Dunkirk (w/ Kara Smith)

Eli Price (00:01.314)
Hello and welcome to the establishing shot a podcast where we do deep dives into directors and their filmography We are here on episode 26 of the podcast Here, I'm Eli price here with Kara Smith Joining us again. I want to say You joined for the French dispatch which

Kara Smith (00:14.183)
What?

Kara Smith (00:27.336)
Yes.

Eli Price (00:27.766)
Like just going off of memory, I'm pretty sure is Wes Anderson's 10th film. And it's funny because Dunkirk is Christopher Nolan's 10th film. Um, it's per it's like perfect. Yeah. It's same exact slot. It's, it's just, it's meant to be the 10th slot. So whatever director I do next, I'll look at whatever's the 10th movie and be like, I guess cares doing that. Um,

Kara Smith (00:33.597)
Okay.

Kara Smith (00:39.363)
Wow. So same slot.

Kara Smith (00:46.287)
Yes.

Kara Smith (00:53.152)
Yeah, hopefully I've seen it.

Eli Price (00:57.71)
Uh, yeah, uh, but we're here. Um, yeah, I'm excited. Um, we're really like getting to, to the end of this series. Um, only a couple left really. And, um, it's been a really good one, a really fun one. Um, and, uh, but today we're really like, this is one of my favorite, um, Nolan movies. Um, kind of like.

Kara Smith (01:08.034)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:24.123)
Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (01:27.458)
peek behind the curtain, I'm recording this with you before I've recorded Interstellar. And so that's like, that's what I usually say is my favorite Nolan, but it's like really tight between this and Interstellar. So I haven't rewatched Interstellar for the that episode yet. So we'll see maybe, maybe I'll like pre share on that episode, since I'm recording it after you know, yeah.

Kara Smith (01:35.282)
Oh, okay.

Kara Smith (01:41.887)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:52.739)
Yeah. Disclosure. Yeah.

Eli Price (01:57.03)
I'll kind of disclose like, okay, I've decided this one is my favorite or that one, you know, but yeah, I'm excited to talk about Dunkirk. But yeah, Kara, you've been on before, but listeners may be tuning in for the first time or maybe haven't listened to that Wes Anderson series. So do you want to share a little bit about like you?

Kara Smith (02:02.748)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:11.132)
Yes.

Eli Price (02:24.838)
Just what you do with movies. I know you shared last time but yeah go ahead and share again about like your Instagram and kind of your Your process of watching movies and rating them and stuff

Kara Smith (02:28.689)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:36.323)
Yeah, so hey again, I'm Kara. I think last time we had a long podcast rambling on and on, both of us, but I always like to say that I am not like a cinephile. I'm just a lover of movies and a lover of just like media in general. So I love probably TV and movies equally. And I'm not as a critical eye as people often say. I have an Instagram called KaraRatesThings and I...

Eli Price (02:42.804)
Yes.

Eli Price (02:50.83)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (03:02.643)
rate movies and stuff, but everyone's always like, you always rate them very highly. But oftentimes I do genuinely, if I saw a movie and I did not like it, I just don't post about it. I feel no need to even, unless it's like a really hyped up movie and I didn't like it, then I'll be like, hey guys, look, I didn't like it. But if it's just a random movie that I saw and I didn't like it, there's no need to report that to the world, somebody might like it. But for me, I'm just like, hey, if we have a similar vibe.

Eli Price (03:07.167)
Yeah.

Eli Price (03:13.39)
I'm going to go ahead and close the video.

Eli Price (03:17.954)
Yeah.

Eli Price (03:21.268)
Right.

Eli Price (03:26.606)
I'm going to go ahead and close the video.

Kara Smith (03:30.643)
then I liked this movie, you probably would too. And that's just kind of the tone I take, but I love going to the actual theater. So I love seeing movies as they come out, but I also just love rewatching, you know, all of your faves and stuff. So that's, you know, what I do. But yes, it's not as critical of an eye as some. It's just, I loved this. Here you go.

Eli Price (03:33.442)
Sure.

Yeah.

Eli Price (03:41.139)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (03:49.623)
Yeah.

Eli Price (03:54.254)
It's like, um, it's called Kara Rage Things, but it's kind of more like Kara Recommends Things that she likes. But you do, that's true. You do rate things though on it. But yeah.

Kara Smith (03:57.247)
Yes.

Absolutely, that's probably true. Yeah, that's probably a better name for it, but that might have been too long of an Instagram handle.

Kara Smith (04:09.767)
Yeah, I give them and sometimes they're a four and not a five. Sometimes they're a 3.72. The ratings are also not consistent throughout. Sometimes I'll change it up. Sometimes they're stars, sometimes they're fractions of numbers. It is what it is.

Eli Price (04:15.244)
Yeah.

Eli Price (04:21.407)
Yeah.

Eli Price (04:25.15)
Yeah. Sometimes you could do a, there's like a really like funny YouTube series called on cinema at the cinema and they give bags of popcorn. Um, but they, but they always give five bags of popcorn. Yeah. It's kind of like, it's kind of like yours. Yeah.

Kara Smith (04:35.8)
Oh, yeah.

Oh, it's consistent. Yeah. Yeah, I listened. I listened to a sex in this. Yeah, I listened to a sex in the city podcast. And they do like Manolo Blahnik's like the shoes, they'll give it like half a Manolo, they'll give it like one heel, not both shoes. They'll give it like Manolo's best Manolo's classics. So we all have our own rating systems. And they mean something to us, but not much to everyone else.

Eli Price (04:54.827)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Eli Price (05:02.658)
Right exactly. Yeah. Yeah that whole the sex in the city rating system would Be it means nothing to me. I don't understand anything you just said so but that's okay That's that's probably that's on that's on me not on not on anybody else. So Yeah, yeah, I love that well, yeah, why don't you share What your introduction to Christopher Nolan was do you remember the first Nolan movie you saw?

Kara Smith (05:09.311)
Yeah. No. Yeah.

Somebody out there might.

Kara Smith (05:32.679)
guess it was The Dark Knight, which I feel like, I mean, that came out years ago. I was young and I did not like it, but I do remember watching those movies and my dad liking it. I remember him being like, oh, this was a great one. And I was like, I hated this movie. So just not for me. It is. And also just in general, I was not into Batman or anything like that. So just there was nothing in it for me, but I watched it with a family. Everyone else seemed to like it.

Eli Price (05:34.647)
Okay.

Eli Price (05:38.125)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (05:44.684)
Yeah.

Yeah, well it's intense.

Kara Smith (06:01.375)
but I was not keen to go back to Christopher Nolan. I would say that probably the first movie that I saw in theater of Christopher Nolan's was Dunkirk, but I have since seen Tenet in theater and seen Oppenheimer in theater. So like I have now seen the most recent ones in theater. I've participated in it and I've enjoyed them, but obviously when I was younger was not for me. And I actually, of course, saw this one being.

Eli Price (06:11.746)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (06:20.01)
Yeah, yeah.

Kara Smith (06:30.023)
I don't remember, I guess I was like, you know, in college. I of course saw this one because Harry Styles was in it. So that's what drew me there, but it was a, I mean, it was a great movie and just like a great story and interesting piece of history. So this was actually my first time watching it and loving a Christopher Nolan film because surprisingly, even for me, I have not seen Interstellar or Inception, which are two of his like biggest works and often like most referenced.

Eli Price (06:33.856)
Yeah.

Sure.

Eli Price (06:45.005)
Right.

Eli Price (06:55.214)
Hmm.

Kara Smith (06:59.379)
works other than like Batman. But yeah, but you know, Interstellar, like obviously that's a big such like pop culture moment even. It's, you know, referenced in movies and music and stuff. And shockingly, I have not seen it. But, you know, I just haven't, I guess, sat down and like been like, I know I need to devote time to this if I'm going to watch it. I need to focus. And I just never have.

Eli Price (06:59.534)
Sure, yeah. Other than, yeah.

Eli Price (07:07.202)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (07:12.695)
Yeah.

Eli Price (07:18.573)
Right.

Yeah. Well, maybe one day, maybe after this podcast, she'll be like, Oh yeah, I need to go back and watch this. Yeah.

Kara Smith (07:24.751)
Yeah, I have, yeah, I don't, yeah, I want to, but I do wish, maybe also if they're doing like a special showing in a theater, because I, if for your first time watching some of these big movies, like you should see him on the theater, or in the theater on the screen. That's where, definitely how he intended it.

Eli Price (07:34.279)
Oh yeah.

Eli Price (07:38.246)
Mm-hmm. Absolutely.

Eli Price (07:43.806)
Yeah. Well, Inception is, I wonder, it's unfortunate. I think, um, Inception's 10 year anniversary was in 2020. So, so if they, they might've done some re-releases, but they, yeah, it wasn't. Yeah, probably not. Um, which Tenet did come out in 2020. Um, and it did release in theaters. So.

Kara Smith (07:53.037)
Ah, so.

Kara Smith (07:58.815)
But probably not, yeah, you're right.

Kara Smith (08:04.903)
Yeah, it was one of my... Yeah, I remember specifically being at the theater because I think the French Dispatch and like Tenet, stuff like that were some of the first movies I got back to the theater to see.

Eli Price (08:15.063)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (08:18.558)
Right. Yeah. I remember talking about that in the, in that French Ditch Flash episode. Um, but yeah, you should definitely, uh, definitely go back and check those out. Um, I can understand just like not being into Batman, like that's totally understandable if you just like, if you're not into like superheroes, then it's just kind of like, and being pretty young and watching Heath Ledger's Joker is like pretty intense. So.

Kara Smith (08:27.839)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (08:32.367)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (08:43.351)
Yeah, yeah, I think it also just kind of like scared me and turned me off of it. So I was never going to like get back into it. So yeah.

Eli Price (08:47.922)
Yeah, sure. But yeah, you should definitely go back and check those out and the prestige. I love prestige as a personal favorite of mine. Um, but yeah, even, even as early ones are really good, but, uh, yeah, yeah. Dunkirk. Um, I saw Dunkirk and theaters too. We can kind of jump into, into the content for today. Um, I saw Dunkirk and theaters. Um,

Kara Smith (08:55.965)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (09:02.047)
They are.

Eli Price (09:16.93)
I want to say it was like maybe opening weekend or close to that. Um, and my, like my only regret is that I didn't go like seek out at IMAX theater to see it in. Um, because I feel like that would have made it like an even like cooler experience, just more like it would have made, you know, Christopher Nolan happy. Uh, but, uh, but yeah, um, it's, um,

Kara Smith (09:21.055)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (09:28.658)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (09:39.663)
Yeah, for sure.

Eli Price (09:46.89)
I think this is just like structure wise through and through like start to beginning kind of like the there I don't think there's a such thing as like a perfect movie but like structure wise and the way everything like plays out like this is like one of those movies that's like yeah that's pretty close you know.

Kara Smith (10:04.297)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (10:13.123)
Yeah. Well, and also the time frame I do like when I went back and rewatched it, you know, specifically for this, like with trying to, you know, pay attention and get all that I could out of it. I was like, wow, I'm so surprised that this movie is like, I think it was like an hour and 46 minutes, like not that long. So many people, you know, make movies are so long. And you're like, okay, I get you're trying to do all this, but he did so much in such a nice time frame. Yeah.

Eli Price (10:22.955)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (10:29.642)
Yeah.

Eli Price (10:37.546)
Yes. Uh huh. Yeah. It's very efficient. Um, for sure. It's his, it's his, uh, shortest movie since his very first, uh, following, which was, which was like an hour and 10 minutes, I think it was a real short. Um, but, uh, but yeah, this, this is definitely his by a, by a pretty good margin, his shortest. Um, like, uh, but yeah, yeah. So like.

Kara Smith (10:41.894)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (10:48.472)
Yeah, not surprised.

Kara Smith (10:53.897)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (11:01.781)
Yeah, yeah.

Eli Price (11:07.57)
Um, no one, uh, talks about back in like the mid nineties, he, him and Emma Thomas, his wife, um, sailed across the English channel to Dunkirk, um, with a friend. And, um, they did it like during may, which is when operation Dynamo was launched, which is the operation of, you know, sending all the little ships over to rescue, um, to rescue the people on the beach. Um,

They did it like during the same time of year. And so it was kind of like this experience that they wanted to have. Um, you know, Dunkirk is a really big deal for British people. Um, and, um, so he, they, they get going and this trip, I forgot to look up what the mileage is, but it's not like, it's like definitely way too far to swim, but like also not really that far. Um,

Kara Smith (11:46.698)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (12:03.899)
Yeah.

Eli Price (12:05.878)
But it ended up taking them 19 hours to get across because they started running into like terrible weather and like currents and like, um, they got across and it was like this, like, wow, that was like a terrible experience. But also, um, no one says that, uh, that was the seed of wanting to eventually tell this story. Um, like he grew this like great respect for those civilians that.

Kara Smith (12:14.859)
Good, Gre.

Kara Smith (12:29.824)
Mm.

Eli Price (12:35.958)
had the courage to make that trip across the channel. And they did it not just in the possibility of bad weather, but with German planes firing above and knowing that they were just sailing into danger and maybe death.

Kara Smith (12:36.18)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (12:45.821)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (12:55.747)
Yeah, it's truly an amazing like, just feat and possibility that so many people agreed to do it and committed to go all of the way because in a 19-hour journey, if I was Chris Nolan, I'd be like, this was a fun little experiment, but let's just turn around. And I'm sure that if, you know, so many people on that day, I'm sure, thought, you know what, we could just turn around and not do this. We don't have to. We're not, you know, enlisted. We don't have to do this.

Eli Price (13:11.199)
Yeah.

Eli Price (13:18.206)
Right. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And I want to say that the Mark Rylance character, Mr. What was his name? I have it written down. Mr. Dawson. Yeah. Mr. Dawson is based on like a guy that like it has like a similar story to that character in the movie. He.

He had a son that had died in the war earlier on. And, um, you know, the Navy was like kind of commandeering ships. Um, and he was one of the guys that was like, no, I'm taking my own ship, um, across sort of thing. Um, like an older guy, like Mark Rylance's and the movie. Uh, so like, there's a lot of like cool, like historical stuff and we'll get into more of it as we go. But, um, but yeah, the, just like.

Kara Smith (13:52.377)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (14:01.748)
Yeah.

Eli Price (14:19.302)
I don't know. It's a really incredible story. And it's a historical story that is such a part of the British... What's the right word? I guess just the British spirit, the British... Yeah, it's a part of their...

Kara Smith (14:40.335)
Yeah, like their patriotism, yeah.

Eli Price (14:46.422)
their Britishness Dunkirk is. Yeah, it's like it both like represents their Britishness but also like feeds it, you know, that story. And so really like when you think about it, no one taking that story on is kind of like a daunting task because yeah, yes, a very known event. Like.

Kara Smith (14:48.158)
Yeah, their heritage, yeah.

Kara Smith (14:57.276)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (15:08.519)
Yeah, it's a big deal. It's a known event.

Yeah, for British people, yeah.

Eli Price (15:15.662)
One of the most known events for, for British people. Um, you know, it's kind of like, I feel like Americans kind of know about it, but it's not like as big of a thing, um, for us. Right. Yeah. It's May 1940. We're not even in it yet. Um,

Kara Smith (15:28.415)
No, yeah, I mean, we weren't even part of the war at the time. So it's just kind of, yeah, that's not our history. So as yeah, part of it, but it is like the true essence of like the British like spirit or like the even like, Great Britain as an empire, just like, small people are like seemingly inferior people doing massive feats like that is just like courageously just being like, we're gonna go for it and accomplishing massive tasks. That's kind of

Eli Price (15:45.495)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (15:51.095)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (15:54.433)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (15:57.087)
Great Britain's legacy of just shockingly small place to have conquered so much at the time and then in this to have accomplished such a great feat.

Eli Price (15:59.074)
Yeah.

Eli Price (16:05.964)
Yeah.

Right, right. And so like I had written down this quote, Nolan had said, I wanted to do something that frightened me a lot. And this is what he kind of chose to do at this point and this is his career is I'm gonna take on this story. And he kind of like told Emma like, I think I'm ready to do the Dunkirk story. And really like when you think about it, if you're gonna take on something like this in the way that he takes it on like,

Kara Smith (16:17.099)
I'm going to go to bed.

Kara Smith (16:20.671)
came up with.

Kara Smith (16:31.068)
Yeah.

Eli Price (16:39.102)
You do need like a ton of experience, which he has at this point. Like this is his 10th movie. He, um, he has like great, like ongoing collaboration relationships with, um, with his team. Um, and so, um, really there and, and really there hadn't been any modern like tellings of the story and film. Um, there was a, like a 1958 movie, uh, dunk, a Dunkirk movie, um,

Kara Smith (16:43.209)
yeah.

Kara Smith (16:50.46)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (17:01.204)
Yeah.

Eli Price (17:08.822)
That was, I haven't seen it, but it's supposedly good in its own, pretty good in its own right. Um, and then like the only thing modern was I haven't seen atonement either, but there's a, a scene with James McAvoy and atonement that like, uh, maybe like a 12 minute sequence or something that deals something with Dunkirk. Have you seen atonement?

Kara Smith (17:26.324)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (17:31.488)
No, actually, I have not either. Yeah.

Eli Price (17:32.586)
Yeah, me either. Yeah. So I can't really speak to those, but really like just that to say, like, there's not, no one has done it on film really, at least not since 1958, which would have been over sick, like not quite 60 years ago, I guess, when they're, when they're starting to take this project on, um, yeah. Um,

Kara Smith (17:41.852)
Yeah.

