Zitat des Tages von Graham Moore:
The only way for something human to feel human is to convince others that it is.
I felt like Alan Turing's story was such an important story to tell, and it was so wonderful to write the script and other people find it and say, 'I never heard this story.' It's such an amazing story that people don't believe it.
Over the years, I would go to my agents, my manager, and I would say, 'Hey, there's this amazing true story about this gay English mathematician who committed suicide in the 1950s.' And they would be like, 'Please don't ever write that script. That is an unmakeable film.'
One of the tricky things about sort of larger, comic-book action movies is that the scale is so big that they have to save the world at the end of every movie, and so at the end of each of the films, either Chicago or New York end up getting obliterated.
Alan Turing, to me, always felt like an outsider's outsider.
I'm just this committed dilettante. I think what I've found is that I've tried to do a lot of different things in my life and discovered I'm not as good at them as I'd want to be.
Among tech-minded kids, I think Alan Turing was a tremendous inspiration. He was a guy that was so different than the people around him. He was an outsider in his own time, but because he was an outsider is precisely why he was able to accomplish things nobody thought was possible.
Being bad at stuff is hard, and we all deal with it every day because we're all bad at stuff.
Alan Turing is so important to me and to the world, and his story is so important to be told, so it was a big thing to take up, and I was a little petrified. Like, who am I to write the Alan Turing story? He's one of the great geniuses of the 20th century - who was horribly persecuted for being gay - and I'm a kid from Chicago.
I'm not gay, but I don't think you have to be gay to have a gay hero. Growing up, Alan Turing was certainly mine. I'm also not the greatest mathematician of my generation. We have lots of biographical differences, but nonetheless, I always identified with him so much.
If you know someone's secret, what power does that give you? How much power does that really give you? What can you do with secrets?
I was not a successful TV comedy writer.
I feel very Midwestern at my core.
In my experience, depression was not something that has been cured so much as managed, like a lot of illnesses.
I liked Columbia, but it was like high school in that there was this big social world that I was not part of. I existed on the side, far away. That might be temperamental, my own fear of large groups, more than anything else. But I had a handful of professors who meant a lot to me.
I was a sound engineer. That was my day job when I started writing.
I think I always felt like an outsider, like a weirdo.
Depression is internal. The upswings and downswings have pretty much nothing to do with what's going on in the external world. It's not like something sad happens to you and then you feel sad. Good things happen, but you feel sad anyway.
When you use the language of 'fact checking' to talk about a film, I think you're sort of fundamentally misunderstanding how art works. You don't fact check Monet's 'Water Lilies.' That's not what water lilies look like; that's what the sensation of experiencing water lilies feel like. That's the goal of the piece.
I'm always much more interested in flawed heroes than in perfect ones.
Everyone remembers the pop-quiz hotshot bit from 'Speed' because it's extremely funny, and it's really smart and really witty. And the notion that action movies can have dialogue that pops just as well as the explosions is something that I hope more people continue to remember.
Britain in 1939 and 1940 really thought they were going to lose the war. It looked like they were going to lose. There was bombing every day, and people were literally starving.
Space camp was actually, like, the best summer of my life. It was amazing. But I thought I wanted to be a computer programmer, and among computer science folks, Turing is this object of cult-like fascination.
Turing was always a legend among computer/geeky kids. He was such an outsider in his own time, and because of that, he was able to see things differently. It was a story that had been well told in books, onstage and on TV, but never on film.
I had been a lifelong Alan Turing obsessive. Among incredibly nerdy teenagers, without a lot of friends, Alan Turing was always this luminary figure we'd all look up to.
Telling Alan Turing's story in a two-hour film was a tremendous challenge. It felt in some small way like our filmmaking version of breaking the enigma code.
'The Imitation Game' is a celebration of Alan Turing's life and legacy, and Joan's final monologue is our eulogy. It's the thing we all wished we could have said to him.
