The story of Alan Turing is one that should be shouted from the rafter of every building in Britain and the U.S. on a daily basis. Yet before recently, his name was barely known. But because of his deductive and technological skills, World War II is estimated to have ended years earlier than it likely would have through pure bombastic strength and will, saving millions of lives in the process. In a top secret project for the British military, the mathematician, logician and puzzle solver Turing and a small team of very smart folks broke the German code machine Enigma, and did so in a way that didn’t alert the German’s that their secrets were on full display to Allied forces.
In the process of cracking the code, Turing also happened to take the first steps toward inventing the modern computer. Hell, some of his theories on technology and humanity have been popping up in science fiction since the post-WWII era. So why isn’t Turing name and his accomplishments known and celebrating by the masses? Because Turing also happened to be gay, a fact that didn’t come to light until years after the Enigma breakthrough (which was kept secret for nearly 50 years), his achievements and heroic efforts were never really discussed or written about in the history books. But thanks to the new film THE IMITATION GAME (starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing), his life will hopefully be better known as something of substance rather than the scandalous headlines that plagued him before he died in 1954.
I recently had the chance to sit down with THE IMITATION GAME writer/producer (and Chicago-born) Graham Moore, whose name first became known to me when I’d read he was writing the screenplay for the novel “The Devil in the White City” for Leonardo DiCaprio, which seems stuck in development hell. He also wrote his own book, called “The Sherlockian,” released in 2010. Joining Moore was the film’s Norwegian-born director Morten Tyldum, whose last film was the fantastic HEADHUNTERS from 2012, and he’s gearing up for his next work, PATTERN RECOGNITION, based on the William Gibson novel. I had a tremendous time talking to these gentlemen about THE IMITATION GAME, a film that seems less about hero worship and more about giving credit where credit it due, and doing so without stigma. The film opens wide this weekend. Please enjoy my talk with Morten Tyldum and Graham Moore…
Capone: The film tells us that this story was top secret for 50 years after the war. How did Alan’s full story, the entire scope of his story, come to light originally?
Graham Moore: A couple of things. In the mid-’70s there was a de-classification of some of the initial materials relating to Bletchley Park. After the British broke the Enigma code thanks to Alan Turning’s fine service in the middle of the second World War, they kept it a secret. They kept it a secret from their own military, and they kept it a secret from foreign militaries. One thing the British government was doing, after the war, was giving Enigma machines to ally governments, like the government of Israel for instance, and saying “Here’s this machine. It’s a perfect code generating machine. We’ve never broken it; no one knows how to read it. Use it at will.” And other militaries were using this machine for 20 years after the war, not knowing the British were listening to everything they were saying to each other. It’s an amazing bit spy craft.
I always say that you can make a whole other movie—a whole other three movies—about the effort to conceal the fact that they’d broken Enigma once they’d done so. So then starting in the mid-’70s, they declassified that they’d broken it, and then began this process of people who’d been at Bletchley started being able to talk to reporters, historians, journalists. Andrew Hodges, who wrote the biography on which our movie was based, although we used a lot of other resources that Hodges didn’t have available. His book came out in ’81, ’82, I want to say? So his was the first biography of Turing, and that was the first book to place Turing at the center of Bletchley Park, the center of the war effort, and the public began to know about this man who had been white-washed from history before that.
Capone: And not just war history, but science history, technology history. The idea that this guy essentially created the framework for the modern computer is astonishing.
Mortem Tyldum: When he was 23. It’s amazing.
Capone: And he had the idea in his head even before that, he just never had the resources to build it. So that’s an incredible revelation. The screenplay was on the blacklist a couple of years ago. How did the screenplay get to you?
MT: I was sent the screenplay. I had just moved to Hollywood. I was reading all kinds of action thrillers and heist movies and superhero movies, and someone said, “You have to read this script. It’s probably not what you’re looking for, but it’s a beautiful script.” And I was just blown away with, first of all, how good the script was, but also that I didn’t know more about Alan Turing. I had the same experience, which I hope other people get when they see the movie. Why was no one aware of this? Why wasn’t this taught to me in history classes in school? Why wasn’t this on the front cover of history book?
Capone: Why aren’t there statures built of this guy?
MT: Exactly, this is crazy. So with that, you become obsessed about it, and it’s became, “We need to tell this story, we need to get it out.” You feel like you’re part of something important, and it became a passion project for us. We sat down and we had the same thoughts and ideas on how we wanted to tell this movie. We wanted it to be an engaging film. History deserves that. We wanted it to be a fun, engaging, thrilling, and exciting film, not just a dusty, old history lesson. That’s how his life was. That's being true to his life. His life was so rich, and there was so much going on. It was so involved.
Capone: As a science fiction fan, the scene between him and the detective where he said, “This is how you find out if someone’s a human being or a robot.” That’s right out of BLADE RUNNER. Or I should say, BLADE RUNNER took it from him. That’s how deep this guy’s roots run in our culture.
