Two superb films but very different.
After receiving 8 Oscar nominations including Best Picture and Best Director, it seems that the early panic about Dunkirk refusing to adopt the typical ‘blood and guts’ approach to a war film wasn’t merited. Then again, who in their right mind would question Christopher Nolan when it comes to filmmaking?
At present, the film has made $525,573,161 at the box-office and with the potential of Oscar success to come, it looks set to continue its streak. While he won’t admit it, the director of Inception and The Dark Knight Trilogy must also be secretly pleased that his decision to cast Harry Styles was fully vindicated. In our opinion, Styles featured in the best scene of the film – when those Allied soldiers were fearing for their lives in the boat’s hull as the German troops used it for target practice.
There’s no denying that Dunkirk was a very different WW2 film to anything that we’ve seen before but Nolan was clear about that from the start. The British director frequently said that he’s far more interested in creating a tense and atmospheric thriller than a standard WW2 actioner and in terms of epic WW2 films, they don’t come much better than Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece, Saving Private Ryan.
Since being released almost 20 years ago, the story of a group of U.S. soldiers that go behind enemy lines to retrieve a paratrooper whose brothers have been killed in action has been widely regarded as the best war film of all time.
In an interview with Collider, Nolan revealed that he asked Steven Spielberg for advice when it came to shooting his own WW2 film.
“Anytime you’re working in such a familiar genre, you look to the touchstones of it. You look to the things that really succeeded, in a particular way, for how they’re going to inform what you do. In the case of Saving Private Ryan, Steven loaned me his 35mm print of it, which was absolutely beautiful, and that film has lost none of its visceral power. It’s really extraordinary, but it had the wrong kind of intensity for telling this story. It clarified, in my mind, that I had to view this not so much as a war film, but as a suspense thriller, and have an unseen enemy and a type of tension with the language of suspense, whereby you can’t take your eyes off the screen,” he said.
Nolan added that he did take inspiration from another one of Spielberg’s films when it came to making Dunkirk.
“What Steven did so brilliantly in Saving Private Ryan was use the language of horror, which is one whereby you’re looking away from the screen. It’s a different thing, but it’s very useful to be able to talk to filmmaker. I mostly spoke to Steven about Jaws and about shooting on the water because I’d never done that, and his advice was, “Don’t,” he said.
Saving Private Ryan and Dunkirk. Two very different films but amazing in their own unique ways.
We’d be absolutely delighted to see even more films of their quality.
