‘Batman’ director Christopher Nolan re-creates history with ‘Dunkirk’

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — “This is about as far as we could get from Lower Wacker Drive,” said Christopher Nolan with a sly smile — sitting as he was in the Barker Hanger at the Santa Monica airport to chat up his “Dunkirk” movie. Reflecting back on the several years spent shooting “Batman Begins” and “The Dark Knight” in Chicago, Nolan recalled, “I loved living and working in your city. It’s one of the few places in the world where I felt totally at home, comfortable and in sync with the community.

“Of course, like everyone, I loved the people and the great restaurants, but as a filmmaker I think my mind always goes back to the challenges of shooting scenes on Lower Wacker. It was such a perfectly natural place to capture the darkness we wanted for those mind-blowing, fast-action sequences. I’ll never forget those long nights we spent down there.”

With his latest movie — “Dunkirk,” opening Friday — Nolan has turned his skills to capturing a historic event: the amazing evacuation of hundreds of thousands of retreating British, French and Belgian troops from their trapped position on the coast of France in the early days of World War II. Those soldiers were, for the most part, targeted for death by the German airmen flying overhead — intent on bombing them to extinction.

For Nolan, “Dunkirk is not so much a war story, but it’s a story of survival. I felt confident taking that on in the language of a suspense film. I really wanted to give the audience that kind of experience. They enter the story and from the very start can connect with the men who were trapped there on the ground at Dunkirk — not knowing if they will ever get out.”

The great fame of Dunkirk, of course, was the amazing humanitarian effort made by British civilians who heeded the call and set sail across the English Channel — in all sorts of boats — to rescue the trapped soldiers on the French coast. Nolan agreed that “what really makes the story so compelling and engaging is seeing the combination of the civilian community coming to the aid of the military operation. … Make no mistake, Dunkirk represented a military defeat, as, after all, it was an evacuation.

“As [Winston] Churchill said, ‘We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory,’ ” quoted Nolan, who went on to repeat the famous praise by the wartime British prime minister of his countrymen and countrywomen’s efforts: “Wars are not won by evacuations. But there was a victory inside this deliverance, which should be noted.”

Filming on the beaches and in the vicinity of Dunkirk brought an authenticity to the movie Nolan could not have duplicated elsewhere. “I think there are moments during filming when we found ourselves in awe. There we were looking out at a thousand extras on the beach and watched so many little ships — some the real boats used during the actual evacuation in June of 1940 — and couldn’t help but feel how this was a very moving thing.”