Eli Price (17:57.414)
And, and Nolan said this too. He said, it is tough to be passionate about something that has already been done. And so that's kind of like part of it too, is like, he wants to do something that like hasn't been done before, or like, at least like not in a long time and definitely not in this way. Um, and you know, you can go ahead.

Kara Smith (18:03.957)
Mm.

Kara Smith (18:10.495)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (18:15.355)
Yeah. Well, and he also has like, so if the other one was done in like 58, that's not far removed from the events themselves. There's probably so many more firsthand accounts of things that those people could have worked from. And it would be more of just like a tribute to those who are still living maybe from this event. But he is now far enough removed from it that he's educating certain people, like Americans, like other people from around the world, that probably that first movie, they weren't educating. They were.

Eli Price (18:37.994)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (18:42.707)
making a tribute and this one he's like, I've got to tell this correctly because there's plenty of people who don't even know what I'm talking.

Eli Price (18:46.542)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. And when you watch it, like it's not, it's not meant to be, there's a ton that's historically accurate about it, but it's, but it's not like necessarily this is an, this event happened in exactly this way. So exactly, exactly. Um, because really like the whole, like everything culminating at just the right point and just the right time, like that's storytelling. That's not like that's.

Kara Smith (18:56.031)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (19:02.823)
It's more the feeling of it, the emotions of it, yeah.

Kara Smith (19:13.62)
Yeah.

Eli Price (19:15.874)
That's like the fictionalized version of the story. It's all based in reality, but like he's not like trying to make a docudrama. Like he's telling a story that's rooted in, it's like reading historical fiction. Like you learn all kinds of like historical facts, but it is still like a fictionalized story based in that setting. And that's what he's doing here. Like I don't know how many people like have thought about that.

Kara Smith (19:25.819)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kara Smith (19:31.856)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (19:38.716)
Yeah.

Eli Price (19:45.034)
watch this movie, but like, this isn't like, you can't like go in history books and read like, oh yeah, this, you know, failure flew over and just the right point in time, it's like, well, no, that's the storytelling. Um, but I mean, yeah, it's like, yes and no, right. But he did, he did go and visit, um, veterans, like all of them, like are in their nineties at this point.

Kara Smith (19:51.279)
and find these people. Yeah.

Kara Smith (20:00.609)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (20:05.001)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (20:09.387)
Oh cool, yeah. Yeah.

Eli Price (20:13.29)
But there's there were still some living that he went and visited with Joshua Levine who is a he's a he was actually the historical advisor For it and He I want to say He has a book called forgotten voices of Dunkirk Yeah, Joshua vine to forgotten voices of Dunkirk that Emma Thomas had given to

uh, Nolan as a gift. Um, I don't know what the occasion was, but she had given it to him as a gift. And, um, like he read it and loved it and brought Levine on as like the historical advisor for the movie. And so like Levine kind of took him around to some of the vets that he had like talked to for his book and, uh, they talked to these guys and listened to stories and so like some of the, some of the things like you see, like come from those stories, um, that.

Kara Smith (20:47.036)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (20:57.227)
That's cool.

Kara Smith (21:02.523)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (21:11.188)
Yeah.

Eli Price (21:12.266)
Like, uh, in the special features, one of the veterans was talking about how, you know, on the mole, they have, uh, you know, the planes were flying over and dropping bombs and like, he recalls like a big hole in the, in the middle of the, the mole, just like, um, just like they have to walk over the plank at that one point. So they, like, they, they pulled like some stories like that and kind of like put stuff like that in to the movie here and there, um.

Kara Smith (21:30.023)
Yeah, just like they showed. Uh-huh.

Kara Smith (21:36.913)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (21:41.43)
which is cool and fun too, you know. But yeah, Emma Thomas, I love, she kind of talked about how it's kind of nerve wracking reading Nolan's scripts for the first time. So like, you know, she's his wife and I'm sure like, she's one of the first ones to read his scripts for all of his movies. And she's like, it's definitely like a.

Kara Smith (21:45.045)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (21:57.835)
Ha ha.

Kara Smith (22:04.264)
Yeah.

Eli Price (22:09.186)
have a glass of wine beside me kind of thing. And I would imagine especially for this one, it was kind of nerve wracking because it's like, it's Dunkirk. Like, I hope he's done it right. And he had originally to talk to her about like not using a script and just kind of like going in and making it. And she kind of like talked him down from that idea.

Kara Smith (22:12.534)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (22:22.041)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (22:36.271)
Yeah, probably a wise decision.

Eli Price (22:38.718)
Yeah, but it was, um, it was only like a 76 page script, which is, um, probably, what I read was that's usually about half of the length that it would usually be for like the budget amount that they worked with. Um, which I want to say the budget was like, um, a hundred million, um, which, um, it is a

Kara Smith (22:45.3)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (22:55.188)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (23:03.764)
Which is a lot of money, but they do a lot of things with it.

Eli Price (23:06.802)
It is a lot, but they really like stretch that, which, which he usually does in his, his movies, like he really stretches and uses, uses the budget well, um, uh, which.

Kara Smith (23:09.524)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (23:18.155)
But there's also not a lot of dialogue in this film, so it does make sense that obviously there's if there was more dialogue, there'd be pages and pages more of that script. But it is like, you don't realize how little they're talking until somebody has like a bit of a conversation. You're like, wow, yeah, we've just been feeling. Yeah, we've been feeling what we're supposed to feel, but we actually haven't been told all of the things, you know?

Eli Price (23:26.603)
Sure.

Eli Price (23:29.92)
Yeah, it is.

Eli Price (23:36.17)
Yeah, there's people. Yeah.

Eli Price (23:42.75)
Yeah. Which is, um, which is kind of like funny in its own, right? Because at this point in his career, Nolan was like, that's like the people that liked no night, like no one movies the least, like that's their main problem is too much exposition, too much explaining too much this. And then this movie, he's like, well, I don't have to do those things. I can like, here's a movie where I, where I don't do it at all. So I just like to do those things. Um,

Kara Smith (23:56.743)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (24:01.397)
Mmm.

Kara Smith (24:05.391)
Yeah, I'm gonna show you.

Kara Smith (24:11.633)
Yeah.

Eli Price (24:12.766)
Yeah, it's, it's kind of one of those like, which like, I'm sure there, it, nothing that I read had him like thinking really in that way, but I'm sure in the back of your head, there's like a bit of that, like, Oh, you think I can only do like exposition heavy movies? Well, here's one with basically no dialogue.

Kara Smith (24:22.804)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (24:30.775)
Yeah. Well, and if you know that that's one of your biggest critiques and you're really trying to do this particular story, well, you know, it might have come into his mind of like, okay, well, I want the critics and everyone to appreciate and like this story because it is such an important story. Yeah.

Eli Price (24:37.411)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (24:48.338)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's Nolan refers to it as the intimate epic. And his goal, he said, when he was writing was to immerse the audience in aggressively human scale storytelling visually, which, yeah, it's definitely aggressive. And it's definitely visual storytelling, as we've been talking about.

Kara Smith (25:09.585)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (25:14.036)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (25:18.39)
It's I would like to like look at the script which I think a lot of Nolan scripts are like you can just buy them on Amazon Yeah, I think a lot of them are just like published I don't know who threw but I've seen like you can I've seen like Oh, you can buy the dark night screenplay on Online, which is pretty cool. You don't see that a ton But uh, yeah, I wonder like what those scripts look like because like

Kara Smith (25:26.252)
Oh, that's cool.

Kara Smith (25:36.329)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (25:40.308)
Yeah.

Eli Price (25:46.43)
It's not like they're dialogue heavy. So what is he writing? You know?

Kara Smith (25:48.899)
Yeah. Which also makes me think, you know, his wife just like looking at this and it's saying, you know, like how did, how is it written that she's just like, okay, I can't even see what you're going for based off of what is here. I need, I mean, he seems like a man who needs like the visuals to understand what he's accomplishing, you know?

Eli Price (26:03.147)
Yeah.

Eli Price (26:09.482)
Yeah, yeah, probably in a sense. But I would guess too, like she's probably, I mean it's his 10th movie and she's probably read a ton of scripts and she's kind of like, she's probably like in the same wavelength as him too. So it's, yeah, it's one of those things where it's like, she probably got the picture. But yeah, I mean, like we said, there's no backstory, there's no exposition, you just jump right in. Like you don't know who these people are.

Kara Smith (26:17.804)
Yeah, she knows.

Kara Smith (26:23.348)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (26:31.046)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (26:35.112)
No.

Yeah. Yeah, you don't know who you're supposed to be rooting for almost like half the time.

Eli Price (26:39.51)
You don't know. Yeah. And his goal in writing it that way was that it would be a very like visceral present tense experience and you would gain empathy for these characters just by being in the moment with them. Which is really like interesting and

Kara Smith (26:53.755)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (26:59.572)
Yeah.

Eli Price (27:06.39)
different experience than you usually get when you watch movies, just in general. It's not like he invented something new. There's definitely a lot of movies throughout film history that kind of take that approach. But to this, a movie of this stature that a ton of people go and see that's basically a summer blockbuster. It's really like a...

Kara Smith (27:13.012)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (27:27.665)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (27:35.466)
It's really one of the, another just example of Nolan being like this, the studio, trust me, and I'm going to do it the way I want to do it. Cause this usually probably wouldn't sell for this, the studio, like a director that doesn't have Nolan's stature coming and being like, here's what I'm going to do. They'd be like, ah,

Kara Smith (27:43.61)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (27:47.074)
No.

Kara Smith (27:53.131)
Yeah, it does go back to his like timing of doing this one or two movies previous and they probably would have said, no, I don't know about that. You know, at some point, it might have gotten scrapped, but he had done just enough to prove that like, no, people will see it and go to a big blockbuster film, even if, you know, there's like 10 minutes of nobody talking and all of that.

Eli Price (27:56.799)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (28:00.927)
Yeah.

Eli Price (28:10.962)
Right. Yeah, for sure. And his so his pitch to WB in his pitch, he referenced movies like recent ones like Gravity and Mad Max, Fury Road, just kind of talking about like that intense, like constant feeling of tension. And then one of the things he said was just forget about the formality of history, which we've kind of talked about.

Kara Smith (28:25.628)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (28:29.883)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (28:38.484)
Yes.

Eli Price (28:38.658)
and imagine an entire film with the energy of the third act of a film. And that's really what you get. Um, when you think about this movie, you're like, wow, in a typical movie, this would be the third act of it. And it would be like compressed down to like, you know, the last, like 20 to 40 minutes. Um,

Kara Smith (28:45.119)
That's, yeah. Yeah.

Kara Smith (28:57.359)
Yeah, we would have spent the first like 20 minutes with these boys at home in England before they even went off to war. Like we would have had so much background, you're right, yeah.

Eli Price (29:01.278)
Yeah. Uh-huh.

Right. But you don't, but you don't need that to, you don't, you don't need that to understand because at the end of the day, like they're, it's not necessarily important, like what their individual background is because they're representative of the young British kid. Like, you know, he has family back home. You know, like he didn't like, it's not like he was like itching to. Yeah.

Kara Smith (29:08.444)
No.

Kara Smith (29:22.223)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (29:27.727)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (29:33.383)
This wasn't his dream, yeah.

Eli Price (29:35.71)
Like you, you can, like, we know what war is and we know the effects it has. Like you don't necessarily need all that backstory. Um, and so really like, it's just like, okay, let's jump right into the third act.

Kara Smith (29:47.132)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (29:51.739)
And it helps you get involved emotionally because instead of being like, oh, I like this kid who we've met in this like first act and like, oh, I just want him to be okay. You're hopping in there and you're like relating yourself to these people because you don't know enough about them. So you're kind of like putting your own life on top of their storyline and being like, wow, like I can't imagine running like this guy is through the streets and like trying to take shelter. It's just all the things. It's easier for you to.

Eli Price (29:57.781)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (30:12.107)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (30:16.427)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (30:18.571)
put in your own feelings and just realize like, yeah, like that could have been any of us if we had grown up at this time and whatnot, you know. And if we were called to war, this is what it would be like.

Eli Price (30:21.895)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (30:26.027)
Yeah.

Right, yeah, and it's like there's the, you know, the famous Roger Ebert quote that movies are empathy machines and this one is just like, the way it is an empathy machine is it just like blasts you with it. Like you don't have time to like connect, you just have to like jump in and like you're just connecting with these guys right away. And another thing that I heard,

Kara Smith (30:47.708)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (30:52.06)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (30:56.502)
I don't know how true this one is, because I don't remember what the source was. Um, but I, but I heard that he, another thing he said in his pitch was, um, that it would be like VR without the headset, like virtual reality without having like the, the thing on your eyes. Um, which is, which is kind of like what he tried. It's not like he does that like constantly, but like, especially I would say like in the dog fights and stuff, it's kind of like that.

Kara Smith (31:01.643)
I'm going to go to bed.

Kara Smith (31:11.12)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (31:14.919)
Wow. Yeah.

Kara Smith (31:26.619)
Yeah, yeah, it's very immersive. Yeah.

Eli Price (31:26.686)
up in the air and yeah, right. But yeah, so that was like his pitch to WB. And of course they were like, okay, here's your money, Christopher Nolan, you know, uh, whatever you could have just said, Hey, can I have some money? And we would have been like, yeah, how much? Uh, yeah. Um, but, uh, but yeah, other, I mentioned, you know, he, he mentioned gravity and, uh, Mad Max free road. Um,

Kara Smith (31:38.921)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (31:44.332)
Yeah, I'll make you something.

Kara Smith (31:53.405)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (31:56.318)
Other influences. So he, he talks about, he used to go into the, just kind of browse the war rooms of Churchill that are in the mall of, in London. And the book of obviously by Joshua Levine, we mentioned some film references that he mentions. He mentions David Lean's Ryan's daughter, which I have not seen.

Kara Smith (32:05.917)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (32:23.528)
I have another.

Eli Price (32:24.646)
He referenced it in relation to like the immediacy of the elements, meaning like the immediacy of like the weather and the just the elements around you and how visceral that can be, which I haven't seen Lean's Ryan's daughter, but I have seen Lawrence of Arabia and the immediacy of the elements of the desert are very like very present there. So I can imagine other Lean movies in a similar way.

Kara Smith (32:34.756)
Yeah, yeah.

Kara Smith (32:45.487)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (32:51.761)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (32:53.01)
mentioned Hitchcock's foreign correspondent referencing like the plane crashing into the ocean in that movie which is again a Hitchcock that I have not seen other Hitchcock, but not that one For like the intensity along with the ones already mentioned he talks about speed the movie unstoppable And then the movie the wages of fear So

Kara Smith (33:03.867)
Yeah, not that one.

Kara Smith (33:14.835)
Mmm... yeah?

Kara Smith (33:21.459)
Yeah, you do get that level of like, like you are on the edge of your seat in the same way that you are in those movies, yeah.

Eli Price (33:24.638)
Oh yeah. Mm-hmm, exactly. Another thing he kind of talks about is silent movies, which you can definitely see he was really trying to pull from that element of filmmaking with the very little dialogue. You're basically visual storytelling. It's like watching a silent film.

Kara Smith (33:47.166)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (33:52.51)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (33:53.578)
And so like he mentions, Intolerance, which was an early DW Griffith film, who doesn't have the best of reputations after making Birth of a Nation, but, you know, was, you know, objectively just like doing some incredible things filmmaking wise.

Kara Smith (34:07.307)
I'm done.

Kara Smith (34:17.724)
Yeah.

Eli Price (34:19.186)
And then he mentions, uh, sunrise the FW Murnau movie. Um, uh, it's sunrise. A song of two humans is the full name. And, um, I can see the influence I can see there is like the month. So it, uh, Murnau came out of like German expressionism, um, which uses a lot of like it's a German expressionism is more interested in emotion, like it. It's.

Kara Smith (34:29.152)
Mmm.

Kara Smith (34:45.599)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (34:46.75)
It's basically art or filmmaking that isn't as interested in plot as it is or character building as it is in like, just helping you to feel purely like the emotion. So everything is like representative of the emotion you're supposed to feel, even the characters. So a lot of times they're like kind of caricatured performances because it's less about like building the character and more about invoking the feelings.

Kara Smith (34:55.935)
Pure, yeah.

Kara Smith (34:59.838)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (35:14.823)
Yeah. Good.

Eli Price (35:15.974)
And you can, I can definitely see that, that influence. And, and two, there was a lot of like montage, like used in sunrise from what I remember. And like, to me, this movie is like a masterclass of montage filmmaking. Cause it's basically just one long, like carefully constructed montage. Right, yeah.

Kara Smith (35:20.971)
for sure.

Kara Smith (35:29.871)
Mm.

Kara Smith (35:35.537)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (35:41.539)
Yeah, of the events of this day. Yeah.

Eli Price (35:45.342)
Um, so yeah, a lot of, um, he, he does mention saving private Ryan as being like a bit of an influence, but I thought this quote was funny. No one said it had the wrong kind of intensity for, for Dunkirk. So it's like, like he appreciated it. Uh, and like, but I guess like, I'm not really sure what that means as far as like what influence he took from it, but, um, yeah.

Kara Smith (36:02.64)
Okay. Yeah.

Kara Smith (36:11.199)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, like what did he take from it if he didn't like agree with it or almost like yeah Yeah

Eli Price (36:16.334)
Like I'm sure he likes the film fine, but it was more like well it it's intense but in a different way that I'm going for sort of thing Right, yeah

Kara Smith (36:24.283)
Yeah, which sometimes is just a jumping off point in general of like, okay, well, that's one way to do it.

