Christopher Nolan Wanted to Take a Risk and Shoot DUNKIRK Without a Script
Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk was a complete masterpiece. If you haven't seen the movie yet, you've got to watch it because it's seriously an incredible film. I was completely immersed in the movie and it was extremely intense from beginning to end. The film never really let up on the tension!
If you 've seen the film, then you know that there's not a lot of dialogue. It was a very minimalist film that relied heavily on the visuals to tell its story. Turns out the director wanted to take the development of the film to another risky level. He initially considered shooting it without a script!
That just seems like a bad idea. Going into any film production without a script just seems like a disaster waiting to happen. There are several stories about movies going into production without a script and most of the time it leads to huge problems throughout the course of production.
The revelation comes from a conversation between Nolan and his brother Jonathan that was published with the Dunkirk screenplay. As Jonathan interviews Christopher, the filmmaker explained that while he became so immersed in the details of the story when he was doing research that he felt comfortable enough to make the film without a script.
"I got to a point where I understood the scope and movement and the history of what I wanted the film to address, because it’s very simple geography."
Nolan ended up going to his wife and producing partner Emma Thomas and production designer Nathan Crowley to share his idea.
"I said, 'I don’t want a script. Because I just want to show it,' it’s almost like I want to just stage it. And film it."
The director seems pretty damn confident in himself, doesn't he? He went on to say that he feels like he's "kind of mastered that form" of telling stories "driven emotionally by dialogue." Thomas wasn't a fan of the idea, though.
“Emma looked at me like I was a bit crazy and was like, okay, that’s not really gonna work."
It's good that there was someone there to ground Nolan and say no to his idea. It's hard to think that the film would have been as good as it was without a solid script in hand. He ended up writing the script fairly quickly and it was the shortest script that he wrote coming in at only 76 pages long.
Do you think Nolan could have pulled off a great film without a script?
Source: THR