Christopher Nolan Employed This Remarkable Trick to Avoid Using CGI and Make ‘Dunkirk’ Look as Realistic as Possible

Christopher Nolan’s 2017 epic historical war thriller movie Dunkirk starred Fionn Whitehead, Harry Styles, Tom Glynn-Carney, and more. The movie showcases the Dunkirk evacuation of World War II from the perspectives of the land, sea, and air of the eponymous coastal town in France.

Upon its release, the movie received praise for its screenplay, direction, editing, and more. A lot of critics at the time stated that Dunkirk might be Nolan’s best work to date and dubbed the movie as one of the greatest war films. The movie won Academy Awards for Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Film Editing. Interestingly, Christopher Nolan used a trick to avoid using CGI in a war film to make it look as real as possible.

Christopher Nolan used ‘forced perspective flats’ while filming Dunkirk

Regarded as one of the best filmmakers of the generation, Christopher Nolan is indeed a genius when it comes to filmmaking. One such example is mentioned by Allen Tsai, who explained that Nolan used forced perspective flats to decorate the scenes in Dunkirk to avoid using CGI as much as he could.

A lot of the scenes in the movie were filmed in the locations where it actually took place—most notably the same beach where the soldiers had lined up to board the evacuation boats while bombs fell on them. According to Screen Daily, Nolan filmed the movie with a combination of IMAX and 65 mm film and explained how he avoided using CGI.

We went into the idea of pairing back the CGI, primarily from a tonal point of view because we shot the entire movie on large-format film, which is incredibly high-resolution and gives a beautiful color reproduction. When you digitize those images, and when you add computer-generated elements, the effects are very difficult to make fit into the tone of the rest of the movie.

Nolan further explained that the visual-effect supervisor, Andrew Jackson, understood that he was going to need to find a way to do as much as possible on camera and try to avoid photographed elements. The filmmaker shared that there are a lot of smart, old-fashioned techniques in moviemaking that are forgotten but can prove to be incredibly efficient.

The filmmaker stated that retired art director Alan Tomkins, with whom he worked on Batman Begins, had shown them photographs and paintings of vehicles that he ended up using for Dunkirk. Nolan mentioned that those techniques were some real efficacies to be made, like creating paintings of lines of men on the beach so that they could avoid or reduce their extra count. Miniatures and painting work proved the best for the movie.

Christopher Nolan shared he wanted to be careful with the story of Dunkirk

During his conversation with Screen Daily, the filmmaker says the sense of responsibility on him with the story that he was planning to showcase on-screen was extreme. He added that one always feels a sense of responsibility for a large-budget movie, but this was a real-life event.

I had the honor and privilege of sitting down and talking to people who were there, and who suffered through these events. That gives you inspiration but also gives you a huge amount of fear in terms of the responsibility you’re taking on. For British people, this is sacred ground, so you need to tread very carefully.

Explaining further, the filmmaker mentioned that even though the fact that the cast involved about 40,000 people, he wanted to create an intimate epic, i.e., to be with the characters, peering over their shoulders and telling the audience about their experience from their perspective.

Dunkirk has very few dialogues, and Nolan believes that the audience has to look at the silent era to understand how movies were not built on dialogues but on images. It’s a powerful argument for trying to tell the story in a way. The movie is regarded as one of the best war films of all time.

Dunkirk is streaming on HBO Max, Netflix, and Prime Video.