Eli Price (36:30.73)
Yeah, yeah, those are a lot. I'm sure there's more influences. He always, you know, he has, he has this kind of like go tos of movies that influence I think, I think there are some that I didn't write down like alien, the intensity building there and alien, which like he, he has to always get in his Ridley Scott influence into his movies he loves Ridley Scott and

Kara Smith (36:42.687)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (36:48.683)
That's funny. Yeah.

Eli Price (37:00.318)
So yeah but Yeah, it's interesting to think about how It's I mean, it's a war movie But the main influences of this film like are not more movies as far as like the like the artistic side obviously like the history and the setting is influenced by war but like the actual like

Kara Smith (37:11.754)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (37:17.46)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (37:23.291)
Yeah.

Eli Price (37:27.362)
techniques and structure and all are like He didn't really look at a whole lot of war movies to make it Mm-hmm

Kara Smith (37:30.314)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (37:35.443)
Well, and it feels different than a lot of war movies. It really does. And it's like, it doesn't necessarily have some of the gore values that some of like some war movies do or even sometimes the shock values that others do. This had like some shocking moments, but it wasn't, it didn't seem like it was aiming for that. It seemed like it was like, no, I want you here. I want it to feel as if this is happening now for you, not, you know.

Eli Price (37:44.942)
Sure.

Eli Price (37:48.226)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (37:58.958)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (38:00.403)
which I guess sometimes is shock value, adds to the plot line, and the plot line is not exactly there. It's more of like surviving the day kind of film. And that's, you know, so that's different than some war movies that are giving you this, you know, big long story and telling you the details of a person or whatever it might be.

Eli Price (38:07.073)
Right.

Eli Price (38:11.95)
Sure, yeah.

Eli Price (38:18.374)
Exactly. Yeah. And, and that makes sense. Uh, but yeah, so, uh, getting into the production of the movie, um, it, so it started a production May 2016. So there again, starting production right in the same month that Operation Dynamo was, was begun, was launched or whatever. Um, and, um, they did most of the shooting, uh, like on location at Dunker.

Kara Smith (38:38.149)
Yeah.

Eli Price (38:46.21)
Like on the beach, Chris and his production designer, Nathan Crowley, who's been with them for forever, they walked the stretch of I think 18 kilometers of beach before production started. And they had actually, I think, started already rebuilding the mole, which we'll talk about in a minute.

Kara Smith (39:13.756)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (39:15.738)
But yeah, it mostly shot like on location at Dunkirk And then other shooting locations so they shot in irk in the Netherlands For like a lot of the open ocean like stuff with the moonstone and whatnot It's like this. It's basically like this enclosed to see And I think it's like freshwater and so they were trying to find somewhere where they had a little bit more like control

Kara Smith (39:29.822)
Okay, yeah.

Eli Price (39:45.482)
Um, yeah, yeah. Of the elements. But, um, but again, like they, I think they got out there and it was just like weather, like the worst conditions, like, so it's like, well, maybe it's still a little bit better than the ocean, but maybe not much. Um, and, uh, yeah.

Kara Smith (39:45.511)
Yeah, of that element.

Kara Smith (39:55.856)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (40:04.187)
Yeah, they're still keeping it true to reality.

Eli Price (40:08.61)
But the cool thing is that Nolan was very adamant about shooting and just like whatever the weather was, unless it just became like way too dangerous. So like whatever came at them, he's just like, I think his mantra was just like, just keep shooting, just keep going. Which is like, I guess like honorable, I guess it like, I guess it a bit represents like that Dunkirk spirit to a certain degree.

Kara Smith (40:17.309)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (40:25.983)
Yeah.

Eli Price (40:37.706)
of like, I don't care what, yeah, I don't care what mother earth throws at me. Like I'm pushing through. And, um, like you, you kind of here too, like some of the crew and I think Emma Thomas said something similar of like, you it's, it's really hard work. Like this, the sort of film they're making is really hard work. Um, you're, I mean, you're working like.

Kara Smith (40:39.407)
Yeah, we're getting this done.

Kara Smith (40:46.598)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (41:00.831)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (41:05.326)
on location with real like boats and real like rough water. Like, and so it's hard. And so the kind of what we were talking about earlier, like that camaraderie you've built with your crew that you've been collaborating with for a while is vital. And you know, at that point, you kind of speak, you speak the same language, you're on the same wavelength. And so like, you can kind of make those

Kara Smith (41:09.908)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (41:20.831)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (41:31.409)
Yeah.

Eli Price (41:33.574)
adjustments and roll with the punches better because of that.

Kara Smith (41:37.167)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, for sure, if they did not have that connection, it probably would not have been made or accomplished as beautifully as it was because you wouldn't really know that they had to work that hard to get these shots because some of them, I mean, are still like beautifully done, all the things that you expect and that people want from his movies because he's done it so well before. So he couldn't have flopped out now when he's trying to tell the story. So all their work paid off.

Eli Price (41:53.899)
Oh yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Eli Price (42:05.538)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, and Hoita van Hortema who's the cinematographer he He's the he was the cinematographer for Interstellar was his first movie with Nolan And then he's done. He's done all of them since so this one and then Tenet and Oppenheimer But this was his second movie with Nolan and he had kind of said like I'm so glad that I had already done a movie with him because that kind of like

Kara Smith (42:19.347)
Gotcha.

Eli Price (42:34.646)
Um, connection already had with them was like so vital for this movie. Um, and like he, you know, he didn't, we didn't have to like have as much like talk throughs of stuff. Like, uh, there was like, there was a bit of a trust between, you know, going both ways of like knowing that the other person like could get the job done. Like they, they kind of had the same vision. Um,

Kara Smith (42:38.516)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (42:47.989)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (42:57.242)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (43:01.138)
And I like this, Hoita said, Nolan was unintimidated by things going wrong. Like anything that went wrong, whether it was the weather or something with a camera or whatever, he's just like, just keep pressing on. Like I'm not intimidated. Um, which sounds about right. Yeah. Um, yeah, I had listened to, um, uh, Roger Deakins, who's a cinematographer. Um, uh, you've definitely seen Roger Deakins work.

Kara Smith (43:08.675)
Okay.

Kara Smith (43:16.052)
Yeah.

great. Yeah.

Eli Price (43:31.35)
Um, if you don't recognize his name, uh, cause he's done a ton of stuff, but he has like a little podcast where he'll, um, bring on, um, other cinematographers and production designers and special effects guys and stuff like that. And I do like interviews with them. Um, and they, they'll talk through like their work and stuff. It's really a cool podcast. Um, and that's, that's where I was like listening to Hoyt to talk about, um, all this stuff. So it was, it was really cool.

Kara Smith (43:41.353)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (43:52.085)
Yeah.

Eli Price (44:00.562)
Um, definitely recommend that podcast if, uh, if that sounds interesting to, to you as a listener, um, yeah, there was really only a few like set pieces that they had to go, they shot like at, in a universal lot in LA, I think. Um, so like there was like the, the stuff where like they're in the boat underwater as the, like the water's coming in, that's like shot with, in like a water tank.

Kara Smith (44:06.502)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (44:19.273)
Okay.

Kara Smith (44:27.654)
Yeah.

Eli Price (44:30.022)
Um, yeah. And then, yeah. And then there's like, um, there's like the, some stuff with the, um, the trawler, uh, which is the one that, you know, the, they're shooting into like, like that, all the guys are like in the, in the bottom, the Dutch ship or whatever. Um, there was some stuff.

Kara Smith (44:30.203)
Makes sense. That one I would be a little nervous if he did that one out in the ocean.

Kara Smith (44:48.711)
Oh yes it is, yeah.

Kara Smith (44:53.499)
And I'm sure probably the interiors at the end, maybe when they're in the house back at home and stuff. Yeah.

Eli Price (44:57.29)
Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, the interiors of the trawler is on set in a universal, like with a water tank. Because they were either in a water tank or they were like, I think I saw in the behind the scenes, they had guys with hoses firing water through those little holes on the outside. And then there's like one.

Kara Smith (45:19.608)
Yeah.

Eli Price (45:25.686)
bigger set piece with like the destroy one of the destroyers, the huge ships when they have that sinking, they couldn't really like sink a full size destroyer. So they kind of had to build something to kind of get those. Yeah. And I want to say like there's even like one of the scenes where it's like turning like you kind of you can probably remember where the camera is kind of like going with the ship they had like mounted the camera

Kara Smith (45:29.835)
Mmm. Yeah.

Kara Smith (45:41.311)
to scale, yeah.

Kara Smith (45:50.93)
Oh yeah.

Yeah. Oh, on to it.

Eli Price (45:56.074)
um like on the side of the ship so like well it's it was like you know a set piece or whatever but like so as it's like going under like you're actually like getting the camera like going with it because it's mount mounted on there which is pretty cool yeah but like other than those like few things which are pretty like when you think about it like don't take up a huge sections um everything was done like real which is the big Nolan thing

Kara Smith (46:03.217)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (46:08.435)
with going under with it, yeah.

That is cool.

Kara Smith (46:19.259)
Yeah, minable. Yeah.

Eli Price (46:25.95)
And to me, like you really feel that in this movie because, I don't know, like when you're in the air, like you feel like you're, you feel like you're in the middle of a dogfight and you kind of are. Like it's a fake one, but you really are like in the camera, like flying, like mounted to the side of the airplane.

Kara Smith (46:25.969)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (46:37.788)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (46:42.25)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (46:49.883)
Yeah, you're seeing what you would see if this were, yeah.

Eli Price (46:53.086)
Yeah, exactly. And like you really are seeing like boats, like they actually did sink some boats. Like it was a controlled sinking, but they did like sink some boats. Like you're really seeing like boats sinking, like the medical boats that like crashes into the pier at one point, they actually like built onto this,

some extra onto it so that they could actually like tip it over into that to actually get that wrecking effect. So like it kind of did actually reckon to you know a faux peer. So just like and you can like feel that when you watch it. It's like visceral and real and you can like feel that in a way that like I can only imagine like CGI just wouldn't have that feeling. You know?

Kara Smith (47:31.305)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (47:35.85)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (47:39.626)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (47:50.203)
Yeah. No, yeah.

Eli Price (47:53.526)
Um, yeah, it's, it's funny. Like, um, that was like the big thing with, um, with, uh, Top Gun Maverick was like, Oh, you're really flying through the air with these guys. And I'm, and I was, and I'm just thinking like, yeah, but no one already, no one did it first. Like it's.

Kara Smith (48:04.1)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (48:10.447)
Yeah, yeah, maybe not as many men were forced up there, but yeah, they, and it does, but it does make a huge difference. And you see that with every movie that goes the distance to do that. And obviously some people are putting themselves in danger potentially in the ways that they're trying to accomplish this filmmaking, but when it is CGI or when they do just like some sort of stunt version of it versus the real filming in the air, in the water, in...

Eli Price (48:16.459)
Yeah.

Eli Price (48:23.458)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (48:27.788)
Right.

Kara Smith (48:39.355)
on the sand like it is very different as opposed to all the ways you could do it in a studio.

Eli Price (48:43.328)
Oh yeah.

Yeah. And I mean, you even think about, so like a couple of other things that, um, they did, uh, you know, special effects wise. So like they had a cockpit, uh, built, um, on a gimbal, which is, you know, just the thing that can like turn in all directions. Um, and they had like men actually like, you know, part of the crew, parts of the crew, like manually like moving it. Um, but they put it at.

Kara Smith (49:03.764)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (49:12.297)
Yeah.

Eli Price (49:13.974)
basically like the edge of this cliff. And so they didn't CGI in a background. It wasn't like in front of a green screen. They did it. You actually get real sky background. And they did that like on purpose so that, hey, it's really like, it's yeah, it's in a cockpit that we're like manually moving. Yeah. So there's certain, there was like certain shots they had to do that way just because of what they were trying to capture.

Kara Smith (49:20.647)
Yeah, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (49:30.183)
Yeah, it feels safe in closed environment, yeah.

Kara Smith (49:43.815)
course, yeah. Yeah.

Eli Price (49:44.214)
But there are other cockpit shots where they had the cameras mounted on the plane looking into the cockpit on the side. So those shots were you're seeing from the side and he's looking over and waving at Ferrier, Collins, or whoever. The camera is actually mounted right there and you're actually seeing.

Kara Smith (49:49.235)
within or on the side.

Kara Smith (49:54.609)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (50:02.012)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (50:06.132)
Yeah.

Eli Price (50:13.342)
a Spitfire plane fly it beside him and then fly off like you're it's real you're seeing it. And just all that stuff is so cool to me. And then on top of that he shot 75% of this movie in IMAX. I know. And

Kara Smith (50:13.811)
That site, yeah.

Kara Smith (50:20.491)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (50:32.285)
That's so crazy.

So yeah, shame that neither of us saw the next.

Eli Price (50:38.082)
I know, it's really a shame. But yeah, it's incredible. And he's really done a ton to push forward that medium. And not just shot in IMAX approved digital cameras. He didn't use digital cameras. It's like the huge, heavy IMAX cameras. And so, and you can see while you're watching, there's a few times where...

Kara Smith (50:51.617)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (51:01.072)
Yeah, that's cool.

Eli Price (51:07.71)
it switches the aspect ratio. And it's usually when there's heavier dialogue going on. And that's because the iMac's camera is so loud. It's like when you're in a more confined space and trying to pick up dialogue, it's like, OK, we'll use the 7. I don't know what they used. I can't remember what they used. I want to say it was like a 65 or 70 mil other kind of camera, or maybe it was 35. I'm not sure.

Kara Smith (51:14.705)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (51:23.562)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (51:34.655)
Yeah.

Eli Price (51:37.394)
Um, I'm not like well versed in cameras. I'm learning as I go in this podcast, but, um, but still not, uh, no, uh, very far from an expert. Um, but yeah, and it's crazy. They said they're like, not only are they using IMAX, but like starting all the way from the dark night, which, um, you know, we talked about was the first narrative movie to you ever use IMAX.

Kara Smith (51:41.385)
Yeah, I'm sure.

Eli Price (52:05.75)
Before that, it was only like NatureDocs that had used IMAX cameras. Um, and so like he's pioneering, not just using IMAX cameras, but like developing new, like engineering ways to like mount them and use them handheld, like Hoyt Van Hoytema, you can see like, has like this, this like engineered handheld like thing that he's like using to carry an I, a huge IMAX cam. I mean, it's, it's probably like.

Kara Smith (52:10.039)
Wow, yeah.

Kara Smith (52:24.145)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (52:31.923)
This massive, yeah.

Eli Price (52:35.138)
The camera's probably already at least 50 pounds. And like, he's got this big contraption on him to help him carry it. That's probably like ways he makes it weigh even more. It's nuts. And he's just like, no, this is gonna be big. And I don't know, it's like, he could have easily just like put some like small, easy to mount digital camera up there on the airplanes.

Kara Smith (52:45.203)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (53:00.33)
Yeah.

Eli Price (53:01.462)
But he was like, no, let's mount an IMAX camera to it. Yeah, it's just, it's kind of nuts, but really awesome. You know?

Kara Smith (53:05.553)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (53:10.891)
But I mean, he did it, yeah. And I mean, once you accomplish that, there's new and improved ways to do things and it inspires others to be like, all right, well, let's try to figure out our own way to carry this around or make it happen and get the shot.

Eli Price (53:19.577)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (53:23.474)
Right. Yeah. And I mean, so they not only are they like mounting cameras, the IMAX cameras on the planes, they had a plane or two where they actually like built, they like deconstructed and reconstructed the nose and the tail of the plane to like encase an IMAX camera so that like you could fly behind.

Kara Smith (53:44.376)
Mmm. Yeah.

Eli Price (53:48.638)
like the Spitfires in that plane and you're actually like flying behind them. Like the camera is just wherever he points the plane, the camera points. And so, um, and same for like the tail. Yeah. Really, really cool. And then like they're building, they're developing these like rigs, um, to like. Put on a boat. So like when you're, when you're seeing like, um, the moonstone, like going through the ocean, you're kind of following alongside of it.

Kara Smith (53:53.254)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (53:56.467)
Wow, that's impressive.

Eli Price (54:17.378)
there's actually a boat with this rig that is engineered in such a way that like it's like stabilized and so like those are like really smooth shots like going beside the moonstone it's actually like on a rig on a boat like following the moonstone but like it's like engineered in such a way that it's stabilized it's not like bumpy yeah which is real so they're like even like developing these new like engineering techniques for like using the

Kara Smith (54:17.489)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (54:27.195)
Oh yeah.

Kara Smith (54:34.411)
Wow, it's beautifully smooth, yeah.

Kara Smith (54:43.896)
Yeah.

Eli Price (54:46.294)
the cameras. So it's just like all around just totally impressive.

Kara Smith (54:52.576)
Yeah, a big win for him to accomplish all of this. And like you said, with the elements and still being able to keep those cameras mounted the way that they had done it themselves, like they don't have a guide on how to do this, they're figuring it out. So that's impressive.

Eli Price (55:03.423)
Yeah.

Eli Price (55:07.242)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the one nightmare story from the production is, so they had one mounted on kind of a Spitfire model that they built, that they used to, so when Collins wrecks and you get the kind of view of the plane skidding across the water, from that side view of the plane skidding across the water,

they had an IMAX mounted on that and they shot, they had a barge out in the ocean and they shot that plane that they built off of the barge to get that like skipping across the water effect. And the problem was it almost immediately started sinking and like they couldn't get to it. And so like the plane with the IMAX camera went down to the bottom.

Kara Smith (55:48.058)
Oh, okay. Yeah.

Kara Smith (55:57.675)
I don't know.

Eli Price (56:01.838)
And like divers went down and it took them like about an hour to like recover the camera. And obviously like the camera is ruined, but the film inside was fine. Yeah, and that's one. Yeah, that's actually it's funny because like it's one of the like resilient things about film. It's actually like it's like it gets more and more delicate over long periods of time, obviously, but like.

