Christopher Nolan breaks down intense scene from Dunkirk

The arrival of Christopher Nolan's DUNKIRK was met with a large amount of critical acclaim, with some even calling it Nolan's best film to date. Now that awards season is in full swing, the World War II drama is snagging all sorts of awards as well, recently picking up Golden Globe nominations for Best Drama, Best Director, and Best Score. Christopher Nolan spoke with the New York Times for their Anatomy of a Scene series, and discussed one of DUNKIRK's most intense sequences, when the young soldiers find themselves trapped below deck after a torpedo strikes their ship, leaving them trapped in the dark.

"What I was interested in exploring in this scene is based on various first-hand accounts I’ve read of people who got evacuated onto large naval ships," Nolan said, "they were put down in the hold to maximize the number of people they could get on one ship. But of course what this means is if the boat was bombed these ships would go down very quickly." Check out the video below!

"It’s about darkness," Nolan continued, "that absolute fear and claustrophobic sense of being trapped with hundreds of other people in a dark space rapidly filling with water. In our research, we looked at what happens to a navy vessel that’s torpedoed and it goes down very very quickly, there’s very little time to think." As always, Nolan aimed to shoot the sequence practically, making use of the real destroyer off the coast of Dunkirk as well as a forced perspective set built in a tank so that they could roll it over into the water.

DUNKIRK will be released on Blu-ray/4K Ultra HD on December 19th.