For his first feature film, The Imitation Game (The Weinstein Company), writer Graham Moore has earned an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. But his is hardly an overnight cinematic success story. Moore had wanted to write about and bring to the big screen the story of Alan Turing for many years.
Portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch in an Oscar-nominated performance, Turing was a computer pioneer who cracked the Nazis’ elaborate secret communication code, an accomplishment which Winston Churchill heralded as the single greatest contribution to helping to win World War II. Turing’s historic, heroic story is also a personal tale as he was a closeted gay man at a time when homosexuality was criminalized in the U.K. He was prosecuted for his sexual orientation and committed suicide in 1954.
SHOOT caught up with Moore who shared backstory on The Imitation Game, which has garnered eight Academy Award nominations for: Best Picture, Director (Morten Tyldum), Adapted Screenplay (by Moore, based on Andrew Hodges’ book “Alan Turing: The Enigma”), Leading Actor (Cumberbatch), Supporting Actress (Keira Knightley), Editing (William Goldenberg, ACE), Original Music Score (Alexandre Desplat) and Production Design (production designer Maria Djurkovic, set decorator Tatiana Macdonald). Tyldum also earned a DGA Award nomination.
Moore additionally served as executive producer on The Imitation Game. Besides the Oscar nomination, his writing of The Imitation Game has earned assorted other Best Adapted Screenplay noms, including from the Writers Guild of America and the BAFTA Film Awards.
SHOOT: What drew you to Alan Turing’s story?
Moore: I’ve always wanted to write about Turing. Believe it or not, I was a tremendous computer nerd. I went to space camp. I imagined that I’d grow up and get into computer science. Among awkward teenagers, Turing was this patron saint–an outsider’s outsider. He never fit in for so many reasons. But because he was an outsider, he was able to see a world no one else did.
As things turned out, I grew up and was terrible at computer programming. I became a writer instead and wanted to tell Turing’s story. Not many people know of Turing. His name should be as well known as that of Einstein or Darwin. His accomplishments are on that level but he never gained the recognition he deserved because of his horrible treatment at the hands of his own government. If anyone deserved a feature film treatment, it was Alan Turing.
SHOOT: How did you get the opportunity to become involved in The Imitation Game?
Moore: It was a long time coming. A story about a gay English mathematician in the 1940s who died didn’t exactly contain the buzzwords that Hollywood executives wanted to hear. I was told it was an impossible film to make, that no one would finance it.
Luckily enough, I went to a cocktail party at the house of my now friend and our producer Nora Grossman. I had met her briefly before. I didn’t know her well but somehow got invited to this party. Perhaps they thought I was someone else. I introduced myself and overheard her talking about this mathematician that no one hear of, Alan Turing. “Oh, my God,” I thought. “I’ve been wanting to do this story for 20 years.”
From then on I imagine she was thinking, “Why is this guy accosting me?” That party began a series of weeks during which I begged her and her producing partner to become a part of their project. I wound up writing a script on spec. Nobody got paid, there was no guarantee of anything. I just felt this was such an important story and it was a privilege and a responsibility to get the chance to tell it.
SHOOT: What was the biggest challenge that The Imitation Game posed to you as a writer?
Moore: The challenge was how do you represent accurately in a film the mind and accomplishments of Alan Turing. He was one of the great geniuses of the 20th Century and I am not. Writing about someone who is a hundred times smarter than I am was a very daunting challenge. The goal was to somehow get the audience inside Alan’s head, to understand the big picture ideas behind his theories which led to breaking the Nazi’s Enigma code. We wanted people to get a sense of who Alan was, his different way of thinking. At the same time, we depicted the code breaking as a thriller. In fact, this story must have felt like a thriller to Turing, a professor accustomed to university life who’s then placed on vital high-level intelligence work.
Still he’s isolated–by being a brilliant mathematician whose intelligence is over most people’s heads, by having to keep his work a secret from everyone, by his wit and cerebral sense of humor, and because he was gay. Being gay was just one of many things that isolated him from the people around him. He was a multi-faceted person who didn’t get the credit he deserved. His death was tragic.
SHOOT: What does the Oscar nomination mean to you personally and professionally?
Moore: It’s amazing because it only helps to get Turing more recognition. In some small way, this film begins to correct the historic injustice done to him. The other month there was a picture of Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing on the cover of Time Magazine. Turing had never been on the cover of Time. He should have been. I wish it had happened back in 1945.
Personally it’s been surreal and exciting for all of us. Particularly since this is my first feature film. It’s also Nora’s (Grossman) first film. To be honored like this while spreading the legacy of Alan Turing, to get his name out to the world, has been a wonderful, extraordinary experience.