Kara Smith (56:09.967)
Yeah. Oh wow, okay. Well, that's a win.

Eli Price (56:28.47)
Whereas like a digital camera would have just been fried and you're like, are we gonna be able to recover what was on there? The film, like you pull the film out and it's like, oh, you know, it got wet, but it's fine. You just let it, you know, you let it dry, you clean it up and you still got all the footage you needed. So there's a bit of a Dunkirk spirit in film too, in real film. Yeah.

Kara Smith (56:28.677)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (56:31.879)
and then you've lost it all. Yeah, yeah.

Kara Smith (56:40.668)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (56:46.334)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (56:52.118)
Yeah, for sure, for sure.

Eli Price (56:56.842)
Yeah, I love that little, I love those funny little nightmare stories, but it's, it's a nightmare because you ruined an IMAX camera. It's like not cheap, you know.

Kara Smith (57:04.846)
Oh, yeah.

No, yeah, that'll lead out the budget.

Eli Price (57:09.778)
Oh yeah. Um, yeah, I could, you know, you could probably talk on and on and on about all the production stuff. There was, um, another, just a couple of other examples of like how they did things in reality, um, instead of like adding in CGI. So they, they had a ton of extras obviously like lined up on the beach and all those lines. Um, but for like those.

Kara Smith (57:35.537)
Yeah.

Eli Price (57:39.394)
the distant lines like out in the distance. Instead of like CGI adding in extra like dudes in post, they built these like cardboard cutout lines that they like had like basically like it had printed on, they printed out these like pictures of, like they took pictures of the actual like extras lined up and they printed them out and like,

Kara Smith (57:48.517)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (57:53.562)
I know.

Kara Smith (58:06.812)
Yeah.

Eli Price (58:09.346)
pasted them to these cardboard cutouts and hand-painted to add in some details. And I think put it on aluminum, it was this technique that he had heard that was used from another, from an older movie to get this effect of motion a little bit from the sun glinting off the aluminum. And so there's just these, you can look up pictures, there's just these lines of cardboard dudes.

Kara Smith (58:29.992)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (58:37.363)
The way they align, yeah. But then they align it with the shot so that it looks like it just, yeah. That's impressive. Yeah.

Eli Price (58:40.227)
out on the beach.

Uh-huh. Yeah. It's like, it's like way back far in the distance. So it's like kind of out of focus, but it looks real. Like it looks like there's real guys out there. Uh-huh. Yeah. Like I didn't notice, like I watched that afterwards and I was like, I would have never. Yeah. I would have never known.

Kara Smith (58:50.855)
Yeah, because of the light and everything. Well.

No, I never would have noticed. No, and never once did I think that there was a CGI moment or anything like that to be like, oh, you know. Wow, that's impressive.

Eli Price (59:02.999)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (59:06.378)
Yeah. I don't now thinking about it. Like I don't remember seeing any, there might've been the only time that I can think that I might remember seeing some green screen behind it was that when I was talking about like the destroyer sinking that big set piece that they used. Um, but even that they, it was like in this outside water tank. So you still had like some sky going on, but I think that scene was in the dark. So they might've had to like,

Kara Smith (59:22.408)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Kara Smith (59:31.988)
Yeah.

Eli Price (59:36.214)
done something adding in CGI in the background there from the green screen. I'm not really sure, but other than that, I didn't see anything that was like CGI. Like there's a lot of like a lot of times you'll see like, oh, this movie used this much VFX visual effects. But visual effects does not mean CGI. Visual effects is basically like just I don't know a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about is visual effects.

Kara Smith (59:36.643)
Adjust that, yeah.

Kara Smith (59:45.006)
Mm-mm.

Kara Smith (59:52.923)
Yeah. CGI. Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:00:02.591)
Yeah, any sort of like little cheat of the shot of the eye of whatever to make it seem larger or more people or whatever it might be, yeah.

Eli Price (01:00:05.502)
Yeah. Right. Yeah. Like the explosion come like when the bomber comes across the beach towards the beginning and, uh, Fiam Whitehead's like characters like ducking down. He's in the foreground of the shot and you can see the, like the explosions coming, um, those are like real, like air cannon, like explosions, like shooting up sand.

Kara Smith (01:00:23.964)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:00:33.834)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (01:00:34.158)
And then like the dude that's like not far from him that like goes up in the air Like even that wasn't CGI they have like a crane with a with this like bungee cable that like pulled him off Uh-huh. I just the right moment. So like really like everything it's that it's just that like That determination to like everything that I can shoot in camera. I'm going to and like at the end of the day like

Kara Smith (01:00:38.545)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:00:43.391)
that just snatched them. Yeah, wow, yeah.

Kara Smith (01:00:53.426)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:00:57.492)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:01:01.674)
The, I think, I think another thing I remember Hoita saying in that, um, interview with Deakins was that, um, really like all the money and effort that a lot of movies use in post-production, um, adding in all this stuff. Um, Nolan like uses the same amount of money and the same amount of like effort and energy, but it's just in pre-production it's in, it's in the preparation for it.

Kara Smith (01:01:17.419)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:01:27.779)
Yeah, it's in...

Eli Price (01:01:31.274)
Like the prime example is the mole. They rebuilt that mole. So most of it wasn't still standing. It's like a long stretch of it. They didn't rebuild like the full stretch. Um, but they re they got, they actually got like the original blueprints for it from the port of Dunkirk, um, and, uh, like rebuilt it like to, to those specs, the best they could, and, uh, they were constantly having to like.

Kara Smith (01:01:37.481)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:01:44.369)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:01:49.107)
Oh wow, that's cool.

Kara Smith (01:01:56.67)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:01:59.33)
there would, a storm would come through and like break part of it and they would have to come back in and like, read, like reinforce it and stuff. Um, and so like, that's a, that's a massive undertaking. Like when you're watching, when you're like watching that, it's like a real. Like peer real mold that they like actually built, um, for the movie, which is

Kara Smith (01:02:02.463)
Part of it, yeah.

Kara Smith (01:02:11.741)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:02:21.259)
Yeah, it is impressive. But again, it's all of that time and effort, but just in a different way and at a different time. And I mean, in the end, I think, you know, we all see the see the effect that it has of I also I'm sure on the actors as well to really be doing something versus being like, OK, you know, the floor is green right now. But remember, you're supposed to be walking a plank. So like, keep your feet in line, just all the things that, you know, make it.

Eli Price (01:02:29.645)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (01:02:36.427)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:02:47.785)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:02:50.459)
I'm like, obviously actors are actors. They're supposed to be able to accomplish this. But when you have extras, when you have people like, for everyone to be there in real time and be on a pier and to understand like where to stand, how to stand, and it looks so real because it is real. They all are bouncing out there or standing out there. They're cold, they're whatever. And it, you know, it really plays out.

Eli Price (01:02:56.814)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (01:03:06.326)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:03:10.246)
Yeah. I remember, um, I remember, uh, Harry Styles in like, uh, and like making of interview was basically saying like, you know, when I'm like in the water out there, like I'm not acting. Like I'm really like cold and trying to swim to get, to get to a boat. Like he, uh, he was, he was just, I thought it was funny. He's like, it's really like he creates an environment where like,

Kara Smith (01:03:18.955)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:03:25.935)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:03:29.818)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:03:36.239)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:03:39.298)
You really like don't have to do much acting. You're like just in reality. Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:03:42.535)
You're part of it, yeah. Which I mean, adds to the reality that we see, but also, I mean, wow, what a first movie to be part of as like your, I mean.

Eli Price (01:03:47.697)
Thank you.

Yeah, for sure. And there's like, there's this like rumor, um, that like Christopher Nolan didn't know he was like part of one direction when he auditioned. And I'm like, really? You didn't know? I'm like, I find that hard to believe. Um,

Kara Smith (01:04:02.422)
That's funny.

me.

Kara Smith (01:04:08.703)
Hard to believe, but maybe he just really is not in touch with pop culture. Maybe he just has no interest at all. Ha ha.

Eli Price (01:04:12.842)
Yeah. I mean, I feel like at this point he had like teenage daughters. And so it's like, and he's British. Like surely he would know, but at the same time, like it's a man that has no email address and no cell phone. And so like, it's kind of like, you know, maybe he just really is.

Kara Smith (01:04:20.12)
Surely then he would know.

Kara Smith (01:04:30.739)
Hey, it's possible. Or at the very least might not have known the magnitude of what this boy band was, just thought like, oh, okay, so he has dabbled in singing, not like, oh no, people will go see this movie because Harry's in it and hopefully they like the film. Yeah.

Eli Price (01:04:39.068)
Maybe, yeah.

Eli Price (01:04:42.73)
Yeah. It really did. They really, there really was a lot of people that went it's like, Oh, I want to see Harry Styles in this movie. And it's like, I wonder if they were disappointed because it's like, you know, get a whole lot of style.

Kara Smith (01:04:53.639)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:04:57.683)
It's very minimal, yeah. No, I will say that's one of the reasons I went. And I mean, of course, like it just was a good movie. So if it had been a bad movie or if you had been bored or whatever, then you'd be like, well, dang, like I didn't even get to see him much, but you showed up and you're like, hey, that was a good one.

Eli Price (01:05:03.115)
Yeah.

Thank you.

Eli Price (01:05:09.354)
Yeah. What a waste. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Another thing that I love about this is the score, which is just like. Just in your face, like he's like, Hans Zimmer is really like shoving this score down your throat. And that's like, I love it. I love them for it, you know.

Kara Smith (01:05:24.539)
Yeah, it's big. Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:05:35.063)
Yes.

Kara Smith (01:05:38.473)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:05:39.442)
Sometimes I feel like sometimes Zimmer scores can be like a bit much. Yeah. Overbearing a bit much. It's like, it's like, okay, Zimmer, we get it. Like you like big sounds. Um, but this movie, it feels so the score is I think part of is because the score is so like intertwined with the sound design, like they're

Kara Smith (01:05:44.787)
Overbearing, yeah.

Kara Smith (01:05:52.455)
Yes.

Kara Smith (01:06:06.237)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:06:07.062)
They're kind of like, you can't have the sound design without the score. Like they go hand in hand and they're kind of melded together. And I think I remember like in the, in the, the special features kind of talking about how, you know, he had Zimmer involved when they were doing, working on like sound and vice versa. And so, um, I mean, like the, when the plane is coming in, like that, that ever rising, like

Kara Smith (01:06:12.692)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:06:36.403)
Yes.

Eli Price (01:06:36.682)
like it's kind of part of this, like it's, it's the sound, the planes making. So it's like, you know, the sound design, but it's also like. Part of the score too. Like it's, it's adding to the music that you hear too.

Kara Smith (01:06:42.982)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:06:50.031)
Yeah. And I think it also adds to the fact that there isn't a lot of dialogue in this. So in a situation where you might have somebody giving you real emotion by what they're saying, how they're saying it, you know, they might be screaming, crying, all this other stuff, and, you know, yelling at somebody that you're not getting that as much. I mean, you occasionally do, but you're not getting that for the whole movie. So to have this music guiding your emotions as well, or like

Eli Price (01:06:56.302)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (01:07:07.916)
Right.

Kara Smith (01:07:17.359)
amplifying something where everyone else is silently running or doing whatever it is they're doing and the music is really giving you that like dialogue and emotion.

Eli Price (01:07:27.07)
Right, yeah. And I think, so one of the quotes that I had written down that Zimmer said that I thought was funny, he said, if there are method actors, I suppose I'm a method composer. And then he like goes on to talk about how he, they were shooting and he happened to be kind of, you know, not able to like swing by. And he went out on the beach and like,

Kara Smith (01:07:41.483)
I'm sorry.

Eli Price (01:07:55.798)
He took a jar and like put a handful of sand in the jar and like took it with them. And it's like, Oh, that's like kind of funny. He's, he was just kind of like laughing at like, Oh, this is, it might sound like dumb, but like, I, I felt like, I guess he kind of felt like, Oh, I need that connection while I'm that artistic connection, you know, while I'm making the score to this sand from, from the real Dunkirk beach. Um, I thought that was funny. Um,

Kara Smith (01:08:00.991)
Hahaha

Kara Smith (01:08:09.005)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:08:16.048)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:08:22.879)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:08:24.238)
But the ticking, so the ticking in the score, that's actually recorded from one of Nolan's watches. Yeah, so they took one of his, I think it was a stopwatch that he has, and recorded the ticking from it and included that in the score, which I think is really cool.

Kara Smith (01:08:28.725)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:08:34.925)
Oh, that's cool.

Kara Smith (01:08:40.852)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:08:47.919)
Yeah. Yeah, that's cool that that's how it was done. But it's also just it's such an important element because it is like that taking any like constant beat is it's your heart rate. It's your on the edge of your seat because it's in time in time.

Eli Price (01:08:55.075)
Nothing.

Eli Price (01:09:01.566)
Yeah. Well, like, well, like the, the right from the get-go, there's that kind of like heartbeat in the score too. Um, which is, you could, I guess you could say is a bit manipulative because it's almost like, like making your heart race along with the score. But at the same time, like, it's not without purpose. Like it, you, you're with these dudes that probably are having like an elevated heartbeat. And

Kara Smith (01:09:09.98)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:09:17.649)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:09:23.7)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:09:30.975)
Yeah, they can hear in their ears as they're running and stuff. Yeah.

Eli Price (01:09:31.37)
You know, yeah, it's their heart. They fill it in their throat, you know, just like you do from the score.

Kara Smith (01:09:38.583)
Yeah. And I mean, the score is, I feel like the score in any film ought to manipulate you a little bit, you know? Just the same in like a horror movie. Like it has that same, not that I like horror movies, but you could just watch a trailer. Like it has the same, you know, impulses and it's supposed to add so much of the effect. Otherwise, it wouldn't be in there. They would not pay these guys the big bucks to do all this.

Eli Price (01:09:44.692)
Sure, yeah.

Eli Price (01:09:48.51)
Oh yeah. Yeah.

Eli Price (01:09:57.132)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:10:00.462)
For sure. This is for sure. This is, you know, it's funny to say that I think this is like the closest Nolan has ever gotten to making a horror movie. Like this is, you know, it has that kind of intensity. Obviously like it's not by any means a horror movie, but like there's elements where he's like using some of those. I mean, he mentions, you know, Alien, which I would say is a, is a horror movie.

Kara Smith (01:10:11.457)
Mm. Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:10:29.222)
Yeah, close.

Eli Price (01:10:30.098)
Um, like, uh, using those intensity building elements. Um, uh, and yeah, the score is part of that. Yeah, for sure.

Kara Smith (01:10:35.407)
Yeah, even using the silence. Yeah, the score, the silence of people not talking, the real panic and fear of these guys of really not knowing what's coming next. And they do have like this, you know, this villain, this enemy, this, you know, scary thing that could potentially strike at any time. And they have no idea which direction it's coming from. I mean, obviously, War, no. And obviously, War is kind of a horror movie. Like it is, but it is just the...

Eli Price (01:10:41.939)
Anyway.

Eli Price (01:10:49.815)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (01:10:55.414)
Yeah. And you don't see it.

Kara Smith (01:11:04.723)
real life just truest, rawest version of like being horrified and being terrified of what's going to come next and just surviving.

Eli Price (01:11:07.94)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (01:11:11.774)
Yeah. The enemy almost is like a ghost in this movie. Like you never once see a German soldier the whole movie. But it's like this ever. Yeah, it's this ever present threat, though, that hangs over the whole movie. So it is like a bit like haunted in that in that way. But yeah, the big so the big thing in this movie.

Kara Smith (01:11:17.733)
Yeah!

Kara Smith (01:11:20.991)
No, you never hear them say Nazis or anything like that.

Kara Smith (01:11:28.388)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:11:31.625)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:11:35.551)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:11:41.47)
Um, what the score was he, he took it and he's used it, um, in other movies. Like it, you can hear it some in the score for the prestige. You can hear it in some of the sound design for like, um, the bat pod and the dark night. Um, but it's this technique of using something called shepherd tones. Um, have you ever heard of shepherd tones? Some people might have. Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:12:00.39)
Mm-hmm.

I've never heard the term, but I'm sure I have heard them.

Eli Price (01:12:07.55)
Yeah, you've, you definitely have, because you heard it all through this movie. Um, so like, it's basically this, like, it's basically like an audio illusion. So like, you know, think of a visual illusion of a barbershop poll, how, like, as it turns, it looks like it's always going up, but it's a visual illusion. It's not always going up, you know, and you kind of know that, but you can't like, you can't like make your eyes unsee that illusion. Um,

Kara Smith (01:12:10.982)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:12:20.999)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:12:24.995)
It's going, yeah.

Kara Smith (01:12:33.419)
see it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Eli Price (01:12:36.978)
And it's basically that same concept, but for your audio. So it's this layering of these rising tones. So you have this higher octave, this middle octave, and then the lower octave. And so the middle octave kind of repeats. It goes up, and repeats. And then the higher octave starts off

Kara Smith (01:12:44.383)
through. Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:12:50.992)
Mmm

Eli Price (01:13:06.398)
I think hot like louder and then gets quieter and then repeats and the lower octave starts. It's the inverse, whichever way they are. And what it does is it creates this effect where you can look up YouTube videos that like visualize it, which was helpful for me. That are cool. Like if you like if you're listening at home and you're like, Oh, I want to pause and like go look up shepherd tone.

Kara Smith (01:13:11.344)
Mmm, okay.