MT: He’s as important as a philosopher, I think. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to think? One of things I love about the film is the idea that just because someone else thinks differently than you doesn’t mean they’re not thinking.
Capone: You chose a film for your first English-language film that has so many words, so much dialogue…
GM: [laughs] We would laugh about that sometimes, the number of words. I would just keep typing, man. So many words.
MT: It’s definitely challenging yourself. There aren’t that many explosions and action scenes to hide behind here. But it’s been such a great experience. First of all, everybody we wanted to be a part of this project came aboard. We became more like family. These phenomenal actors, who all said yes to the part of this. It’s a small, independent movie. The budget is small. We shot it in eight weeks. They all wanted to be part of this. I got everybody behind the camera that I wanted. So as a filmmaker, it’s been an incredible experience.
Capone: I don’t want to get sidetracked, but you said something earlier that I don’t want to forget. You said you were sent superhero movie scripts? What did you get sent? Can you say?
MT: Should I say?
GM: [laughs] This is on you.
MT: I got sent some superhero scripts, yes. With respect to the studios that sent it to me, I’m not going to tell. But I did get some guys in spandex sent to me.
GM: I think that’s fair.
Capone: You might still be on their radar. Once they bring somebody in, they tend to keep your name in the hopper of candidates.
MT: Yeah, and I actually like superhero scripts. I like superhero movies. I have nothing against them. And Turing is like a superhero in many ways. He’s the superhero in tweed, and it worked.
Capone: One of the most incredible things about the film is that you have a guy and most of what is going on is going on in his head, and at least at the beginning of the film, he’s wholly unlikable. How do you make those two things interesting in a cinematic way?
MT: It’s a huge challenge to make it thrilling. First of all, we wanted to make the danger ever present, because war is always there. The film is structured so the whole thing is a mystery. The whole thing is like, who is on Alan Turing? It’s like a puzzle and a mystery. That's why we have the three different timelines, and they’re not linear. They’re all interwoven. You’re trying to find out who he is. It’s a mystery in itself, who he is. And then you have the actual race against the clock, breaking the Enigma. Think about what these guys did. At midnight, all the work is for nothing. You have to start all over again at 6am. It’s like they were doomed to lose. It was hopeless.
GM: One thing we talked about a lot was that if you were living in Britain in 1939, you felt like you were living through the apocalypse. There is this like dystopian, sci-fi thing happening in Britain at the time where things are not looking good. Once the Blitz started, they really thought they were going to lose; it looked like they were going to lose. There’s a line in the film that says England was literally starving, and that’s true. That sense of these incredibly young people, as Morton said, Turing was 23 when he came up with the intellectual underpinning of the computer, 27 when he got to Bletchley Park. Joan Clarke was 24.
MT: Hilton was 18.
GM: Yeah. These are young people living at the end of the world, as they felt, with this incredible pressure all on them. It’s all, as he said, on these mathematicians, these tweedy superheroes to save the world, because they literally thought it was about to end. So one thing we talked about a lot was conveying the incredible pressure that they were under and the thriller feeling of that.
Capone: Yet with all of these heavy burdens on their shoulders, you open up the film with this job interview scene that’s so funny. And there’s humor throughout, but that scene is maybe the funniest scene in the movie. It’s wordplay. Talk about the role of humor in this story; without it, it would be oppressively serious.
GM: That’s exactly the idea. That’s exactly right.
MT: We talked about that from the first meeting we had together. First of all, I think that if you’re going to go emotional, there’s nothing better than to make people laugh before you hit them with a sledgehammer. And I think it’s important for this. It was the air. There’s something about placing this awkward and arrogant Alan Turing into this system that is fundamentally funny, and this is how it was in real life. And there were clashes. Alan was an eccentric man, but it’s smart humor. Like you said, it plays with words, it plays with twists and turns, which is both something me and Graham loved.
GM: There’s this idea we talked about with other directors I met with before Morton, they had this idea that this is a serious movie, and you can’t put any jokes in a serious movie. And I think one of the reasons we fell so in love during our first meaning—we were like “We have to do this together, we have the exact same vision for it.” We both felt that Alan Turing’s life deserved a vibrant film, and a film full of life and energy and humor, because his life was. He was a funny man. He could be a funny man. He was a passionate man, he was a driven man, and the film had to reflect that essence.
Capone: I think we’d be doing the story a disservice if we didn’t talk about Joan as a person, because assuming you more or less got her right here, she’s a remarkable human being just as an intelligent, progressive woman,. There are times in this film that surprised me that had nothing to do with the Enigma project. It mostly had to do with her, and the fact that she was willing to marry this man.
MT: Which is true. They were engaged for six months, and he told her, “Just so you know, are you sure you want to be engaged to me, because I’m gay.” And she said, “I don’t care,” which is the true story behind them. It was a non-sexual marriage. In many ways, it was very modern, because it was based out of respect.
Capone: She lays it out. She says it. “We have our minds in common.” That’s a great line. That’s progressive.
MT: It is. It’s better than most marriages, or I think it is.
