"REDCAR welcomes Joe Wright"

reads the message on the canopy of the Regent cinema.

And, for his part, the director of Atonement is glad to be back in the east Cleveland resort, where he filmed what has become one of the most talked-about and admired movie sequences of the year.

Families strolled along the sands yesterday where, last August, the cameras rolled on a recreation of Allied troops gathering on the beach for the evacuation from Dunkirk during the Second World War.

The centrepiece of Wright's £15m film of Ian McEwan's novel is a staggering five-minute sequence, shot in a single take, that travels along the beach weaving among and around groups of soldiers preparing to leave France.

The camera circles the bandstand and comes to a halt among the servicemen in a bar created in the Regent cinema.

Wright previously filmed BBC television drama series Nature Boy in the region. He says: "We shot that in Middlesbrough, so we always had a bit of a soft spot for the North-East.

"We were talking about how Dunkirk had an industrial side and was a holiday seaside resort - and thought of Redcar."

With limited time and money, he had only one day to film what he considered the centrepiece of the movie.

"Originally, I was thinking of doing a montage of shots but didn't have enough time to achieve that. One day, as a joke, I said, you know that Steadicam shot that I did on Pride And Prejudice, I'd like to do the same on the beach'," recalls Wright.

The whole thing was "really daunting", not least because he needed a thousand or more extras, recruited locally, to play the troops.

"I like to involve the community in the work I do; we did some of that on Pride And Prejudice. I quite like the circus comes to town aspect of film-making.

"With extras, it's quite difficult to keep the energy up. By the seventh shot, everyone is getting bored, by the eighth they're talking on their mobile phones.

"The aim was to create a piece of theatre, a big event that everyone had to focus on. With 1,600 cast and crew, doing it in this short amount of time creates all this adrenaline.

"People are talking quite a lot about the shot and that's a testament to the lads from this area.

Without them, this shot would be rubbish."

Wright rehearsed with groups on the beach all day and then starting shooting in the late afternoon to capture the fading light.

"I had faith that at a certain point, we were going to get really good light that day. I'd almost chosen a location because of the direction of the light at evening,"

he says.

"I wanted a magical, elegiac sense to that scene. I got three takes and, on the third one, the light was with us and it was magical."

After three takes were completed, Wright went for a fourth.

But camera operator Peter Robinson paid the price for carrying the 60lb Steadicam backwards through sand. He collapsed on the fourth take.

Even then, Wright still didn't know if he had captured the scene as he had set out to do.

The radio contact between the camera and the recording devices was at such a long distance that he had no record of what they had just shot.

They had to wait until the next day to see the scene in a makeshift screening room at a local health club. There was relief all round when they saw the sequence for the first time.

"The reason why the scene works is the extras and the local people who came and gave their time with so much dignity," he says.

"They really put their hearts into it. My primary concern on that day was making sure they were involved and engaged and feeling like they were performers."

There was never any doubt that the makers would return for screenings of the finished film.

"We always promised people we'd come back, so it was very important to do that," says producer Paul Webster.

"This premiere feels like the best so far. There's a real sense of occasion about it."

As well as seeing his name up in lights on the front of the Regent, the regional premiere gives Wright the chance to reflect on the day Dunkirk was recreated at Redcar.

"There was this amazing energy of those 1,600 people focusing on this one little bit of film. That was an incredible experience and something I will never forget," he says.