Kara Smith (01:13:17.171)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:13:33.065)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:13:33.882)
YouTube video like it's actually like really cool But it basically creates this illusion of an ever-rising tone So like it tricks our ears to thinking like that the that the tone is just like continually rising in pitch When it's really not it's this illusion sort of like the barber pole and so like when you like you can think of one of the like prime examples it's in the actual music of the score, but like

Kara Smith (01:13:50.547)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:14:01.937)
Uh-huh.

Eli Price (01:14:02.77)
in the sound design like the planes. So when the planes are approaching, you hear that

Kara Smith (01:14:08.339)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:14:09.438)
And it just sounds like it's just like infinitely going up the pitch. But it's not, it's an illusion, but it creates this intensity. And this like anxiousness is like the effect it has on you, which is really cool.

Kara Smith (01:14:14.761)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:14:20.751)
Mm-hmm, for sure.

Kara Smith (01:14:27.191)
Yeah, because of course, yeah, it does have that again, like, horror esque of like, okay, it's coming, it's coming, it's coming, eventually, it's gonna give like, something's gonna happen. And then obviously, like, it doesn't, but it creates that fear.

Eli Price (01:14:36.212)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (01:14:42.866)
Right. Yeah. And, um, I just think that's really cool. And something Nolan wanted to do kind of along with that is he wanted to take that idea of a shepherd tone and kind of apply it to his structure of his movie. So he wanted to like build ever and like intensifying sequences, building, building where it feels like the tension is just like constantly rising through the whole movie. Um, and never, never like, he never wanted there to be a moment where it felt like you.

Kara Smith (01:14:56.117)
Mmm.

Eli Price (01:15:12.39)
you like flattened out or like went down in intensity. He wanted it to just feel ever rising in intensity, which it sort of does. I think there's a couple of moments where you kind of like, I don't think you ever go down. Yeah. Um, a little bit of a plateau in a, in a few moments, but other than that, um, like pretty like, well, perfectly executed as far as that goes. Um,

Kara Smith (01:15:16.873)
Hmm

Kara Smith (01:15:22.291)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:15:25.683)
get a rest maybe, a plateau kind of, yeah.

Kara Smith (01:15:33.352)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:15:38.523)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:15:41.042)
The only other thing about the score, when there's the one moment where the score kind of changes, and that's when the little ships finally arrive from across the channel, that moment is Elgar's Nimrod from the Enigma variation, which I've never listened to.

Kara Smith (01:15:51.473)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:15:57.557)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:16:09.919)
Uh-uh.

Eli Price (01:16:11.154)
Nolan, I wrote down this quote from Nolan. He said, I didn't really say this to Hans talking about Hans Zimmer, but it played at my father's funeral a few years ago. I just found it, find it unbearably moving. So I just thought that was kind of a sweet little like moment of vulnerability from Nolan. Like, I really just wanted this in here because like he, he finds it moving. And it really is that moment. I find that moment moving. And

Kara Smith (01:16:17.151)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:16:27.412)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:16:36.819)
Absolutely. It's so

Eli Price (01:16:39.99)
The score matches it so well too, I think.

Kara Smith (01:16:42.091)
Yeah, yeah, it's such a hopeful relief of a moment. And that is, you know, and the score adds to that, which is also interesting, then, that played at his father's funeral just because of, I can imagine that would be so incredibly emotional when in, you know, in that situation.

Eli Price (01:16:59.55)
Oh yeah, for sure.

Yeah. So this movie, let me, I'm going to make sure I didn't like miss any like cool. No, I think I think I pretty much hit all the cool stuff. There, there's more cool stuff. But like, like I said, it's funny the so the special features like making of doc is actually longer than the movie. And so like, I watched a whole another movie basically.

Kara Smith (01:17:15.686)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:17:19.091)
Of course, yeah.

Kara Smith (01:17:24.371)
Mm-hmm. Hahaha.

Eli Price (01:17:31.682)
just about like the special features and the making of the movie. So there's a ton of, yeah, there's a ton of stuff, a little, just leave it at that. But yeah, so the movie, one of the first things he did when he finished was he screened it for like a bunch of veterans, which is really cool. No one said it was both like daunting and moving to do that, which I can imagine. But yeah, the movie.

Kara Smith (01:17:35.487)
That's funny, yeah. I'm sure.

I'm sorry.

Kara Smith (01:17:50.003)
That's cool. Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:17:55.783)
sure. Yeah.

Eli Price (01:18:01.494)
comes out in the summer of 17. And it really just got fantastic critical response. The word masterpiece was thrown out. It was that degree of good critical response. And yeah, I mean, there was some, as with any Nolan movie, there's some detractors out there.

Kara Smith (01:18:08.288)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:18:14.964)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:18:31.838)
Um, like some just kind of like only saw it for like the technical aspects. Uh, which I guess I get, but like, I don't see how you aren't pulled into the motion of it too. Um, I, I don't, I honestly just don't get that response. Like, Oh, it's just like clockwork and, and this like exercise and like pris like precise clockwork, like timing. And I'm like,

Kara Smith (01:18:37.673)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:18:45.763)
Yeah. I mean, yeah.

Eli Price (01:19:01.818)
No, it's not.

Kara Smith (01:19:03.787)
I think that people, you know, walk into a thing wanting to be critical and of course, some of those people can only ever do that. But I, yeah, I would be very surprised. And again, like I went in for mostly the Harry Styles of it all. I went with my parents, they went because they're like, okay, yeah, like it's Chris Nolan film. But I mean, you know, and I was a part of the Harry Potter, or not Harry Potter, Harry Styles like discourse of it all. And like, yeah, there's so many fans who went in.

Eli Price (01:19:06.459)
Yeah. Maybe so, yeah.

Eli Price (01:19:12.756)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:19:34.495)
fans of Harry Styles who went in to see this movie were like, wow, what a great movie. Like what, you know, a touching kind of moments. And even if there wasn't a lot of dialogue, there's still so many emotional moments, not just because of like the threat of war and like the fear of survival and all of that, but also just, you know, even with George, you know, dying and then his friend putting him in the paper and all of that stuff. Like the moments that we do have dialogue and that we see backstory or we understand these people, it's...

Eli Price (01:19:38.336)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:19:55.691)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:20:04.407)
so overwhelmingly beautiful and emotional and lasting. Cause that's one of some of the stories, like when I went back to watch it, I was like, I remembered the French soldier who's just so desperately trying to make it and was helping them. And then of course, George, who was, yeah, it was like all my favorite characters died because, cause you know, that's how it goes. But it's just, you know, having all these really touching stories.

Eli Price (01:20:05.952)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (01:20:17.198)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:20:21.65)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:20:30.346)
Right. Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:20:31.255)
even though that's not exactly the point. Like these little stories aren't the point. It's more of just like a testament. Yeah, they do. I mean, he obviously very much accomplished everything he set out to do, even in the ways he did it. Like all of those things, we see them come through and they all paid off for him.

Eli Price (01:20:34.55)
Thank you.

Eli Price (01:20:37.742)
These little choices though, they all add up.

Eli Price (01:20:52.078)
for sure. Yeah. So Emma Thomas said that this movie is the sum of everything we've learned in our prior movies. And I really feel like that comes through. And you know, we've kind of been like touching on that here and there of just like, just like the maturity of him at this point is his career. And not just him, but like his whole team that he's worked with so much like you, you

Kara Smith (01:21:03.37)
Mm. Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:21:14.964)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:21:19.228)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:21:21.234)
work and work, we work together on so many different like projects, making these, this art and eventually like you're able to make something that's so like, uh, just like precisely put together and like this girl and like, just, um, it's, I mean, it's an experience. It's a, it's, um, a capital E experience, you know, of a movie. Um, and you just don't get, you don't.

Kara Smith (01:21:36.703)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:21:42.259)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:21:45.98)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:21:50.754)
get that a whole lot. I mean, when I go and watch an Avengers movie, like, it's like there's a lot of stuff happening and there's some exciting moments, but I wouldn't say like that it's a capital E experience like this is.

Kara Smith (01:22:07.683)
No, because again, those movies like in the Avengers movies, and the reasons why, yeah, I don't love superheroes, but the reasons why I did love the Avengers is like those stories are telling you the stories of these people. They're giving you the backstories and the friendship, the camaraderie, the connection between the characters. And I think that obviously we all love that. I was like movie watchers and just storytellers like, you know, we love seeing connections of people and hearing their backstory, but...

Eli Price (01:22:21.227)
Right.

Eli Price (01:22:25.358)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (01:22:34.785)
Right.

Kara Smith (01:22:37.291)
him drawing back from that and not giving you as much of that, it really does elevate the experience because you're not so focused on the individuals necessarily and like those storylines and reconciling what happens to this one guy like it's not about that.

Eli Price (01:22:48.087)
Right.

Eli Price (01:22:54.25)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Um, one of the things that, uh, Nolan kind of spoke to, so the, you know, the film comes out, um, and this was around the time that the whole Brexit thing was happening, um, which was like a huge ordeal. Um, I remember like hearing a ton about it, even over here, uh, in the States. Um, and, uh, which, you know, uh, Brexit.

Kara Smith (01:23:09.255)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:23:17.727)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:23:23.954)
It was basically like Great Britain deciding to leave the UN. Um, and, um, you know, some people might be listening and be like, what is that? Uh, but, uh, but yeah, there was, there were a lot of people. Yeah. There were a lot of people, um, that like, within that Brexit movement that kind of co-opted this film, um, like for like not national fervor and stuff and, um,

Kara Smith (01:23:35.759)
yeah to leave the EU yeah.

Kara Smith (01:23:47.237)
Eww.

Kara Smith (01:23:50.397)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:23:51.802)
And this is Nolan's response to that whole ordeal. He said, Dunkirk has always been a Rorschach test for people, but I think the confusion we see today between patriotism and nationalism is extremely tricky. I don't believe we want any political faction to own patriotism or to own Dunkirk, which I thought was really like, insightful of him.

Kara Smith (01:24:00.762)
Thank you.

Kara Smith (01:24:19.432)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:24:19.902)
Like as a response to that, you know, cause like when you make something like this and then like a group of people kind of like co-ops it and is using it in a way that like you don't believe in, you can get accusations thrown your way, you know, like you're enabling these people and that sort of thing. And you know, he's, I just thought that was an insightful quote of like, you know, one political faction cannot own.

Kara Smith (01:24:32.548)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:24:36.637)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:24:40.124)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:24:49.122)
patriotism. Nationalism is a whole different story, you know, but, you know, like he's, I mean, he's half British, but he's more British than not, you know, and like he has, I mean, he has the accent, so I mean, yeah, but yeah, he's, I mean, he's a dual citizen, technically, of America.

Kara Smith (01:24:51.496)
Yeah.

Okay.

Kara Smith (01:25:03.853)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:25:10.499)
then yeah, he's full fledged in our eyes.

Kara Smith (01:25:17.713)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:25:19.134)
Great Britain, but um, but yeah, I just thought that was a cool insight. And it really like along those lines, like the movie does feel very apolitical. Um, because it's not about like this side or that side, even like, even though like you kind of watch it and you know, like which side you should root for. Um, like that's kind of just built into watching a world war II movie. Um, but, uh, yeah, it's, it's not about.

Kara Smith (01:25:29.098)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:25:38.236)
Yeah, of course.

Yeah, yeah, of course.

Eli Price (01:25:48.842)
Besides, like we talked about, you never even see a German soldier. It's about, it's just about survival really.

Kara Smith (01:25:53.)
No.

Yeah, and I mean you have a bit of that in-group out-group with the British versus French soldiers, but at the end of the day, like these people aren't talking, like unlike other war movies, or especially World War II movies where you're seeing like, oh here's our, you know, plans to win this battle, to take over this area, like what are these guys are not doing that. They're like, let's just get home. Let's just get home before we regroup, before we talk about like what is

Eli Price (01:26:01.43)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:26:25.503)
who we're against and all that type of stuff. So it really, yeah, it does scale back the like political parts of a war and just down to how are all of these boys gonna make it another day?

Eli Price (01:26:37.91)
Yeah, for sure. And it, and that, yeah, it's universal. It's a, it's a human, it's a, it's about a human experience. Um, but yeah. And even on top of that, like along similar lines, the, um, you know, a lot of war films when you watch it, they kind of fall on different ends of, I guess you could call it a spectrum, but they, a lot of times they're either like an anti war film.

Kara Smith (01:26:39.507)
Which is, yeah, universal.

Kara Smith (01:27:06.452)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:27:06.77)
Um, so like it's trying to portray war, um, just, yeah. Um, which is usually my preference. Um, uh, I, I usually like if there's the other, the other way of that you see war films go as they kind of like, um, sentimentalize like the victory of it. All it romanticize is another good word. Um,

Kara Smith (01:27:10.444)
as such a dirty thing and yeah, such a horrific event.

Kara Smith (01:27:17.148)
Yeah, I mean...

Kara Smith (01:27:31.601)
Yeah, and romanticize the violence or the battles and things.

Eli Price (01:27:36.798)
Yeah. If, if not even, I mean, maybe like not even some probably do, but, um, the, I guess like the being generous, like the better ones, like, aren't necessarily like romanticizing the violence. Like they show the horror of that, but like romanticizing the idea of like victory over enemies, um, sort of thing. Right. Um, and this like,

Kara Smith (01:27:51.604)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:27:55.23)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like the good conquering evil in the most basic sense. Yeah.

Eli Price (01:28:05.526)
So like you kind of have those two different types of war movies, which most kind of fall into one or the other. I would, I would, I would imagine, um, obviously like I haven't seen every war film, but, um, but a lot of the ones I've seen kind of fall into those two categories and, um, this one really kind of feels like this middle ground though. Um, like it's, it's for sure anti-war. Like you don't watch this film and be like, Oh yeah, war.

Kara Smith (01:28:12.959)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:28:18.398)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:28:27.986)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (01:28:35.234)
Like let's romanticize it. Yeah. Right. Um, and then like, but at the same time, there is a bit of like victory to it. It's just like not maybe romanticized in exactly the same way. Um, so it's, it's kind of like you watch this and you're like, man, with. This was a moment in history and it's not, it's not like.

Kara Smith (01:28:35.387)
Yeah, like I want these guys to go back out there. Yeah, you kind of want them to go home and stay home.

Eli Price (01:29:05.826)
for war, but at the same time, like it's appreciative of this moment that was so pivotal and so like, inspirational for a whole nation and like side, I guess. Um, and so like, it's kind of like this weird middle ground between those two movies, which is just another way that it's like unique within the genre, I think. Um, yeah.

Kara Smith (01:29:21.756)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kara Smith (01:29:32.259)
Yeah, I agree.

Eli Price (01:29:35.254)
But yeah, so that was kind of like a big sidebar, but yeah, the movie opens in 2017. You know, Nolan loves those June or July. I'm sure it opened June or July because that's when all of his movies open. But it earned 527 million worldwide, which is a really like, honestly, a big haul for a movie like this.

Kara Smith (01:29:48.83)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:29:52.831)
Thank you.

Kara Smith (01:30:01.221)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:30:03.746)
And I'm not sure how much Harry Styles had to do with that. Um, but I'd like to imagine it was mostly because it was a Nolan movie. Um, and like we've talked about many times, Nolan gets butts in seats. Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:30:08.61)
You never know.

Kara Smith (01:30:13.715)
Well, and because it was so critically acclaimed as well. Yeah, it does. And it did, it opened with such good reviews that it was like, okay, we're not, you know, most people like the trickle effect, everybody's like, oh yeah, then I guess I'll be there because it's done great, yeah.

Eli Price (01:30:22.89)
Yeah, we've got to go see this movie.

Yeah. Hmm. And, um, it was obviously like his highest grossing film ever in Britain. Um, in great Britain, like makes total sense. Um, I was actually listening, um, uh, the Ringer net podcast network has, um, a show called the rewatchables and, um, they, um, they had Quentin Tarantino on for the episode they did on Dunkirk. Um, and it was like Tarantino's suggestion for that.

Kara Smith (01:30:36.635)
Yeah, makes sense.

Kara Smith (01:30:55.467)
Oh, fuck.

Eli Price (01:30:58.738)
Episode for the like the rewatchable like movie or whatever And he kind of yeah, he it was cool because he talked about Just like a brief overview of his like little story. He told he saw it the first time and like he was like Obviously like very impressed but like didn't necessarily connect with it emotionally and I can't remember if it was his like

Kara Smith (01:31:03.303)
That's cool.

Eli Price (01:31:27.106)
second or third time seeing it, but like he happened to be in London for something and He had a little bit of time on his hands and he was like, ah, you know, I should see Dunkirk like in I'm like I'm in London. I'm in Great Britain. I should see Dunkirk here and so like he he's like tells a story like he goes in and The the guy at the ticket counter is like, oh, yeah, you're gonna love it. You're gonna love it and then

Kara Smith (01:31:44.764)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:31:53.599)
Hahaha

Eli Price (01:31:54.69)
Like the girl ripping his tickets, like, Oh, it's fantastic. You're going to love it. And so like, he's already going in like, with this mood of like, Oh, these people like love this. And he was talking about how like, these weren't like old, older people. These were like really young, like kids, like, and they like, were so like excited about this movie. And then like he said, just like, he just talked about how like watching it in that theater with.

Kara Smith (01:32:07.339)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Eli Price (01:32:21.362)
a theater full of British people was like actually like a really powerful experience and like he said, you could like just feel the, the emotion in the room. Yeah. Um, and it just like elevated the, the movie for him. Um, and I just thought that was like a really cool, like little story. Um, that, um, that I don't know, just like putting myself in those shoes. I can imagine just like how surreal of an experience that would be, you know, um,

Kara Smith (01:32:26.387)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:32:30.49)
and yet yeah

Kara Smith (01:32:40.352)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:32:49.855)
sure.