[Everybody laughs]
GM: You’re married; I’m not. You can talk about that.
MT: Don’t quote me on that. I’ll be in trouble.
GM: We loved this idea of these two outsiders who found each other. He was an outsider from the culture around him because he was a gay man at a time when it was literally illegal, and she was an outsider because she was a very, very smart woman living at a time when women weren’t allowed to…she couldn’t be a professor. She couldn't find a use for her intelligence until the war broke out. There was this amazing societal thing happening at the time where there was a generation of women like Joan Clarke who weren’t allowed to use their intelligence and really live up to their potential until the war happened. And then you get this great outpouring of smarts that they got to experience. As Morton said, you had this marriage of outsiders, these two people who find each other, even though they’re both outside from their society, they bring out the best and most wonderful in each other.
Capone: You’ve got three stories going on here. The wartime story, the flashbacks to Alan’s childhood, and then the scenes with the detective, which are a few years after the Enigma project. And it made me wonder who edited this. And I was really surprised to find out that it was William Goldenberg, who previously had done Michael Bay films, and he’ done films with dozens of characters. Tell me about his role in this.
MT: Billy’s amazing. I feel very lucky that we got him, because he’s the hottest editor in Hollywood. He just came from Oscar winning ARGO and ZERO DARK THIRTY, and I love HEAT the way he did the editing.
Capone: Well, the work he did for Michael Mann [including THE INSIDER, ALI, and MIAMI VICE] is incredible.
MT: Incredible. So he came in and did it for a fraction for what he usually takes, but we attracted amazing talent for this project, which is phenomenal. He was really good. He has an understanding of it. I think a lot of people are not aware how complicated it is to actually have three time periods, and having that feel like one story, and having that non-linear thing, and in the middle you meet the narrative point of now, when the interview is happening, and then restart the whole thing at the beginning. The structure is actually immensely complex, and it just flows so effortlessly that you don’t even think about it. It says a lot about Billy. He’s a great editor. I can’t praise him enough.
Capone: You open with that monologue that you think is narration, but then you realize Turing talking to somebody at that moment. Let’s talk about Benedict a little bit, because obviously we know he’s a great actor, but he has to play someone whose every aspect of his life has to be a secret.
GM: I think that’s a perfect way of describing it.
Capone: Some aspects of our lives, we’re allowed to talk about, but he can’t talk about any of it. And he has a body language that is different—it’s contained, it’s pent up.
MT: That’s an extremely good way of describing it. That's what the core of the character is. He has to hide everything. First of all, he has this great loss that happens to him with Christopher. To me that scene, he can’t even tell that he’s a friend, not to mention that he can’t tell anyone that he actually loves him. He’s holding this all inside, and then it’s like layers and layers and layers of secrets that is like a burden on him. The thing is that Alan Turing never talked. He stood trial [for being gay], which was the most unjust trial ever, and he never spoke. If it was me, I would scream out, “Do you know what I did?” But he didn’t. He took this secret with him, all he did, all he achieved, and never spoke about it, which was amazing.
Capone: What direction did you find yourself giving him the most in terms of his performance?
MT: Oh, there were all kinds of discussions back and forth about how obvious should things be and how hidden should things be, how much should we project now? How much of what goes on can we withhold, and how much do we show the audience?
Capone: So it was about degrees…
MT: Oh, it’s a lot about degrees. How openly can you project what actually goes on, the internal struggles of what he had. How much of it should be externalized, and how much should we just keep as a secret and hope people see better? So there were a lot of layers with that. It was really amazing, because he came in the morning, pick up his suitcase, put on his fake teeth, he wanted to have fake teeth to look like Alan Turing’s. And he transformed. He walked differently and became this person. Actually, he developed this great speech pattern. This feeling of speech where the mouth was never able to catch up with the brain. The brain goes so fast.
Capone: It’s almost a stutter.
MT: Yeah, it is a stutter. It’s subtle and smart stutter that’s based on a brain going on over here at full speed. So it’s remarkable. He’s a phenomenal actor.
Capone: It looks like you’ve got a couple things on your plate coming up next. Both of them look like they’re science fiction. So is that your commitment?
MT: CHAIN OF EVENTS is Warners. That is not really science fiction, but it’s pretty close. It’s at least science. The main character is a cryptographer working for the NSA, so that’s pretty funny. And then PATTERN RECOGNITION with Mel Gibson.
GM: William Gibson.
MT: William Gibson, sorry. What did I say?
GM: You said Mel Gibson.
MT: Oh sorry, sorry, sorry. [laughs]
GM: Do you want start a rumor? That would make it to the internet and be a whole other story.
MT: It’s William Gibson, definitely. Which is a different kind of sci-fi. It’s sci-fi happening now. It’s more like an alternative. And I’ve always been a sci-fi fan. It’s interesting to do things that are contemporary or moving forward. I want every movie to feel different. I wanted to do a British period movie from the war. Done that.
GM: No more tweed for you.
MT: Next one will have no tweed.
Capone: Thank you so much. It was great to meet you.
