War epic ‘Dunkirk’ gets DC premiere

Director Christopher Nolan’s new epic, “Dunkirk,” retells one of the pivotal moments of World War II, but don’t expect to see any famous politicians from history in the film.

Despite highlighting a real event, Nolan’s film focuses on fictional characters instead of well-known figures like Winston Churchill, Great Britain’s then-prime minister. Nolan said he wanted to share the experiences of everyday people swept up in history.

“You’re trying to give a subjective experience for the audience, you’re trying to see and know what these characters would have seen and known,” he said at the D.C. premiere of the movie on Wednesday.

“All they would have known of the politicians in Whitehall and, you know, the higher-ups, the generals and everything, is what they would have read in the newspaper.”

{mosads}Nolan, his wife, producer Emma Thomas, and Allison Jaslow, the executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, attended the D.C. screening at the Lockheed Martin IMAX Theater at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

The film depicts the Dunkirk operation, when hundreds of thousands of Allied troops trapped by the Germans on a beach were evacuated from France to Britain across the English Channel.

After the screening, Nolan sat down for a Q&A with CNN’s Jake Tapper.

Nolan said he was first inspired to make the film after he sailed the English Channel 25 years ago with Thomas.

He said that the difficult journey took approximately 19 hours due to the weather conditions, and that experience made him want to tell the story of the harrowing evacuation at Dunkirk.

He waited several years to start making the film because he wanted to gain experience on working on other films and coordinating larger productions. Several of Nolan’s prior hits are “Interstellar,” “Inception” and “The Dark Knight” trilogy. “Dunkirk” was based on his own screenplay.

The film also has an almost-entirely British cast, but Nolan said that he was able to convince Warner Bros. to green light the project because the story is universal.

Nolan also spoke about the significance of history and why it was important to screen the film at a museum.

“You’re looking at all these historical artifacts all around that are here so that people can come and, if not literally touch history, feel that they are seeing it as somebody at the time would have,” he said.

“Dunkirk” opens in theaters nationwide on Friday.