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While the shot was being executed, Wright tried to watch via a microwave-linked monitor, but the distance between the camera and the video village proved too great. “The image kept coming in and out,” he recalls. “It wasn’t until we saw the rushes the following day that we were sure we’d got it.” Working with Clive Noakes at Deluxe in London, McGarvey was able to view select 35mm dailies throughout the shoot. “When we wrapped at the end of the day, we’d all trundle down to a little tent and watch rushes projected on an Arri LocPro,” recalls the cinematographer. “It was a truly communal experience, and I think it ultimately affected the feel of the set and the whole crew’s approach to work.” After the Steadicam introduces the audience to Dunkirk, the “dreamscape” grows even riper. First, Robbie stumbles into a cinema where Marcel Carné’s Quai des brumes (Port of Shadows) is playing. Shooting in a movie theater in Redcar and creating the effect completely in camera, McGarvey employed a Mac 2000 to simulate the projector’s beam and a Barco digital projector to project a DVD image onto the screen; the scene was shot at 25 fps to allow the camera to sync with the digital projector. “The Barco gave us significantly more output than the cinema’s film projector, but the existing projection screen didn’t have enough transmission to allow us to see the image from the other side, so we tested various materials and found a type of silk that worked,” recalls McGarvey. “It was thin enough that we could see the point of light from the projector beam so we’d understand where we were.” To give McAvoy some additional light, “Perry handheld a 350-watt Arri that we bounced into some foamcore. In the end, we still had to push the 5218 one stop in order to get a good exposure.” Robbie is in poor health when he arrives in Dunkirk, and before long he slips into delirium and imagines that his mother is washing his feet. To represent this hallucination, McGarvey turned to a tool he’d used to similar effect in World Trade Center (AC Aug. ’06): Panavision’s Hylen lens system. “It allowed us to selectively defocus areas of the frame, and we could just dial it in. For instance, when Robbie walks into the room, we shot with the Hylen dialed out — everything’s sharp in the frame. But when he turns around and sees his mother, we dialed it in on cue with the flash of an explosion outside the window. I had the explosion coming up on a dimmer at the same time I dialed in the Hylen, creating this vignette around his face so his surroundings kind of ebb away.” Such subjectivity was reinforced by the filmmakers’ decision to shoot Atonement in Super 1.85:1, which utilizes more of the negative by letting the image take up space traditionally reserved for the soundtrack. “The close-up was very important in this film,” says McGarvey. “It’s about the characters’ interior worlds, and the format enabled us to really fill the frame with a face, like a portrait. This aspect ratio also has a reticence, more modesty compared to the perceived grandeur of 2.40:1.” Among the final images of Dunkirk is a brief scene in which Robbie looks at a postcard from Cecilia in a dark shelter that is packed with soldiers. During rehearsal, McAvoy struck a match to view the postcard, and Wright and McGarvey were struck by the beauty and simplicity of the effect. “At the high point of the match, it was just underexposed, but there was enough light there that we could light the shot with just the match,” says the cinematographer. “It was such a release to actually have an actor do the action exactly as he did it in the rehearsal with no [movie] lighting, no artifice. If we’d lit it, we would have destroyed the sense of dying light we were trying to create. You can see the dying light reflected in his eyes, and it really grips you.” This section of the film also follows Briony (now 18) as she works as a nurse in London and tries to reconnect with Cecilia. The art department built the hospital interiors in Shepperton Studios, and the close collaboration between departments was evident throughout the set’s development. “I knew from the scale models they’d made that it was going to be very difficult to get certain angles without seeing through the windows and off the set,” says McGarvey. “So Sarah [Greenwood] made the windows a little deeper, so that when we looked obliquely across them we wouldn’t see outside. I was also keen to have a ceiling fixed in the set; that allowed us to get even wider shots and use low-angle perspectives to really see the scale of the set.” The hard ceiling contributed to the veracity of the set in another, subtler fashion. Evans explains, “The Thames is supposed to be just outside the hospital, so we did a little trick by bouncing 10Ks into shallow trays of water that held pieces of broken mirror. The light reflected off those pools and gave us a little flicker effect on the ceiling.” McGarvey notes that Greenwood’s crew also “made a beautiful painted backdrop — a pale, monochromatic vista of the parliament. I asked for it to be slightly out of focus and slightly brighter/overexposed. What I wanted outside the windows was something that would go a bit milky, which is what your eye sees when you’re inside and the outside appears slightly burnt out.” Greenwood adds, “We looked at lots of references of London during the war, and there was nothing buoyant about it whatsoever. The only color we left in was red — red buses, Briony’s red cape, blood, and the red curtains in the hospital — which was something Joe particularly wanted.” McGarvey desaturated this middle section further in the film’s digital grade, which he carried out over two weeks at Deluxe Laboratories’ Capital FX in London with colorist Adam Inglis. McGarvey and Inglis matched the look of the dailies, but occasionally the cinematographer allowed himself a bit of enhancement afforded by digital tools. For example, in a scene prior to the soldiers’ arrival in Dunkirk, “Robbie walks through an orchard and comes across a group of schoolchildren, all dead and lying out in the grass,” explains McGarvey. “He takes his helmet off and looks up into the sky. We did a dynamic grade there, overexposing his face for a few seconds and then pulling it back again to create a soft aura, like he’s gone through some sort of strange portal.” In the film’s final moments, we see an elderly Briony being interviewed about her writing career, a conversation that reveals new layers to the story presented thus far. “That section was totally unadorned — shot absolutely clean with all the pristine clarity Primo lenses afford,” says McGarvey. Reviewing his work on Atonement, the cinematographer observes, “I’ve always had the best experiences when I’ve properly communicated intent, when I’ve described to everyone I was working with exactly what I was going for. And usually, if it was properly described, they supported me.” The Dunkirk Steadicam shot was a case in point, a difficult feat that rallied the entire crew. “Cinema is such a young art compared with other art forms that it’s not only desirable or exciting to test new ground, it’s also our responsibility,” he says. “It’s incumbent upon us to push the boat out now and again.”
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