Every great magician guards his secrets, but Christopher Nolan has always been pretty open about what made him who he is. You might think the guy behind ‘The Dark Knight‘ would point to Stanley Kubrick or Ridley Scott as his biggest influence. However, Nolan keeps going back to Alfred Hitchcock. And previously, he brought up a specific Hitchcock movie that hardly anyone talks about. That movie is ‘Foreign Correspondent‘ from 1940, and it directly inspired one of Nolan’s most intense films.
‘Foreign Correspondent‘ is kind of the forgotten Hitchcock movie. It came out the same year as ‘Rebecca‘, which won Best Picture, and most people would rather talk about ‘Vertigo‘ or ‘Psycho‘. But for Nolan, this wartime spy thriller is a lesson in “technical virtuosity.” Back in 2017, when he put together a film series at the BFI to celebrate ‘Dunkirk‘, he picked ‘Foreign Correspondent‘ to show how pure visual suspense works.
The ‘Foreign Correspondent’ Scene That Inspired ‘Dunkirk’
So what’s the link between an old black-and-white thriller and a huge IMAX war movie? Apparently, it is that a plane is drowning in the ocean.
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‘Foreign Correspondent‘ is about an American reporter who stumbles into a spy ring in Europe. The big action scene involves a civilian plane getting shot down over the Atlantic. Keep in mind this was 1940, when there were no computers and special-effects tricks. But Hitchcock made it look terrifyingly real. The camera stays inside the plane as water bursts through the windows, and you feel trapped in a sinking metal box.
Nolan said that the scene became his starting point for ‘Dunkirk‘. “His technical virtuosity in Foreign Correspondent’s portrayal of the downing of a plane at sea provided inspiration for much of what we attempted in Dunkirk,” Nolan explained.
Watch ‘Dunkirk‘ again. There is a scene where the pilot Collins has to ditch his Spitfire in the English Channel. He struggles to open the canopy while freezing water rises around his face. That is straight out of Hitchcock. Nolan did not just copy a plane crash; he copied the way Hitchcock shot it from inside the cockpit. The fear is not just the crash itself. It is the geometry of drowning in a small space. Nolan used IMAX cameras to update the look, but the idea is all Hitchcock.
How Nolan Uses Hitchcock’s Rules of Suspense
The connection goes beyond one scene. In a 2017 interview, someone asked Nolan how he made a war movie that was also entertaining. He brought up Hitchcock without missing a beat.
“Think of the great filmmakers. Hitchcock is certainly at the top of the list… In all of his films, it was about the visual language of suspense,” Nolan said. He explained that even though ‘Dunkirk‘ is based on real events, it runs on the same engine as ‘Foreign Correspondent‘: geometry, clockwork and the raw feeling of something bad about to happen.
In case you missed it: The Real-Life Killer That Fascinated Alfred Hitchcock More Than ‘Psycho’
Hitchcock once said that suspense means giving the audience information the characters do not have, like showing a bomb under a table before it goes off. Nolan did something similar in ‘Dunkirk‘, but he used a clock. The ticking score by Hans Zimmer and the three timelines coming together all create that same mechanical dread Hitchcock nailed in movies like ‘Saboteur‘ and ‘The 39 Steps‘.
Why You Should Watch ‘Foreign Correspondent’
You can stream ‘Foreign Correspondent‘ on HBO Max right now, and more people have been watching it since Nolan brought it up. If you are a Nolan fan, you will see the DNA of ‘Inception‘ in the way the movie rushes from one country to another. And you will see the DNA of ‘Dunkirk‘ in those quiet, desperate moments where people fight against the sea.
It is rare for a director like Nolan to admit that one of his huge technical achievements was just trying to catch up with a movie made almost eighty years earlier. “No examination of cinematic suspense would be complete without Hitchcock,” Nolan admits.
By talking about the movie that inspired ‘Dunkirk‘, Nolan gives us more than a recommendation. He gives a quick masterclass and reminds us that while technology keeps changing, the basic physics of fear stay the same, whether it is the splash of cold water, or the slam of a steel door, or the look on a pilot’s face. For Nolan, ‘Foreign Correspondent’ is not just some overlooked movie; it is the key to everything he tries to do.
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