"I always think that history presents us with more interesting stories than we can make up," says first-time screenwriter Graham Moore. "I'm not creative enough to make up a story as fascinating as Alan Turing's real-life story."
Whatever he might lack in creativity, Moore has managed to make a successful career out of depicting the lives of inventors. He might not be making anything up, but he has managed to find plenty of real-life drama.
Moore has just finished a novel that covers the complex relationships among Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla. The Imitation Game, his film on Turing, the British mathematician who decrypted the Nazi's seemingly unbreakable Enigma coding devices and who came up with the concept that makes modern computing possible, opened Dec. 25. The film has gained honors at festivals around the world, including Toronto and Memphis.
The movie stars the Internet's most meme-able star, Benedict Cumberbatch, as Turing and depicts Turing's efforts at a time when his ultimate success was less than assured.
"We wanted the film to feel like a thriller because Alan Turing would have felt like he was in the middle of a thriller. Here he was a mathematician out of Cambridge, and he suddenly becomes one of the top spies in Britain after the war has broken out," says Moore by phone from Dallas.
"They're living through this apocalyptic period in British history where from 1939 to 1940 England thought that they were going to lose the war. Things were bad. London was being bombed every night. Turing was a 27-year-old mathematician with the fate of the free world hanging on his shoulders."
The Germans were able to conduct their assaults on London and other targets because they used Enigma devices to code their transmissions so the Allies couldn't understand them. Turing and his team developed machines that eventually decrypted the Nazis' messages and also led the way for technology that we now take for granted. While Turing didn't actually build the machines he conceived, he and the devices are estimated to have shortened World War II by two years.
Moore explains, "It's a machine that does not do one thing; it does everything. It makes a calculation and from the results of that calculation, it determines what it wants to do next. It's not programmable. It's reprogrammable. It was the decision-making part of it that literally nobody had ever thought of before.
"That idea of the Turing Machine, which was making thousands of calculations in a second, to the iPhone that you have in your pocket, which is making billions of calculations every second, if you use the same concept, it's just making the calculations much, much faster."
No Ordinary Math Geek
In addition to determining how to make Turing's complex mathematics understandable and the sedentary but essential task of decoding exciting, the Chicago-born Moore and Norwegian director Morten Tyldum (he directed the film adaptation of Jo Nesbo's Headhunters) also worked to make Turing's complicated life part of the tale.
Turing took his own life on June 7, 1954, at age 41 after having been forced by court order to endure a chemical castration because he was convicted of "indecency." Homosexuality was illegal at the time in the UK. In 2009, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued an apology for the way the government had treated a war hero, and Queen Elizabeth II pardoned him last year.
Despite the way he had been treated, Turing took vital state secrets with him to his grave. Other British agents weren't so principled.
"There were all these people who were selling secrets to the Soviets, and they were never prosecuted. That's one of the things we explored in the movie. There was this Soviet mole at Bletchley Park that MI6 was protecting, and he was never prosecuted for his crimes." Moore says.
"When Alan Turing was being prosecuted for the 'crime' of homosexuality, he never once raised his hand and said, 'Oh, by the way, I saved 14 million lives during the Second World War.' He never did that. He stayed loyal to the British government even when they were not loyal to him."
Moore and Cumberbatch also dealt with the challenge of making the occasionally abrasive Turing relatable. In addition, Turing belied the egghead stereotype because he was an astonishingly capable athlete.
"One of the things we wanted to show with Turing was a sort of gay character that you hadn't seen onscreen before. I think sometimes gay characters in films can be sort of caricatures. They're sort of like 'the gay guys' with the capital 'G.' Turing wasn't like that. He was so multifaceted. He could be arrogant, difficult and prickly and very hard to work with. He had a hard time communicating with people. That was all true," Moore says.
"At the same time, there was also this great fragility to him. There was this amazing sensitivity he had as a result of a difficult childhood. We tried to show that sensitivity as well as his sense of humor. His sense of verve was so important to us."
He adds, "Movies always have these sort of doddering mathematicians who are dropping their spectacles when they're trying to clean them off. I don't know why, but they're always clumsy onscreen. Turing wasn't. He was an Olympic-level marathon runner. He was quite physically fit. Benedict had to get into shape to play Turning."
According to Moore, Cumberbatch augmented his natural resemblance to Turing by wearing dental inserts so his teeth and jawline were more similar. "As a writer, you dream of being able to write for an actor like Benedict Cumberbatch's caliber. You don't think it's possible, but you hope that one day you might get to," he says.
Moore first gained public attention for his New York Times best-selling novel The Sherlockian, about Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle, so the connection between the film's writer and the star of the movie and the series Sherlock may be more than a coincidence.
The Ultimate Reward
Before The Imitation Game had even started shooting, Moore received accolades for his first movie script. His screenplay had topped The Black List, a list of the top unproduced scripts as voted on by more than 250 film executives. According to Moore, the honor has some drawbacks.
"It was so flattering to be on top of The Black List in 2011. It was wonderful. It's a tremendous honor. There is a bit of where it feels like this thing in Bull Durham where he's the king of the minor leagues. That's great that I have the best unproduced screenplay of the year. It would be a little better if it was the best produced screenplay of the year."
MovieStyle on 01/02/2015