10 Film Scenes That Broke The Camera

Christopher Nolan strikes again, this time in his Oscar-winning war film Dunkirk, which was shot entirely with IMAX cameras. 

Nolan's aforementioned commitment to doing things practically ensured that, to achieve many of the gorgeous shots of planes soaring through the sky, Nolan literally had those heavy IMAX cameras mounted to planes.

And this led to another accident during the sequence where Collins' (Jack Lowden) plane is shot down over water and he's forced to ditch. 

We get some beautiful plane-mounted shots of the plane descending out of the sky towards the ocean, yet the outcome for the camera was a lot worse than it looks in the film itself.

According to cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, the unmanned plane was launched from a platform into the ocean, with the IMAX camera being contained within protective housing.

While the initial plan was to simply retrieve the camera once the plane hit water, the plane ended up sinking almost immediately, taking the entire camera system with it.

It was another 90 minutes before divers could retrieve the gear, by which point water pressure had broken the housing and flooded the camera with brackish water.

But impressively, the actual film magazine containing the footage remained intact, and after being drained and cleaned with freshwater, was entirely usable.

As Hoytema rightly pointed out, if the scene had been shot with a digital camera, the footage would've definitely been lost.