Eli Price (01:32:51.442)
Yeah. I, like I said, I love this movie. It's, it's so good. Um, we did, um, they did get. So he had gotten some Oscar nominations before, but this was his first big, like big, like hall of nominations. He got eight nominations for this one. Um, and so he, some, so he got eight nominations in one three. Um,

Kara Smith (01:32:58.667)
I'm going to go to bed.

Kara Smith (01:33:06.046)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:33:11.141)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:33:19.711)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (01:33:20.61)
The three he won was in sound mixing. Well, so like, I guess I should say like when the movie wins for like sound mixing, sound editing and film editing, which are three that it did, it's not actually like Nolan that gets the Oscar for those. It's the sound mixer and the sound editor and the film and the editor of the movie. Um, that get the Oscars for those technically. Um, but you know, Nolan's a big, big part of that. Um,

Kara Smith (01:33:33.935)
Yeah, of course.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:33:46.687)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:33:47.778)
But it also got nominated for original score, production, design, and cinematography. And then like this was his movie where he got nominated for best directing and got nominated for best picture. And so like it was really a big deal of a movie for him in that sense. He didn't win best director. I can't remember who won best director that year.

Kara Smith (01:34:00.574)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:34:07.956)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:34:13.535)
that year.

Eli Price (01:34:14.914)
forgot to look that up. I do know that it lost best picture to Guillermo del Toro's shape of water. That was a year that one, which is funny because like the for me, memento in the special features, there's like this interview with del Toro interviewing Nolan about the movie and like del Toro like loves it and stuff. So they're like, they're actually like close. And so

Kara Smith (01:34:23.085)
Oh, wow, yeah.

Eli Price (01:34:42.934)
I wonder if it was like kind of this, like, ah, you got me this time kind of thing. Like they, they like to respect each other. So, you know, um, but, uh, but yeah, I, I just thought that was cool. I, I wish, I feel like he should have won. So for me, that was like my favorite movie of that year. Um, I wish it would have won. I haven't to be honest, I haven't seen shape of water, but yeah.

Kara Smith (01:34:47.267)
Yeah. Maybe. Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:35:06.283)
I guess, I guess, yeah, I guess Guillermo del Toro won both, they won both picture and director that year. Yeah.

Eli Price (01:35:14.322)
Oh, he did. Okay. Yeah. Which, you know, del Toro is a great director.

Kara Smith (01:35:17.831)
I mean, oftentimes they go, yeah. And oftentimes they do end up going hand in hand with director and pictures, so you know.

Eli Price (01:35:24.448)
They do sometimes it, and then sometimes though they, they do, or they're like, oh, we love this movie too. And we'll kind of split it. Um, yeah, but uh.

Kara Smith (01:35:30.563)
Yeah, it's like too good. So that yeah, which I am a bit surprised that they didn't split with Dunkirk just because of how well it did. But I'm sure shortly he won a million BAFTAs though that year. I'm sure. Especially being within the UK. Oh, wow. Dang.

Eli Price (01:35:38.315)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:35:43.162)
Um, it didn't win best picture. It didn't win best picture back either. Um, I did look that, look at that. I, it wasn't something I don't remember what it was though. Um, okay. Yeah. It came in second. It said, I think, um, but yeah, it's, you know, obviously a great movie and the cast that's, that's the other thing we haven't really touched on a whole lot. Um,

Kara Smith (01:35:53.019)
I'm surprised that in the UK he couldn't have pulled it out.

Kara Smith (01:36:04.188)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:36:09.126)
One of the things he did was like, he wanted to cast like as many like young men that were kind of more unknowns and acting as he could to kind of get that feel of these, you know, anonymous young men, um, as soldiers, um, which he did, you know, to great effect, um, Fionn Whitehead who plays the, the character's name is Tommy. And I, I'm like,

Kara Smith (01:36:15.984)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:36:24.508)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:36:29.899)
Thank you.

Eli Price (01:36:35.85)
almost 100% positive, you never hear the word Tommy said. No, but that's what he's listed as is Tommy. And I wanna say I heard that that's kind of like a British term for like an anonymous soldier. So I guess that... Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, so I think that was like the idea there. But...

Kara Smith (01:36:38.751)
think so. I don't think you ever hear that.

Kara Smith (01:36:54.079)
So, okay. So kind of like if they named him John Doe, or like, you know, John Smith kind of, yeah. Gotcha.

Eli Price (01:37:05.426)
I think he did great. I don't think I've seen him in anything before or since. But.

Kara Smith (01:37:07.432)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:37:11.459)
Yeah, I don't think so either. Because I mean, some of these, of course, like the actor who plays George, very, yeah, like obviously, he goes, I feel like this was probably the first thing I've seen him in, but I've seen him in multiple things since. And he's done very well for himself. Obviously, even Harry's gone on. But I mean, you know. Then, of course, there are the people that we do know, like Tom Hardy and things like that, that we knew before, we knew then.

Eli Price (01:37:18.09)
Yeah, Barry Keegan.

Eli Price (01:37:24.754)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Right.

Eli Price (01:37:37.49)
Right. Yeah, Keegan was fairly new. He had he had he had just been in the Killing of a Sacred Deer by is a Yorgo Slathemost movie with um, uh, I want to say Uh, Colin Farrell's in that but uh, so he had been in that wasn't nearly as big as this obviously it's um, and but yeah, he really hadn't been and in a whole lot that was kind of like

Kara Smith (01:37:48.685)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:37:59.865)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:38:07.254)
I was really like when he was kind of breaking in. But yeah, I think he's a fantastic actor. Other things I've seen him in since, but. Yeah, he so this that's kind of his big thing. There's there's some other like unknown guys like you have Tom Glen Carney, who plays Peter, Mr. Dawson's son, George's friend. And I.

Kara Smith (01:38:09.905)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:38:14.452)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:38:18.033)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:38:31.816)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:38:35.806)
Again, just like a guy I don't think I've heard of before or since. Um, Jack Loudon who plays Collins. Um, never, I don't, you know, I don't know. Like, uh, yeah, Gibson, the, the guy, I think Gibson is the, is it Gibson or Collins that's the French guy. Um, yeah, that his name is a Niren Barnard. I think he was a Welsh actor. Um.

Kara Smith (01:38:40.187)
Yeah, same.

Kara Smith (01:38:47.867)
Yeah, they'll know him.

Kara Smith (01:38:57.867)
I think it's Gibson.

Kara Smith (01:39:04.017)
Oh, okay.

Eli Price (01:39:06.186)
So still British, I guess, but yeah, putting on the French accent. And then there's actually like a surprise appearance by Michael Caine, technically, in the movie. He's the voice of Fortis' leader, I think is what they call him.

Kara Smith (01:39:07.965)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:39:12.011)
Thank you.

Kara Smith (01:39:17.124)
Yes!

Kara Smith (01:39:21.483)
Which I didn't hear it. He really does have such a distinctive voice, but I didn't hear that the first time I watched it. And then this time in knowing that, oh, he's in it. Because I remember that being kind of a discussion and just a little pop culture thing of, of course he's going to be in it. But I don't remember sitting there thinking that. But I think it's also just a matter of the immersive experience of it all. That's not what I was paying attention to. Whereas in some cases, you would be like, oh, who is that voice over? I know that voice. But I...

Eli Price (01:39:26.25)
Yeah. Okay. Sure. Yeah.

Eli Price (01:39:35.447)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (01:39:46.371)
Right.

Eli Price (01:39:50.721)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:39:50.855)
I didn't have time to think about it. I was trying to figure out what's going on, what's gonna happen, you know?

Eli Price (01:39:55.134)
Yeah. And you, that's all you just hear him. I mean, I think he has like three lines that he says, um, over the radio. Uh, and, uh, yeah. And I mean, cause that, that plane goes down pretty, pretty soon in the movie. Uh, yeah. And then, uh, you know, we've talked about Harry Styles who I thought was really good in this, you know, a lot of it is pretty like understated acting. Um, uh, there, he has like the one moment.

Kara Smith (01:39:59.995)
Yeah, it's not much.

Kara Smith (01:40:08.22)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:40:16.747)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (01:40:24.01)
I think in the bottom of the trawler where he really like gets to like be like, um, kind of like right, expressive and like loud. Um, but other than that, it's pretty like, most of the performances are pretty understated and part of that is just cause like, it's just like basically silent acting. Like, um, I mean, you have like, so, um, Mark Rylance I think is like great as Mr. Dotson. Like he carries that.

Kara Smith (01:40:27.863)
Yeah, to show some acting skills. Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:40:39.615)
in it.

Kara Smith (01:40:43.631)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:40:54.05)
that atmosphere of that character so well. And then like you have Tom Hardy, who's like the, I guess the best I actor in the world. It seems like every time you see him, he's like covering up some of his face somehow. I mean, he's like, I mean, he's Bane obviously. And then in this movie, he's-

Kara Smith (01:41:05.323)
Hahaha.

Kara Smith (01:41:10.064)
It's... yeah.

Kara Smith (01:41:17.171)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:41:18.422)
Got the mask on the plane the whole time for Mad Max Fury Road. He's got the mask on for the first like, however long.

Kara Smith (01:41:24.843)
I mean, obviously a lot to be said if he can express that much and just, yeah, this much of his face.

Eli Price (01:41:28.93)
Yeah. Right. And then Kenneth Branagh, I thought, was like really well cast for that role because you do want he kind of holds that kind of like. That I mean, he himself just has that persona of like the, you know, what am I trying to what words would be appropriate for Kenneth Branagh? Like.

Kara Smith (01:41:56.043)
I mean, I guess it's just...

Eli Price (01:41:58.594)
I don't know, like, he kind of has this very British, like, I don't think... Yeah, that's a good word, stately.

Kara Smith (01:42:04.139)
It's very stately, it's very, yeah, it's, I don't know, very like proper, but also just like solid presence, you know? He very much walks into a room, it's stately, like he's, you know.

Eli Price (01:42:13.902)
Yeah. Yeah, that's yes. Yeah. Um, yeah, thank you. I think you, you expressed exactly what I was trying. I think maybe I sent it to you telepathically and you said it. It wasn't coming out of my mouth. Um, and then Killian, Killian Murphy is great too. The he's, uh, his, uh, cast as the shivering soldier. Um, doesn't have a name. Um,

Kara Smith (01:42:21.643)
I'm going to go to bed.

Kara Smith (01:42:27.235)
Yeah, yeah, that's what it was.

Kara Smith (01:42:39.29)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:42:41.078)
But he's great too. I think he, he like carries that, you know, haunted performance very well. Um, but, um, but yeah, I mean.

Kara Smith (01:42:42.731)
He is.

Kara Smith (01:42:49.319)
Yeah. I mean, he just gives us the full, I mean, just essence of fear and just being terrified and being so completely torn up by this. And also just the, I feel like he really adds to the idea of war and the lingering effects because all the people, they're handling everything that's happening to them relatively well. But when you...

Eli Price (01:42:59.836)
Oh, yeah.

Eli Price (01:43:16.162)
Right.

Kara Smith (01:43:17.375)
first meet him and we meet him after, you know, what has happened to him. But then you go and see those scenes of previously he was so calm and collected and like seemed very much like a great soldier and stuff. And then you now see like how. Everything that has happened and all of it has happened so suddenly as well has completely shocked him and will obviously have an effect on him for years to come.

Eli Price (01:43:26.322)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.

Eli Price (01:43:41.162)
Yeah. And, um, and you do get, I think that's important to kind of like see that in a war film is to see the, that effect that it has, um, which we'll, we'll probably talk about in just a bit, a little bit more. Um, but that is a really perfect, um, like turning point to talking about some of the key aspects of this movie, one of which is like the way it is structured, like you're,

Kara Smith (01:43:50.098)
Mm.

Eli Price (01:44:09.826)
You're jumping around in time, like Nolan, like very like, obviously at this point in his career is known for like playing with time in his movies. Um, and really like when you think about cinema, that's what film, that's what like films are. They are these like, um, endeavors in like manipulating time. Um, um, just like by nature of how they work and what they are. Um,

Kara Smith (01:44:11.946)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:44:18.397)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:44:29.989)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:44:35.753)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:44:36.714)
And so, but Nolan is one of those directors that like kind of puts that in your face. Like he makes you aware that, you know, that the time that you're watching is being manipulated. And this is like the culmination of that, that idea. And I think it's done to great effect. In this movie, it's all about the building of the emotion and the intensity.

Kara Smith (01:44:49.97)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:45:05.419)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (01:45:05.654)
And I wrote down this Stanley Kubrick quote that I think is like, really like applies here. He said, a film is or should be more like music than fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later. And obviously like there's different kind of philosophies on film and different approaches. This was...

Kara Smith (01:45:33.887)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (01:45:34.798)
Kubrick's approach and Nolan is like a great respecter of Kubrick and so like you know you kind of like kind of know that Nolan has some influence there and probably was aware of this like idea of having like the moods and the feelings and the emotions be like what's like present as you're watching and figuring out like what it means it's kind of comes after and that's like so very true for this movie

Kara Smith (01:45:45.129)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:45:53.769)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:46:02.581)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:46:04.258)
And really, it all comes from the way it's put together. It really is pure filmmaking turned up to 11. Let's get all these shots. Let's mix the sounds, syncing up with the intensifying, constant climb in intensity.

Kara Smith (01:46:19.946)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:46:32.95)
building all these shots together, editing together, or jumping around, like I'm letting you know, like this is a week, this is a day, this is an hour. And even like, you have these moments where you're jumping back and forth in time and you're learning new things from different perspectives because you're in a different like, kind of timeframe of the movie. And it's just like this.

Kara Smith (01:46:32.979)
Yes.

Kara Smith (01:46:41.856)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:46:52.959)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:47:02.702)
I don't know, a barrage of intensity that like, even just like, it doesn't even just come from like the way it's like cut together. Like, because it's shot so much in IMAX, IMAX is a format that's so big, like usually you don't wanna cut a whole lot because there's so much on screen to see, you wanna give the viewer time to like see it all. Yeah, and so like, they even like,

Kara Smith (01:47:28.331)
absorb it, yeah.

Eli Price (01:47:32.362)
are finding different ways to build the intensity without... A lot of times you build intensity by cutting a lot. And they're finding different ways to move the camera to build that intensity instead of cutting. And a lot of that comes from doing the handheld stuff, I think, too. But yeah, it really does feel like a third act of a movie. We talked about playing earlier.

Kara Smith (01:47:39.356)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:47:59.432)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:48:00.978)
And I heard someone else say that it feels like a trailer, but in a good way. It's like you're watching a whole movie that's basically the way you usually feel when you watch a movie trailer, and it's intense, and you're like, whoa, yeah. You're totally into it and excited. And I was like, oh, that's a fun way to think about it. But yeah, it's this manipulation of time and space, and that's like...

Kara Smith (01:48:06.356)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:48:14.315)
That's true.

Kara Smith (01:48:22.876)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:48:29.81)
Nolan's major endeavor throughout his career. Um, and this is like, I was saying it's like a master class of montage. It's you're, you're basically like, I mean, it really is like, it's the whole movie is one is well, I would say it's like three montages all like intertwined. Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:48:39.091)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:48:51.215)
Yes, intertwining, yeah. And it is, and the choices in those times to intertwine or times to show things, I mean, it really is interesting. It makes it all the more dynamic and also like, not confusing, but just like, you can't guess what's gonna happen. You can't guess what's gonna happen to each individual person because at times, then you're like, oh wait, I didn't even know that. Like even the Killian Murphy situation like we were talking about, like.

Eli Price (01:49:01.126)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (01:49:11.596)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:49:19.394)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Kara Smith (01:49:20.475)
You then cut later to a film or to a part of the movie where, I mean, he's out on a boat. Like he is a very composed soldier who's telling other people what to do. And so you're just like, yeah, actually, I don't know what to expect from these people because you then kind of, because of the montage effect, you're reminded you don't know these people because you didn't get their backstory. And so you don't know what they're capable of or what will happen to them individually or as a whole.

Eli Price (01:49:29.795)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (01:49:41.026)
right?

Eli Price (01:49:46.315)
Oh, yeah, or how these events will change them, you know? And like that all comes through, like, I mean, you can think about like when you're making a movie that way, like continuity, you have to be so precise, like to get continuity right. And even like thinking about like the trawler we were talking about, like that it's being shot and you know, all these holes.

Kara Smith (01:49:50.425)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:50:03.451)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Eli Price (01:50:13.61)
and you got water coming in, well, like you're having to like make sure your continuity is correct because like part of that is shot on the beach. Part of it is shown after the boat's been towed back out into the ocean. Part of it's being shot, um, at on sets, like when they're on the inside of it. So you have to like, make sure like that everything like matches up when you edit it together and so it's really impressive, but really like all of that. Tension building and.

Kara Smith (01:50:24.996)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:50:34.831)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:50:42.762)
like that comes from the montage effect and the way it's edited together and the shepherd tone like structure. It just like, it has, it all builds up to these like moments of convergence where everything comes together. There's like, I think there's several of those like as you start reaching the end of the film that like where the payoff is just like huge.

Kara Smith (01:50:50.515)
Thank you.

Kara Smith (01:50:58.887)
Mm.

Kara Smith (01:51:05.949)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:51:09.532)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (01:51:10.046)
So, I mean, the obvious one is like, you know, the little ships arriving. That's the obvious.

Kara Smith (01:51:14.403)
Yes, of course. Or even, you know, Tom Hardy flying over the beach and all of the, you know, soldiers cheering and everything. Like, yeah, these really big hopeful moments.

Eli Price (01:51:21.31)
Right. Yeah. Him flying over the beach. The, the big one. Um, one of the big ones that I, that I caught this time around that I, that I don't know that I necessarily like was focused in on before was, um, when the moonstone is like getting, driving out of the oil, cause it's like, um, we've got to, we can't save anybody else right here. We've got to get out of here. The whole boat's going up too. Um, and.

