DUNKIRK PODCAST: Dunkirk vs. Saving Private Ryan

Dunkirk is a particularly interesting script to look at as screenwriters because it breaks pretty much every rule that you’ve likely been told about screenwriting.

This is a war movie that (for the most part) isn't about winning but about losing.
It’s a war movie in which planes don’t explode in spectacular fashion but rather disappear silently into the ocean. A movie in which fighter pilots are more concerned with running out of fuel than with bad-ass lines of dialogue.

It’s an action movie in which the “good guys” don’t always win, and in which the bad guys can actually shoot.

Dunkirk is a movie that flies in the face of every traditional notion of star-power and how it’s supposed to be used in a big budget feature.

In fact, it features an actor in a starring role that we have never seen in a major motion picture before-- who spends most of the movie, from the very first scene, simply running away!

So what is this screenplay built around that lets it break all of these rules and still succeed?

On the simplest level, it’s because audiences don’t come to movies for the things that so many screenwriting teachers, so many producers, and so many writers spend so much time obsessing over.

They don’t come for exposition. They don’t come for plot. They don’t come for nice “likeable” characters and memorable dialogue. They don’t come for formulaic structure or wrapping up everything with a bow.

Audiences come to movies to go on a journey. To experience something that moves them emotionally, and transports them into a different kind of world…

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