival of others.   Dunkirk is a movie that flies in the face of every traditional notion of star-power and how it’s supposed to be used in a big budget feature. This is a movie with an American budget with no American actors and no American characters. In fact, it features an actor in a starring role that we have never seen in a major motion picture before-- who spends most of the movie, from the very first scene, simply running away! He’s not “Saving the Cat” or behaving in any of the courageous ways we’ve been taught our main characters are supposed to behave. Not trying to help other people, but trying to save his own life in whatever manner is possible. He’s a guy who will pretend to be a Red Cross worker in order to try to sneak onto the boat that is evacuating the wounded. And yet we are able to connect with this character, we are able to care about him; we are able to feel for him. This is a movie that stars Tom Hardy and sticks him-- for most of the film-- in the cockpit of a plane and behind a mask that obscures so much of his face that we can’t even tell it is him! That takes its biggest name star and hides him from the audience that cloaks him in anonymity. And though in some ways this is an inside joke-- a nod to the recurring trend of directors covering half the face of one of the best actors in the business in roles ranging from Bane to The Road Warrior-- it’s also a thematic decision -- one that captures the anonymity of real heroism. That evokes the memory of the thousands of forgotten heroes of World War II and countless other wars. Dunkirk is also a movie that ignores most of the standard rules of the war movie genre. This is a big budget war movie with firefights shot almost entirely from the point of view of the pilots. It’s a war movie in which planes don’t explode in spectacular fashion but rather disappear silently into the ocean. A movie in which fighter pilots are more concerned with running out of fuel than with bad-ass lines of dialogue. A movie in which we watch not from the perspective of an audience being entertained by the fireworks, but from the perspective of exactly what it feels like to be a fighter pilot in the middle of battle. It’s an action movie in which the “good guys” don’t always win, and in which the bad guys can actually shoot. Where there are no supervillains, but no super heroes either. Where the Nazi pilots are as anonymous, and as good at their jobs, as the British ones. It’s a movie which assembled the largest naval unit in film history, not for a spectacular battle sequence, but for a simple journey against the waves of the English Channel. A movie in which Battleships don’t participate in spectacular action sequences, but sit helplessly loaded with frightened men, only to be sunk by a single bomb from the air or torpedo from the sea. It’s a movie in which even the good guy British soldiers are tainted by nationalistic racism and selfishness, turning French allies away from British boats, and even sacrificing the lives of their own foot soldiers to protect their air force and battleships.   Dunkirk is a movie which completely rejects the idea of exposition, or the need to explain anything to the audience. Not only does the film lack a single memorable quip or funny line-- it barely has any dialogue at all! It doesn’t tell the audience any more than the individual soldiers on the beach know, moment by moment, just as they’re learning it, and sometimes even a step or two behind. And yet, it manages to create a compelling and convincing portrait of characters that all feel very different from each other. It manages to tell a story about Tom Hardy’s fighter pilot character-- a guy who makes a life changing decision--  and to capture the feeling and the emotional import of that decision with barely a word—simply with a blown fuel gauge, a couple of chalk calculations on his fighter jet console-- and a big decision at the end of the film. It’s a journey that is not structured around big speeches and feel good American values and huge heroic choices that lead to happy endings, but rather with a series of understated little choices that play out almost in real time, and add up to one big sacrifice that plays out nearly as quietly as the ones the tiny choices that preceded it. Dunkirk is a movie in which good characters not only die for something but sometimes die for nothing. It’s a movie filled with ethical confusion, and also profound empathy. A movie in which you may just have to understand that the half drowned soldier you save on your boat may be so damaged from the war that he may never be the same again. Where you may just have to understand that he may hurt someone that you love, not out of hatred, but out of terror. A movie in which the bravest choice may not be to fight but to accept the ugly truth of war. A movie not about justice, but about acceptance. And at the same time, a movie about holding onto the values that tie us together, and the risk we all face when, in the face of our fears for our own survival, we forget to hold onto those values. Christopher Nolan’s approach to Dunkirk’s battle sequences is a total inversion of Steven Spielberg’s unforgettably gory battle at the beaches of Normandy in Saving Private Ryan. Dunkirk presents an equally horrifying beach battle with virtually no blood at all. Rather than capturing the horror of war through gory violence and chaos, Nolan captures the same madness through the bloodless lens of orderly bureaucracy-- lining his soldiers up in orderly bureaucratic rows on the beach-- silently ducking them en masse as they are bombed, slaughtered and attacked.  A horror of war in which most people simply get in line-- and which even the moments of individuality and self preservation which occur within that orderly slaughter are no more likely to lead to salvation than simply following the rules. This is a movie where characters make real decisions that aren’t Hollywood at all, real decisions under pressure drawn from research about the real events-- such as the character who at one point just gets up from the beach and walks into the water as if he could somehow swim the English Channel. This is a movie about plans for escape that don’t work out. Where risky acts of inspiration, like sneaking into a beached boat and waiting for the tide to rise, only lead to another way to die. So what is this screenplay built around that lets it break all of these rules and still succeed? On the simplest level, it’s because audiences don’t come to movies for the things that so many screenwriting teachers, so many producers, and so many writers spend so much time obsessing over. They don’t come for exposition. They don’t come for plot. They don’t come for nice “likeable” characters and memorable dialogue. They don’t come for formulaic structure or wrapping up everything with a bow. Audiences come to movies to go on a journey. To experience something that moves them emotionally, and transports them into a different kind of world. And to create that kind of experience for your audience, you only need two things. The first is a strong sense of your own intention in making the film-- the question you’re genuinely wrestling with, and the emotional journey you want to create for yourself by writing it. And the second is a character who wants something as badly as you do-- who wants something so badly they’re willing to do almost anything to get it. Who’s going to pursue that intention even in face of the biggest obstacles and most challenging consequences. Nolan is a big fan of Hitchcock, and one of the things that Hitchcock demonstrates so clearly in his films-- something forgotten by so many Hollywood filmmakers-- is that you don’t have to explain very much for an audience to feel suspense or to feel connection for a character. Simply rooting a character in their action, in their attempts to get the things they want-- simply rooting the character in their physical world and letting them try to do things that are really hard-- creates a feeling of connection and suspense for the audience, even if we don’t know exactly what is happening and even if we don’t agree with what the characters are doing. And what is really cool is that Christopher Nolan, by working in this way, drops you into the feeling of the war. Not just through the kinds of actions that the characters are taking, but also by the way that he shoots them. By creating a feeling of confusion that just washes over you. He drops you into the experience of the war,