Har­ry Styles and cast on work­ing with Christo­pher Nolan’s Dunkirk

Har­ry Styles is no stranger to being swarmed by hun­dreds of peo­ple, but work­ing on Christo­pher Nolan’s upcom­ing World War Two dra­ma, Dunkirk, pro­vid­ed a dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence for the pop star sen­sa­tion-turned-sup­port­ing actor. He was one mem­ber of the 1,300-strong ​‘beach’ unit who spent six weeks film­ing on the shore­line of Dunkirk, the pri­ma­ry loca­tion for what promis­es to be an epic retelling of a tru­ly remark­able saga. In antic­i­pa­tion of Nolan’s film, which hits cin­e­mas 21 July, we sat down with Styles to chat about his debut role.

“From a char­ac­ter point of view, the sto­ry is stripped back to basic instinct. It’s all about that sur­vival instinct, and how dif­fer­ent peo­ple react­ed to the sit­u­a­tion in dif­fer­ent ways. So you have clash­es and ten­sion between dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters and that inter­twines with the land, air and sea theme.”

“The biggest thing I learned from mak­ing this movie is that Chris Nolan doesn’t sit down. He leads by exam­ple, so any time there’s a break giv­en it’s because he knows every­one else needs one. It makes it real­ly hard to com­plain because you know he’s been there longer than you, you know he’s the first one there and you know he’s going to be the last one to leave. For him it’s all about mak­ing the project the best that it can be, and that’s infectious.”

“A week before we start­ed film­ing Emma [Thomas, the film’s pro­duc­er] called me and said, ​‘By the way, I for­got to ask… you can swim, right?’ It was a relief to know I could because there was so much swim­ming involved. How­ev­er much you train for it, film­ing in the water for an hour in full clothes is a gru­elling experience.”

We also spoke to fel­low cast mem­bers Fionn White­head, Jack Low­den and Tom Glyn-Carney:

“My favourite war film is The Thin Red Line. Chris actu­al­ly told me to watch it – not as a ref­er­ence or because it’s a war film but because he just real­ly loves that movie. My great grandad fought in the Sec­ond World War. He died before I was born. But my grand­fa­ther start­ed out as a solid­er when he was 16 and fought in Korea and Bur­ma. I talked to him a lot about his expe­ri­ences, the feel­ing of being a young sol­dier involved in a major battle.”

“When I told my mum that I would be play­ing an RAF pilot she told me that my grandad’s best man was an RAF pilot. That’s prob­a­bly as close a con­nec­tion as I have to the War. But it’s inter­est­ing that the Scot­tish bor­ders, where I come from, has loads of old RAF air­fields that are now cov­ered up. Dur­ing the War they were in con­stant use but many of them were attached to work­ing farms. There’s one sto­ry about a farmer who would get an ear­ly warn­ing and he would run out and clear all the cat­tle off the runways.”

“I’ve always been fas­ci­nat­ed by his­to­ry, about why the world is like it is today and how that’s come about. We all read a book by Joshua Levine called ​‘The For­got­ten Voic­es of Dunkirk’, which is real-life accounts of the event from peo­ple who were there. That was bril­liant because you real­ly get a sense of all these dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives, of what these men were hear­ing and see­ing and smelling.”

LWLies 70: The Dunkirk issue is on sale now – order your copy today via our online shop.