Kara Smith (01:51:43.368)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Eli Price (01:51:50.618)
you have the soldier being dragged through the water, and you just think like, oh, there's one more dude they're trying to save, and then finally his face comes out and it's Fionn Whitehead, it's Tommy, and it's like this moment where you're like, whoa, like, and the payoff is huge. And I love that. Even thinking about when you see

Kara Smith (01:52:01.517)
It's our main guy.

Kara Smith (01:52:06.)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:52:09.918)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:52:18.37)
Cause you see Collins, which is, you know, Farrier's dog fighting partner up in the air, um, you see him go down and Farrier sees him and he's like, okay, he's okay. But then like later, like you get the moment where the moonstone's coming up and he's like, he's stuck in there. Like it's really actually this intense moment. Um, and, uh, it's just like, yeah, there's moments of like convergence where like all the timelines are coming together. Like there's have such huge payoff. Um,

Kara Smith (01:52:23.336)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:52:34.459)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:52:46.745)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (01:52:48.726)
be a, yeah, some other themes, were there any that stood out to you that really spoke to you as far as like, just like something that, I guess something that this movie affected in you personally.

Kara Smith (01:53:08.547)
Well, I think that going back to I was saying about the few storylines that I did remember one of them being George's and then that is kind of the one character you kind of get to know a bit when he's talking about he just wanted to do something with his life. And, you know, you're seeing him and you know this older man and this other guy who kind of, you know, his friend kind of seems like George like what are you doing buddy like you probably shouldn't be out here.

Eli Price (01:53:15.192)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (01:53:23.159)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:53:37.203)
you know, all of them kind of step up like as civilians to be heroes, to bring these guys home. And even though he didn't make it, and then even seeing his friend kind of have a, like a really, I would say just like courageous, heroic moment to tell Killian that George will be fine, that he didn't die. And then of course, to put his friend in the newspaper. I think that all of those moments are kind of like, yeah, this is like the spirit.

Eli Price (01:53:55.177)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:54:07.487)
of these people and what they accomplished that day is like they had a million little victories, not just this big victory of like bringing home all these soldiers. They you know, there was a million little stories and all of these people didn't necessarily sign up for it that day, but they all learned things about themselves and they were all heroes in small ways, even though of course, a thousand of them won't be remembered because they were just random guys.

Eli Price (01:54:12.15)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:54:18.127)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:54:24.91)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:54:34.707)
taking their boats to pick up other random guys who often, so many of these guys won't be remembered, you know? We don't know, did they die five days later? Did they survive still till today? You know, we don't know their families might, but that's kind of all, they're just this mass group, but they're all heroes in their own right.

Eli Price (01:54:40.642)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:54:55.498)
Right, yeah. It's all these little things. It's and it's the culmination of all these like little choices to that kind of like, I guess, like, in a sense mirrors all the culmination of all the like the little filmmaking choices, you know. And yeah, just thinking about like the effects that it has on everyone and like. Unlike each individual person, like.

Kara Smith (01:55:02.569)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:55:10.108)
Yeah, true.

Eli Price (01:55:22.462)
in the moment, I guess, like just thinking about what you've been talking about alongside what we were talking about before of like how the, you know, thinking about that cubit quote about how the themes and the what it means all comes later. And it's almost like that's the perfect way to do a war film because if especially if you're wanting to give the perspective of the people in the middle of it because those people that are in the middle of it, they don't

Kara Smith (01:55:43.698)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:55:48.316)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:55:52.042)
they only have time for like that immediate emotion. They don't have time to dig into what does this mean? Like, how is it gonna change me? How is it gonna affect me? They're just like in the intense present moment emotions of it all. And so like, really like that's perfect for this film. Like that is trying to express like that intensity of emotion. And then like you finish the film and you're like, wow.

Kara Smith (01:55:55.948)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, absolutely.

Kara Smith (01:56:06.643)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:56:13.407)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:56:22.174)
What was going on here? Like, what does it mean? What, how can I like dissect this and digest it, you know? Um, and you kind of have to do that afterwards, but that's the same for these soldiers and these, these like civilians that cross the channel. Um, they, they don't have time to digest it and dissect it in the moment. That's later, you know,

Kara Smith (01:56:29.329)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:56:43.727)
Yeah, that's all the things that linger in all of the stories in the way it's shaped them to be who they will be after this.

Eli Price (01:56:50.758)
Right. Yeah, for sure. And it's, um, it's like, you know, the, the Dunkirk spirit is kind of something that like British people talk about. Um, it's like, it, it kind of means different things to different people. Everyone kind of, there was like a ton of, um, like talking heads on the, uh, special features, like different people of the crew kind of saying what Dunkirk spirit meant, and, um, they all kind of had these like.

Kara Smith (01:57:01.261)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (01:57:20.002)
different variations of similar enters, but it was different. Each one was different, which was kind of cool. Like grit in the face of adversity was one. But Nolan said to him, it's like this pulling together of community and what can be achieved when we pull together to do something. And I thought that was a cool way to think about the Dunkirk spirit or whatever.

Kara Smith (01:57:25.652)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:57:43.935)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:57:49.222)
But it is, it's really this, it's this communal heroism that's being displayed. I mean, you have 338,000 soldiers rescued on the stretch of 18 kilometers of beach. Um, and it's this, I don't know, it's like, it's this strange, like, sense of like, the victory is in the survival. Um, the victory is in, um,

Kara Smith (01:57:53.313)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (01:57:59.551)
So crazy.

Kara Smith (01:58:14.009)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (01:58:18.526)
just like living to see another day, like getting, because like at the end of the day, this like, this isn't a war victory, this is a retreat. Like this is a defeat in the sense of war, but like it's been like over time, like, you know, with the hindsight of history and like that, you know, point of view we have now, like this was a huge victory, like even though.

Kara Smith (01:58:22.057)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:58:27.975)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:58:45.341)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:58:46.378)
in the moment it was this really like huge defeat.

Kara Smith (01:58:48.271)
Yeah. Well, and you definitely see that in them coming home on the train and like, you know, Harry Styles' character thinking that everyone is going to be so ashamed of them because that's what he feels of like they didn't do their job and they retreated and they ran home. And of course, all of these, you know, British civilians being like, no, like, we want you home. We don't want you to just go out there and die for no reason. Like you can, you can fight tomorrow, but today just...

Eli Price (01:58:54.586)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (01:58:58.487)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:59:16.386)
Just be here.

Kara Smith (01:59:16.459)
so many of you survived and we all came together and we made it happen and like that's a huge victory yeah and it also just like the victory and the hope of it all you know like that hope of this being accomplished at this time I'm sure brought um you know so much power back to the British people in order to keep going because they obviously were not even close to done with this war and it would get even worse on their own land you know with

Eli Price (01:59:26.118)
Hmm.

Eli Price (01:59:39.574)
Yeah.

Eli Price (01:59:45.342)
Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Kara Smith (01:59:46.123)
bombs in London and all that. So these moments of victory, if they hadn't had them, obviously they would have lost so many soldiers and lost so much momentum, but all of the things that they gained by, even as civilians, being able to do something to help. Yeah.

Eli Price (01:59:59.842)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And I mean, you do get like moments of like more traditional individual heroism with, um, so you think about like, uh, Farrier is kind of like an example of that, um, which like fun fact, um, no one, no one said that, uh, it was that, that kind of whole part was not based on at all, but like a trip more of like a tribute to his grandfather who, like they would hear stories about.

Kara Smith (02:00:09.713)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:00:14.697)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:00:24.011)
I'm going to go to bed.

Kara Smith (02:00:27.869)
Uh.

Eli Price (02:00:29.578)
their grandfather and he died. He actually died, um, flying bomber missions with the RAF, which is the, the Royal Air Force. Um, um, which is, you know, that's, that's kind of a cool thing too. Um, but really like, like I said, it's this communal heroism that's on display. It's, it's, um, it's survival as a people has its own, like kind of version of courage, um, cause really like.

Kara Smith (02:00:35.639)
Well, yeah.

Kara Smith (02:00:41.916)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:00:45.394)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (02:00:55.604)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (02:00:57.922)
there's a sense in which surviving is courageous in a situation like this. And I guess that's another subtle way that it's a horror movie. Because if you, especially you think of the slasher movies where you get to the end of the movie and this character that you've been with finally gets away and they survive.

Kara Smith (02:01:05.204)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:01:13.267)
Mm.

Kara Smith (02:01:23.804)
Yeah.

Eli Price (02:01:24.542)
And there's this like visceral reaction of victory, which really like all this person did was like not die, but it's almost like, yeah, but it's almost, and it's almost like the, that it goes back to what the, the blind guy says when they're, when they're filing out of the train, you know, he, he's telling them well done and, uh, he's the soldier says, you know, well, all we did was survive. And he said, that's enough.

Kara Smith (02:01:29.211)
Yeah. But it's huge.

Kara Smith (02:01:42.975)
Yeah

Kara Smith (02:01:54.666)
Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (02:01:54.822)
Um, which was a really touching moment for one, but it, but it's true. It's, it's this idea of like, your existence justifies itself and surviving, surviving is enough, you know? Um, and I think that's really cool. And that's, I think that's something that like, is very present in those. Horror movies like that, but also like in movies like this, where like

Kara Smith (02:02:04.912)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:02:19.59)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (02:02:21.342)
the existence of these young men, their existence justifies itself. Like their survival is important in and of itself without having to have some greater meaning behind it because they're people, they're humans. And humans are like, they deserve, we deserve to live.

Kara Smith (02:02:26.76)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:02:30.777)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:02:34.739)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:02:42.507)
Yeah, and they're a part of this community and the fact that they weren't lost from it, you know, it's a huge thing.

Eli Price (02:02:45.292)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm, for sure. Yeah One of the question so I usually reference Elijah Davidson he has this little like almost like kind of devotional book going through Nolan's filmography called transcending time and he kind of It's it's like each entry for each movie is pretty short and it has like a little prayer At the end is pretty cool

And he, he kind of poses the question like, what good can one pleasure boat do? Um, which I thought was like, Oh, that's a, you know, interesting, like just framing question to think about the themes of this movie. Um, but, um, but like, you know, it really, like, when you think about it along those lines of like survival being just its own form of courage, like even like if only one.

Kara Smith (02:03:28.98)
Yep.

Kara Smith (02:03:41.801)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (02:03:44.946)
One pleasure boat showed up and it saved, you know, the 30 men. Like that's like important enough. Yeah. That's huge. It's 30 people's lives. Like, yeah, it's out of 300, like 400,000. Sure. But like it's 30 lives that are saved. But like, exactly. Yeah. But like, but what turns out happening is it's.

Kara Smith (02:03:47.164)
You're right.

Kara Smith (02:03:50.955)
That's huge. Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:03:55.455)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:03:59.539)
But yeah, that's 30 lives. That's 30 families who, you know.

Eli Price (02:04:11.474)
those little choices made by a lot of people coming together. And all those like good little choices, like all come together to do something like miraculous, to do something like incredible. And and I think that's just a really cool like thing to think about. That's like. Just like so viscerally present in this movie and like obvious and blatant and like it's.

Kara Smith (02:04:13.063)
Okay. Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (02:04:25.758)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (02:04:40.938)
It's not some like subtle artistic like idea. It's just like, it's real and it's there. Yeah. But yeah, and then like along with that, the cool like, I guess this is like kind of jumping back to production stuff that I kind of threw in right here in the notes, cause it's really cool, is they got in contact with the Dunkirk Association of Little Ships.

Kara Smith (02:04:44.239)
Yeah, it's the point. Yeah, yeah.

Eli Price (02:05:09.034)
And so there's this association that like, um, keeps track of, and like that people are members of that they have all these little ships that were a part of that, um, operation dynamo that like went across the channel to save, um, you know, these men at Dunkirk, um, and all these ships, like they keep them restored and in good condition.

Kara Smith (02:05:09.523)
That was cool.

Kara Smith (02:05:28.595)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:05:33.99)
Oh, cool. Yeah.

Eli Price (02:05:34.13)
And these, you know, they have, there's these families that own these ships that like take care of them. And it's really cool. And so they, they actually used a ton of these ships, um, and the movie, um, and like the families that own the ships, like were, um, like drove them across the channel and like, um, were like in the movie, like driving their own ships that they own, that were actually at Dunkirk, um, on that.

Kara Smith (02:05:38.62)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:05:45.366)
Oh cool.

Kara Smith (02:06:01.823)
That was super cool.

Eli Price (02:06:03.098)
on that day in 1940. And like, it was this week of shooting and like, everyone's just talking about how like, surreal and powerful it was to have these actual ships that like, saved and rescued all these men. Like, you're pulling like, you're not actual soldiers, but like, you're there experiencing it. Like, you're pulling these men into these boats, just like it did, you know, 75 years ago.

Kara Smith (02:06:12.979)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (02:06:20.584)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:06:25.403)
Yeah, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (02:06:33.262)
Just like an incredible moment. And I love this Nolan kind of said in one of the interviews around all of these ideas. He said that one myth of movies that you see a lot is that one person can save the world. And he said, but Dunkirk shows that it takes a community. And I thought that was really cool. Really cool, really powerful.

Kara Smith (02:06:35.411)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:07:00.424)
Yeah.

Eli Price (02:07:02.762)
And like at the end of the day, like it really isn't just a British story. Like it's a human story. It's about surviving and, and surviving so that there can be a hope of flourishing. Um, and, and kind of holding onto that hope in the midst of all the chaos that you're in the midst of, you know, uh, is really cool. Um, yeah. Um, that were there any other?

Kara Smith (02:07:08.913)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:07:25.246)
Yeah.

Eli Price (02:07:32.582)
moment I mean like Any like really? Just stand out shots from the movie or moments that you wanted to mention before we kind of get to final thoughts

Kara Smith (02:07:45.979)
Um, well, I did think that, um, that Helmets on the Beach, and I see that you have that, you know, listed here on the notes, but the Helmets on the Beach also, like, it's, it's such a beautiful shot. And I feel like when you get, you cut back to it kind of, because you've been with like the boys and like loading onto ships and like all this triumph and, and seeing all those helmets is like, it really brings back that realization of like, this is how many bodies, you know, this is how many deaths could have occurred.

Eli Price (02:07:51.975)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Eli Price (02:08:10.846)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:08:14.763)
And for so many reasons and for so many little choices and for so many brave acts, there's so many people that made it out. And obviously we don't know their stories. We don't know if they made it to the end of the war, but they made it out that day. And it is just truly remarkable. And also I feel like in that moment in that shot, it brought back to the fact of this is not like just a falsified story. This is a real event that occurred. And like, you know.

Eli Price (02:08:21.838)
that.

Eli Price (02:08:40.682)
Nothing.

Kara Smith (02:08:41.547)
Because at times, of course, anytime you're watching a movie, even if you know it's based off a real story, you kind of get wrapped up in just the movie. And then that shot just felt very much just like a history book shot, something that you'd be like, wow, that's kind of, yeah, this is real. These were people. It happened. And so many people.

Eli Price (02:08:48.307)
Right.

Eli Price (02:08:53.676)
Okay.

Eli Price (02:08:58.955)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, and it really does like, it's this like beautiful and striking, but also like kind of haunting image, you know. And you know, it does like make you, I guess in that perspective, like you're like, man, there could have been so many more helmets on this beach. Yeah. And then, you know, the other like really like striking images like a fairy or looking at the plane on fire.

Kara Smith (02:09:08.947)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (02:09:18.911)
So many more. I mean, you know, so many more.

Kara Smith (02:09:29.532)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (02:09:31.21)
which, you know, that wasn't obviously a Spitfire. Those people love those Spitfire planes. They like revere them. So like you would never in a million years burn a Spitfire plane. Like they kind of built some up to look like Spitfires, like a closely related plane. But I thought that was funny, like watching, they were like, you do not destroy a Spitfire. But that image is like striking and just kind of

Kara Smith (02:09:40.672)
Yeah. Never burn one just for a movie. Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:09:49.556)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:09:55.787)
Hahaha

Eli Price (02:10:00.242)
represents you know that individual sacrifice and that um that like you know was vital for you know it just again the all those individual choices like of sacrifice like all culminate and built together um to make like a miraculous thing happen um yeah the you know we

Kara Smith (02:10:04.711)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (02:10:11.048)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:10:16.391)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (02:10:22.878)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (02:10:27.606)
You know, that's enough from the blind guy, which I thought was like really powerful. Um, I was like touched, you know, you, you've heard like, brand all say like, um, home before in the movie, but the moment where the little ships come in and he's looking through the binoculars, he's like, what do you see? And he says, home. It's like, Oh, you got me right in the heart. Um, uh, but yeah, there there's a lot of like, it's just striking images. Um,

Kara Smith (02:10:29.972)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:10:39.7)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (02:10:47.326)
I know.

Eli Price (02:10:56.342)
You know, you talked about earlier, you know, Peter telling the shivering soldier, you know, that George was going to, he lies to him and says that he's going to be okay. Like, man, the, that even just shows like, you haven't, you haven't like grown with this character a lot. You haven't like interacted with them a lot. You've seen them, you know, in action. Um, but earlier in the movie he had like told him like, no, he's not going to be okay.

Kara Smith (02:11:04.124)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:11:18.451)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:11:22.46)
And yeah.

Eli Price (02:11:23.058)
And like, even in that just short span of time, how much that kid has grown and understands, like, you know, I, he, this is what he needs. He needs to have, be able to hold on to some sort of hope.

Kara Smith (02:11:27.966)
and

Kara Smith (02:11:32.82)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:11:36.62)
Yeah, the humanity and compassion of it all, you know?

