The favorite Alfred Hitchcock movie of filmmaker Christopher Nolan wouldn’t be most people’s choice but Foreign Correspondent is a forgotten masterpiece of the spy genre. Nolan has more authority than most in judging classic works of film, and seems to have a preference for one of Hitchcock’s earlier movies.

The legendary director’s second Hollywood production was made just before the birth of noir cinema, and just after the outbreak of the Second World War. Foreign Correspondent is often overlooked today in favor of the best Hitchcock movies that came before and after it, such as Rebecca and Shadow of a Doubt.

Nevertheless, the film has obviously inspired Christopher Nolan, who has referenced it directly in relation to one of his own cinematic masterpieces. In fact, Nolan is so taken with Foreign Correspondent that he chose it for a series of screenings to the British public back in 2017.

Christopher Nolan’s Favorite Hitchcock Movie Is Foreign Correspondent

The Director Named This Film In A Series He Curated For The BFI

Alfred Hitchcock has had a far greater influence on Christopher Nolan’s filmmaking than most people realize. Nolan’s 1998 feature-length directorial debut was essentially a homage to Hitchcock movies, which have inspired countless other thematic and formal elements in the Dark Knight director’s work.

The only Hitchcock film that Nolan counts among his favorite movies, however, is the 1940 espionage thriller Foreign Correspondent (via IndieWire). To celebrate the release of his war movie Dunkirk in 2017, Nolan was asked to curate a series of screenings at the British Film Insтιтute (BFI) based on his influence. Foreign Correspondent was among the 11 he chose.

Movies Christopher Nolan Curated for his 2017 BFI Series

He went on to eulogize the “technical virtuosity” of this Hitchcock movie in his written introduction to the screening series (via The Film Stage). Indeed, Nolan had a point in drawing our attention towards Foreign Correspondent. The film’s daring experimentation prefigured some of modern cinema’s greatest advances.

Foreign Correspondent Is A Forgotten Classic Of The Spy Genre

In Both Thematic & Stylistic Terms, It Points Towards Hitchcock’s Later Work

If it weren’t so commonly overlooked today, Foreign Correspondent would be celebrated as one of the best spy movies of its day, if not of all time. The movie combines a classic Hitchcockian tale of subterfuge and misdirection with visual aspects of the film noir genre which would begin to proliferate in American cinema immediately after its release.

In terms of both theme and style, Foreign Correspondent bridges the gap between Hitchcock’s two greatest films of the 1930s and 1940s, The 39 Steps and Notorious. It borrows its Clause 27 scene from the climactic final sequence of The 39 Steps, while lending Notorious its use of sinister and enigmatic pro-Nazi villains.

For Hitchcock scholars and disciples, the movie is worth studying for its Freudian perspective on the female love interest of its тιтular hero, as well as its impressive visual set-pieces. It was a commercial failure for Hitchcock at the time of its release, in large part because these set-pieces cost so much to shoot.

Foreign Correspondent was Hitchcock’s most expensive movie to make until Lifeboat in 1944, with Rebecca, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Suspicion, Saboteur, and Shadow of a Doubt all costing less to produce. Yet its biggest-budget scene is the one that’s most inspired Christopher Nolan, in addition to entire generations of filmmakers before him.

This Hitchcock Movie Inspired Scenes In Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk

Nolan Took His Visual Cues From Foreign Correspondent For Dunkirk’s Spitfire Scenes

More specifically, the climactic scene in which a Short S.30 Empire clipper airplane crashes into the sea in Foreign Correspondent served as a key inspiration for multiple scenes in Christopher Nolan’s historical film Dunkirk. Nolan himself alluded to this scene in his introduction, prefacing the Hitchcock movie for the series of BFI screenings he curated. Nolan made the connection, saying:

“No examination of cinematic suspense and visual storytelling would be complete without Hitchcock, and 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.”

We can see the direct visual inspiration of this Foreign Correspondent scene in two pivotal moments of Dunkirk’s airforce narrative. The first is during a dogfight between British Spitfire fighter planes and their German counterparts, when various aircraft are depicted descending towards the water below from the point of view of their pilots.

The second comes when the Spitfire fighter pilot Collins, played by Jack Lowden, actually crash-lands in the sea. His crash is depicted in real time, with the primary focus on the surface of the water coming closer and closer as his plane goes down, interspersed with quick cuts to sH๏τs of his face and from the wing of his Spitfire.

This scene is a carbon copy of how Hitchcock presented the downing of the plane in Foreign Correspondent, although back in 1940, he was using far more primitive technology than Nolan had access to for Dunkirk. In his appearance on The Dick Cavett Show in 1972, Hitchcock revealed the secret of how he’d sH๏τ this scene.

He had a professional pilot nosedive towards the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California in his plane with a camera attached to its front. Hitchcock then had the footage captured by the pilot projected onto the back of panels used for the set of Foreign Correspondent’s plane cockpit, which were made out of rice paper.

The moment the ocean in the footage appeared close enough, two mᴀssive tanks hidden behind the rice-paper panels emptied hundreds of gallons of water into the cockpit. This scene may have been costly to shoot, but it still holds up today as an incredibly realistic portrayal of a plane crash at sea from the pilot’s perspective.

Hitchcock’s genius is rarely rendered more clearly than in the story behind this moment in Foreign Correspondent. It’s no wonder his fellow filmmaker Christopher Nolan is so taken with the movie.

Sources: IndieWire; The Film Stage