Saturday, July 15, 2017
By Jake Coyle
AP Film Writer
NEW YORK
Excerpts from an interview with “Dunkirk” director Christopher Nolan:
Q. Because you’re such an advocate of the big-screen experience, you’re often asked about concerns about the demise of movie theaters. Is that tiresome?
A. I will say it’s tiresome. Now it’s streaming. Last film, it was television. Ten years ago, it was video games. People love video games. But people also need and love washing machines and they sell a lot of those. It’s just not relevant. We’ve always had TV movies, we’ve always had miniseries, we’ve always had straight-to-video movies. We’re making movies for the theater. And theatrical experience isn’t just about the size of the screen or the technology behind, although that’s a big part of it. It’s about an audience, the shared experience. What cinema gives you, unlike any other medium, is this fascinating and wonderful tension and dialogue between this intensely subjective experience you’re having from the imagery the filmmaker has put up there, and this extraordinarily empathetic sharing of that with audience around you. It’s a remarkable medium for that and that’s what defines it. What’s a movie? The only definition of a movie, really, is it’s shown in a movie theater.
Q. Did you always conceive of yourself as a filmmaker drawn to epic and to scale?
A. When I was about 15 or 16, I saw an IMAX film – it was actually an Omnimax film – and I was just mesmerized. I said why doesn’t Hollywood make features this way? On ‘The Dark Knight,’ I was finally able to be the first filmmaker to use IMAX cameras for a Hollywood feature film, and I’ve sort of built on that.
Q. Does the story of Dunkirk about living to fight another day hold particular relevance today?
A. Dunkirk sustains as an extraordinary resonant story for humanity because it’s a bit of a Rorschach test. What was important to me, what I get from the story, and why I think it’s a very important story to tell now, I think we live in an era that overemphasizes individuality at the expense of what we can do together. Whether you’re talking about in American industry, the fetishization of the individual billionaire versus a union, just to give you one example. What Dunkirk shows you is: We can do so much more with communal heroism. That’s what makes it an unusual war story, of civilians and military coming together. But I think that’s why it resonates. We are stronger working together, and for some reason, that’s become unfashionable.
Q. Does it strike you that you’ve made three films in a row about getting home?
A. The concept of home, there’s nothing more universal than that. As a filmmaker, I’ve become interested in primal ideas – ideas that are very simple and can resonate and speak to people in very simple ways but have complex roots to them.