Eli Price (02:11:39.378)
Yeah. And really like, it's funny cause like, we're talking about like the victory of it all, but really like there's these like little moments that kind of undercut that victory to like the, like the, the shot of the plane on fire. It is kind of like this paradox because it represents that personal sacrifice of victory of, you know, survival of everyone else, but it's also like, you know, it's the one moment where you kind of see some German soldiers.

Kara Smith (02:11:50.945)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (02:12:08.254)
And you're, it's kind of like cuts you back into reality of like, Oh yeah. Like this is very much not a victory. It's like a small maybe victory, but it's like, yeah, it's, it's like, it's just prolonging what like the inevitable that you're going to have to deal with. Um, and then like the other moment that I, that I think of is, um, you know, when

Kara Smith (02:12:08.393)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:12:12.935)
Yeah, this isn't over. This was, yeah, this was not the victory day.

Kara Smith (02:12:23.613)
yeah.

Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:12:34.887)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Eli Price (02:12:35.914)
You know, you kind of open with his face and then the very end of the movie, like it's like you it's, it ends back on his face and it's, but when you, but when I was watching it, it struck me because he, you know, you expect to read this, like, you know, Churchill speech and it's like so well constructed and written and hopeful and you expect it to be this like triumphant moment of reading this Churchill address. But when, yeah.

Kara Smith (02:12:44.357)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:12:55.358)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (02:13:02.175)
Yeah, where the music swells and he gets louder and everything. Yeah.

Eli Price (02:13:05.65)
Yeah, but it, like, it ends with him kind of looking up from the newspaper and it, it doesn't feel like he doesn't feel like that. It's his face is almost like, um, like he's like, I hear what Churchill's saying, but he hasn't experienced what I just experienced. Um, kind of you, you kind of like can read that on his face. Um, and it's like, yeah.

Kara Smith (02:13:15.241)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:13:26.036)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:13:32.371)
Like those are nice words, but this isn't done. And tomorrow is another day where we're gonna have to keep finding.

Eli Price (02:13:36.926)
Yeah. And it's, you know, Churchill was like, obviously like vital for like keeping that spirit going in the country. Um, so like, I'm not meaning to like undercut, but like, it's just, it's just these kind of like small necessary moments that Nolan like includes to like, remind you that like, but this isn't about like this.

Kara Smith (02:13:46.863)
Yeah, for sure.

Kara Smith (02:13:51.908)
No, it is necessary, but...

Eli Price (02:14:06.21)
triumphant feeling like don't get carried away with that sort of thing. But yeah, I don't know, did you have anything else? I have one final thought that I thought was really cool. Okay, this is all I have to say too. This is also from Elijah Davidson from his little Transcending Time book, this idea.

Kara Smith (02:14:08.254)
Yeah.

Mm-mm. Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:14:24.479)
Go for it.

Eli Price (02:14:35.662)
Because I have some original thoughts, but this one was just like, man, this is better than all of my original thoughts. It's just this cool way to think about it. He talks about how the asynchronous action is edited together in such a way that it creates this inevitability of everything coming together. You're building and building and building all these like, you know.

Kara Smith (02:14:43.624)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:14:59.924)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (02:15:04.69)
asynchronous meaning like out of time, like they're kind of like scattered around in their different time frames or whatever. But it does like it creates this like feeling of like this is all going to come to something and to come to like an apex, like a culmination of everything. And it does. And it's almost like this.

Kara Smith (02:15:21.617)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (02:15:34.07)
You can almost say like it's this idea of maybe like fate, if you want to call it that or something that is being like expressed in the struck, like the way that the movies structured and edited together. Um, but what he kind of took away from that was this idea of like the storyteller having this eternal perspective. Um, which I thought was a really interesting and cool way to think about it. Um, and interesting to just think of when you thinking of

film in general and the way that film plays with time. And it's because the storyteller has this outside of the time of the story perspective. It's like, for all intents and purposes, is like this eternal perspective as relative to the story they're telling. They can see the beginning and middle and end and how everything plays together. And

Kara Smith (02:16:04.735)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:16:20.264)
Yeah.

Eli Price (02:16:30.034)
Yeah, it's this like outside of time perspective. Um, and I was just thinking about how like really like stories and our stories that we read or hear or watch can do that for us, like in our personal lives, like it can give us this. It, you, you kind of can give yourself over to this story and, and let it like wash over you and like.

Kara Smith (02:16:46.462)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (02:16:58.298)
and experience it like you experience the movie Dunkirk. And it gives you this more precise and eternal kind of, in a sense, perspective on things that help you to kind of maybe process something you're going through or to be able to, you know,

Kara Smith (02:17:21.161)
Mm, yeah.

Eli Price (02:17:26.49)
see something in a new perspective because you're getting this like, I don't know, this storyteller's perspective. I was just thinking about how like that that's why stories are so important because they are able to like inject us with hope and peace in the midst of whatever chaos might be going on in your life, whatever things that are out of your control are happening.

Kara Smith (02:17:35.379)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:17:44.51)
Yeah.

Eli Price (02:17:54.426)
And, you know, we tell stories and they help ground us and, you know, help us get through those moments, help us to, like, you know, like the Dunkirk spirit to push forward in the midst of adversity. You know, having that hope that you get from stories, you know, helps you to keep acting in the moment that you're in, even if it's like...

Kara Smith (02:18:00.561)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (02:18:10.673)
Yeah.

Boom.

Eli Price (02:18:22.486)
doesn't feel like you're going to get out of it, which is exactly what that Dunkirk spirit is partly about. So yeah, I just thought that was really cool. And it really, when I was reading it, it really spoke to me personally. And I just thought it was well worth sharing that.

Kara Smith (02:18:24.712)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:18:28.401)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:18:43.995)
Yeah, no, that's a great perspective and note on it. And yeah.

Eli Price (02:18:47.799)
Yeah.

Yeah, that's, I think that's all of our Dunkirk talk. Do you have, so you've seen, let me think, you've seen four Nolan movies, is that right? Man, you've got some work to do, Kara.

Kara Smith (02:19:00.607)
Yes, four of them. I know, I know. It's just that some of them are, like I said before, I wanna see, and some of it's just that I haven't taken the time to commit to it, or I wanna see it in a different way, and others are just that they don't really interest me. So, but, yeah.

Eli Price (02:19:12.898)
Sure. Yeah.

Eli Price (02:19:18.574)
It's fine, yeah. Yeah. So out of the four you've seen, where would you put this one? Is this?

Kara Smith (02:19:27.703)
Um, I would say that I, I think that this is the one that I would recommend the most. It's definitely high up for me. And it's the one I would recommend also because of like, it is different. It is interesting. Like you can gain an interest in it in a way that's outside of Christopher Nolan himself, like you don't have to just be like into him. Like I feel like Tennant, you probably should be a Christopher Nolan fan in order to like really dive into that, or I wouldn't recommend it unless I knew you liked Christopher Nolan.

Eli Price (02:19:34.099)
Okay. Yeah.

Eli Price (02:19:40.464)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (02:19:52.054)
It's scary.

Kara Smith (02:19:57.087)
Whereas Dunkirk, it's just like, you know, I think it has a lot for a vast majority to gain from and like have piqued their interest. And I also love just like how much he was able to accomplish in a shorter timeframe compared to all of his other movies. And I think that kind of speaks for itself as well. And, you know, something again, like you were saying earlier, like some of the choices he made in this film, I don't think he would have made if he had.

Eli Price (02:20:19.118)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (02:20:26.311)
made this movie years previous. And I think that even that runtime would have been different had he made it at a different point in his career or his life. Because I think that maybe a little bit of wisdom and maturity knew that like, now you wanna make it concise because you want everything to be striking and the momentum to be there and everything.

Eli Price (02:20:29.102)
Sure.

Eli Price (02:20:35.019)
Yeah, maybe.

Eli Price (02:20:48.434)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, this is still one of my favorite. For me, it's like a 10 out of 10 five-star movie. Like I said, I think it's like the way it's constructed, the way it communicates everything you need with such little dialogue or exposition, just like the, even just like the visceral experience of everything, almost...

Kara Smith (02:20:53.819)
Yeah. Yes. Yeah, for sure.

Kara Smith (02:21:07.859)
Yeah.

Eli Price (02:21:17.138)
literally everything that you're seeing being something that's like captured in camera for real. It's just like, it's an incredible experience. If this ever shows like an IMAX again, like I'm going to try to get out and see it. Yeah, for sure. It's one of the...

Kara Smith (02:21:22.459)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:21:26.418)
It is.

Kara Smith (02:21:29.851)
Yeah, it'd be worth going back to, yeah. Yeah. You never know, maybe like on the anniversary of like Dunkirk itself or something, they might like, you know, show.

Eli Price (02:21:38.89)
Yeah, yeah, maybe so. One can hope, but yeah, for sure. But yeah, like I said, we'll see. I haven't recorded the Interstellar episode yet, so maybe, yeah. Interstellar might drop below, right now, I would still put Interstellar as my favorite just because I can't push this up.

Kara Smith (02:21:44.836)
Yeah, for sure.

Kara Smith (02:21:55.919)
It might win you back, but you never know.

Eli Price (02:22:09.534)
it I think at different points I've had I've flip-flopped them in my like letterboxed ranking just because I can never decide which one I like more interstellar like gets me in a in a totally different way though it's one of his most emotionally impactful for me personally so that would be yeah

Kara Smith (02:22:12.367)
Yeah. Uh huh.

Kara Smith (02:22:25.355)
for sure.

Kara Smith (02:22:33.003)
They're very different movies, so they can hold a number one spot. Both of them can, I think.

Eli Price (02:22:38.37)
Yeah, they can be co-champs for me, I guess. But yeah, that's really it for this movie. We're obviously talking about Tenet next week, and so excited about talking through that. Yeah. Yes. I haven't seen that since I saw it in theaters.

Kara Smith (02:22:40.625)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:22:48.671)
Yeah.

next.

Kara Smith (02:22:56.903)
I mean, that's a good maybe a lot to discuss, I'm sure. Ha ha ha.

Kara Smith (02:23:03.443)
Sensing at the theater, yeah.

Eli Price (02:23:05.322)
So I'm interested to revisit it for sure. And yeah, I don't know. I'm hoping I like it more this time. And then I did, not that I disliked it before, but it was, it's, yeah.

Kara Smith (02:23:14.344)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:23:18.763)
I really enjoyed it, but I think that now having like, cause when I got out of the theater, like reading articles and stuff like that, now I feel like you would go back into it maybe with a little bit more like understanding and being able to pick up on stuff that in the first time you're just like, what is going on?

Eli Price (02:23:26.582)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (02:23:34.466)
For sure, yeah. Yeah, well, yeah, and that's what we're gonna do next week. This is usually where we take a quick break and come back and do movie news and our movie draft. We're not gonna be doing that this week. Just the way scheduling worked out, we're just not able to do that. It would've been probably fun to do a war movie draft or something like that. But in the stead of that, we're gonna just make our...

Kara Smith (02:23:43.753)
Yeah.

Eli Price (02:24:03.302)
recommendation of the week. Just more movies that we would recommend that we like. Maybe like one or two each. So I don't know, did you have anything in mind for that Kara? More movies that you would recommend?

Kara Smith (02:24:18.291)
Yeah. Yeah, because I mean, obviously you could deep dive into a million. I mean, obviously there's a million and one war movies and there's war adjacent movies and there's, you know, all this stuff. But one that I don't know that tons of people watch, but I saw and I thought was so good. And it really was like it was another edge of your seat. Like me and my parents, you know, stepped away from it being like, wow, that was really good. And we were impressed by it was Greyhound, which was on Apple TV. We've got Tom Hanks in about.

Eli Price (02:24:26.24)
Sure.

Eli Price (02:24:41.454)
Hmm.

Okay. Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:24:47.635)
him taking boats during World War II, so similar time area, but taking them from America over to Europe and very intense, another very much survive the day kind of movie. And I thought it was very well done and I really enjoyed that movie. And just because it was on Apple TV, I don't know that many people sought it out or even if they have Apple TV like really.

Eli Price (02:25:15.382)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:25:17.859)
sat down and watched it, but I think if you have it, it's a good one to watch, or even if you just get like a little seven day trial or something on Apple, then it'd be worth the one of the ones to see. And then, yeah, I think that one is, I think that one was really good and worth seeing. And then another movie, because we said maybe two. This is not a war movie. However, I do want to recommend it because it has a Dunkirk-esque ending with literal

Eli Price (02:25:24.266)
Yeah.

Eli Price (02:25:27.574)
make a new email and get a new trial, you know.

Kara Smith (02:25:45.647)
small boats coming to rescue these guys, which is, I don't know if you've ever seen or heard of it, but it's the movie Pirate Radio. It's another British film about, yeah, it's about a moment in British history in the like 60s where rock and roll music was banned from British radios and radio stations like came up with inventive ways of getting around that, which meant like being on ships off of the shore.

Eli Price (02:25:53.046)
Yeah, I have it. I don't know that one.

Eli Price (02:26:12.161)
Ah.

Kara Smith (02:26:12.555)
broadcasting rock and roll music to the British audience. But in this movie, which has like Bill Nye and Chris O'Dowd and Philip Seymour Hoffman and like so many great people and then obviously it's rock and roll music. So it's so like so much great Brit rock is in the soundtrack and everything. But just a very funny, silly movie about these guys who are on a radio, like on a ship, they have a radio station broadcasting British rock. And then at one point

Eli Price (02:26:39.12)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (02:26:41.855)
They have to move the ship, the ship starts to go down, and they put a call out on the radio before the ship goes under saying, if anyone's in this area here's our coordinates, please come, we're gonna go down and we're all gonna die on this boat. And just like in Dunkirk, another British moment, all of these fans of this radio station come out on their personal boats and save all the DJs and all that stuff. And it really, I was like that...

Eli Price (02:26:45.924)
Oh no.

Eli Price (02:27:01.975)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:27:11.655)
didn't like connect the two and I'm like, oh yeah, duh, that's exactly where they got the inspiration for this because while that's a true, yeah, while that's a true moment in British history of rock and roll music being banned and everything and all of that, the storyline and you know, this cast is all obviously fictional and so they gave it a good old British Dunkirk end too to make it a triumphant finale. So if you're thinking war movie, I think Greyhound is good and if you're thinking just...

Eli Price (02:27:15.43)
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, without a doubt.

Eli Price (02:27:33.474)
Ha ha ha.

Yeah, that's fun.

Kara Smith (02:27:40.955)
a very British, Dunkirk-esque movie, then Pirate Radio is a good one.

Eli Price (02:27:45.97)
Yeah, that's good. Um, yeah. Okay. I mean, I have, so there's, I mean, there's obvious ones like Apocalypse Now is like, you know, kind of masterpiece. Uh, definitely like an anti war film. Um, uh, one of my favorites, um, is by a director that I love, um, Terrence Malick his, uh, the thin red line. It's a very like, um,

Kara Smith (02:27:56.34)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (02:28:01.725)
Yeah.

Eli Price (02:28:13.898)
It's a very different, another that's, it's similar to Dunkirk in that it's a very different sort of war movie. Malek has this more like poetic way of making movies than kind of like prose narrative. And so like, and it applies to the Thin Red Line too. And then like a couple of like maybe ones that.

Kara Smith (02:28:20.913)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (02:28:27.401)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:28:30.783)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (02:28:42.186)
A lot of people have heard of those two, but I guess two that are maybe would be off of people's radar. We talked about Guillermo del Toro earlier, but his Pan's Labyrinth deals a lot with war and the effects of war on, you know, the little girl in the movie specifically whose father is like a general. And so I would.

Kara Smith (02:28:50.879)
Mm-hmm.

Kara Smith (02:28:56.13)
Oh yeah!

Eli Price (02:29:09.358)
recommend that. It's a very strange, fantastical kid's point of view, sort of look at the effects of war and hate. But then another one that I really enjoyed, it didn't get huge critical praise, but Spike Lee's DeFiveBloods, which came out in 2020, was really good. It has a

Kara Smith (02:29:13.298)
Yeah

Eli Price (02:29:35.33)
fantastic cast with Delroy Lindo and Jonathan Majors are in it. And it's a really interesting, it's about, for African-American Vietnam veterans, they're going back to Vietnam because they had buried some like treasure that they had found and they're like going back to try to find it. And yeah, it's.

Kara Smith (02:29:57.44)
Hmm

That was cool.

Eli Price (02:30:03.89)
It's really, it's a really interesting, like different kind of movie. Uh, Spike Lee is, you know, it's a Spike Lee movie. So naturally, but, um, but yeah, um, those are maybe a couple that are maybe off of people's radar that I would recommend. Yeah. Um, yeah, that's, that's pretty much all we have. That was our recommendations of the week. Care where can people follow you?

Kara Smith (02:30:09.116)
Yeah.

Kara Smith (02:30:20.062)
Yeah

Kara Smith (02:30:30.423)
Okay, yes. So my Instagram account is CaraRatesThings and it's K-R-A-Rates-Things. So again, like I said, not a very critical, you know, raider, but I do just recommend things that I like. So if you see movies on there that you're like, oh yeah, I love these movies, then chances are you might like whatever comes next on there.

Eli Price (02:30:37.898)
Yep, easy.

Eli Price (02:30:46.303)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Price (02:30:53.534)
Yeah. Gotta love it. So, yeah, you can follow Kara there. I'll put it in the show notes. But yeah, we're wrapping up. Like I said, next week, we're going to be covering Tenet. Looking forward to that conversation. But until then, I've been Eli Price for Kara Smith. You've been listening to The Establishing Shot. We'll see you next time.