By Gill Pringle
In Dunkirk, Barry Keoghan and Jack Lowden play two characters who have very different experiences of the massive military evacuation the film centres on. Lowden is Spitfire pilot Collins who, with wingman Tom Hardy, is tasked with defending British ships from German bombers. Keoghan, on the other hand, plays George, a teenage boy who leaps at the chance to play his part when civilian ships are chartered to help ferry Allied troops from France to England.
Barry, your character is a beautiful spirit in the film; a young person who wants to help and get involved, maybe isn’t quite fully aware of what he’s getting himself in for. Is that something you can relate to, as it seems so disconnected from today’s youth?
Barry Keoghan: I think it has changed, hasn’t it? It’s a question I always asked myself, “What do they actually get on that boat?” I think the rise of social media and all of that has changed the minds of the youth. He was looking for an adventure, wasn’t he? Or he wanted to meet French girls (Laughs).
Talking about social media, Chris has a reputation of banning cell phones on his set…
Barry Keoghan: I had my PSP on the set and was told to put it away. That’s just because we were out on the sea a lot for hours and hours. We didn’t really feel like we had to be on our phones, we just hung out and played cards, stuff like that.
Jack, did you enjoy being up in the air and filming the flying sequences?
Jack Lowden: Personally, I would much rather learn to sail a boat. One of my favourite parts about doing this job was going out every morning, for about two to three weeks we did off the coast of Holland, we went out at 6am every morning. And there was about an hour, an hour and a half peace where we’d find somewhere to sit. When you’d come back and the sun would be setting, it’s a brilliant way to travel. But air is fun. We’d go up and down for 25-30 minutes, come back down. Chris would take the film out of the camera, put it in the little thing and stand and watch it, then he’d go, “Okay, go for that, let ‘s try this bit of the action.” So, we’d go up and do it and come back and show him. It was like we were making our own little short film. I grew up on stage, so I’m still getting to grips with film acting; a lot of film acting, to me, is spent trying to ignore what you can actually see and what you can actually hear. It’s amazing that on stage you have far less distraction even though you’re surrounded by sometimes hundreds of people.
Christopher Nolan spoke very openly about how he wanted to show the real intensity of being in the cockpit of a Spitfire. Did you gain all that from just going up in a plane or did you do much research into the physical aspects of it?
Jack Lowden: Yes, I went up in a plane before we shot anything, and I remember the first take I did in the cockpit, because we were just on the ground somewhere, the first thing Chris said to me after was, “Remember it’s really loud in there.” We couldn’t recreate it, but it’s deafening. I find it amazing, because when we went up I was in charge of the comms between the pilot and the air traffic control, so I could hear them talking to one another and rattling off all these letters and numbers and I could never even make out what number he was saying. Nobody ever went, “Sorry could you repeat that?” They know exactly what they’re saying. So, when we did the stuff on the gimbal, we had to remember how loud it was because it wasn’t loud when we were shooting that stuff. Another thing you’ve got to pretend: it’s so cramped, and in the gimbal, itself, it took a lot to get in and out of. Quite often I just stayed in there for a couple hours. It must have been exhausting for them, because I find it exhausting when we just went up for 20 minutes and I wasn’t fighting anyone. The heat and the noise, the whole thing shakes. It’s nothing like air travel is for us.
Did you talk about that with Tom Hardy, because you’re never actually on camera together?
Jack Lowden: We spent a week together, doing all the stuff in the cockpit and I was doing my lines off screen for him and stuff like that. He’s a lovely man.
Barry, did you do a lot of research?
Barry Keoghan: Chris gave us the book and that, and I didn’t read it, no. I don’t read books, to be fair. I wanted to stay away from knowing anything that happened. I wanted to know the basis and I wanted to be naïve to it all, just as the character.
Read our interview with Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas
Read our interview with Harry Styles and Fionn White
