MORTEN TYLDUM – SCIENCE MUSEUM QUESTION & ANSWER SESSION
“As a film-maker, you don’t ever get to pick your projects, you fall in love with them.”
“This movie is about the importance of being different and how minds should be able to explore freely and not be burdened down by normality. He was a very unique man and in a way, he was punished for it. It is great that he has been pardoned, but he has nothing to be pardoned for, he’s done nothing wrong. He was just a gay man who was being more or less crucified for being gay and in many ways, he should pardon us.”
These very stirring and poignant words are of course referring to Alan Turing, a pioneering Mathematician and a brilliant cryptanalyst credited with cracking the codes of the Nazis’ Enigma machine, but despite helping to end the Second World War, he was disgracefully persecuted for being gay.Â
On Wednesday evening, the lucky audience at an exclusive private screening in London’s Science Museum were given a treat ahead of watching THE IMITATION GAME, as the director of the film, Morten Tyldum was in attendance and participated in a very interesting question and answer session.
Sat calmly on a red stool under the spotlights on the stage floor of the Imax theatre, the Norwegian director, who came to international attention for his 2011 screen version of Jo Nesbø’s thriller HEADHUNTERS is very matter of fact about the creation of the film and the difficulty in getting THE IMITATION GAME produced, as he answered Time Out’s global film editor, Dave Calhoun‘s questions.
“It has been a very special journey to be able to tell the story of Alan Turing on the big screen for the first time. I thought I knew a lot about history and then this script was sent to me and I read it and fell in love with it and I was shocked and amazed by how little I actually knew of it. Why wasn’t this man on the front cover of my history book at school? I became obsessed with it, the more I read it, the more I fell in love with it.”  He’s reconciling the moment when his agent sent him the script to read and having never made an English language feature film before, this screenplay drew him in and compelled him to have the story of Alan Turing told for the whole world to see.
He has a refreshingly heartfelt and introspective take on the story and it is clear to see that the 47-year-old film-maker feels an emotional pang when discussing the misjustice of Turing and only wishes to shed light on a remarkable and inspiring man.”When you are making a movie like this, you have two obligations that are running side-by-side: To show the science and the work he did – you have to get the right facts, but also you have to make an engaging movie because he deserves that.” Â
He pauses for a moment, deep in the existential thoughts that dominate the conversation reflecting on the turmoil of delivering the film accurately and of course in a way which shows the brilliance of the codebreaker. “I wanted the film to not feel like a history lesson. There are so many thrilling moments in his life. There were so many interesting things to him and the more you read up on his work, the more you get to know him and how engaging he was. He’s also like a mystery – who is Alan Turing? He’s like a puzzle and in the film we try to piece him together and understand him a bit more. All we want is to do justice for him.”
To illustrate his earlier point about the intelligence of the mathematician, Tyldum references just how unique the man was and how influential his thoughts have been. “To me, Alan Turing is as much of a philosopher as he is a mathematician. His ideas were: what does it feel like to be alive? What does it mean to think? He has a theory that ‘we are only human to a degree that we can convince other people that we are human.’ In other words, we are what we are because we convince other people what we are – hence the imitation game.”
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Wanting to plunge the audience into the life of Turing and his fellow code breakers, Tyldum helped to create a heightened understanding of those involved in cracking the Enigma code by shooting the film in as many of the real-life locations as possible and with the genuine tools. “The machine you see in the film was the actual Enigma machine in the war, which the Nazis used and it was phenomenal for the actors to touch and feel it and they were reminded that these were so important.”
Despite there being a lot of attention about Alan Turing and after he was given a posthumous royal pardon, getting the backing to have his heroic, but tragic story told was not an easy task and once again, it was Turing’s sexuality that seemed to cause the most difficulties: “In terms of movie budge scales, the film was quite small, costing 14-15 million dollars and it was a small, independent production, it wasn’t a studio… I think as soon as they discovered it was about a gay man, they didn’t want to make it anymore, so it had to be made independently.”
A host of excellent actors were involved in the movie including Keira Knightley, Charles Dance, Matthew Goode and of course Benedict Cumberbatch who enigmatically brings Alan Turing to life. “Great British actors all wanted to be a part of this and they all worked so hard. We had to shoot it in only eight weeks with three weeks of rehearsals and we became like a family together who all worked hard and tried to figure out their characters and Alan Turing. They all tried to their best to do justice and nobody wanted to fail.”Â
Fail they have not. THE IMITATION GAMEÂ is a powerful, moving and heartbreaking story of a man to whom we owe so much and after years of secrecy, it is thanks to this film that Alan Turing is finally getting the recognition he deserves – and quite rightly so.
Here are some snippets from the interview with the brilliant director:
THE IMITATION GAME hits UK cinemas on Friday.
