He took the train from London, and he was early and went to the village cinema to see a movie while he was waiting. The true story is actually that he watched Snow White when he was waiting for the interview with Commander Denniston at Bletchley Park-the one that you see in the beginning of the film. The apple did come from Alan Turing’s fascination with Snow White, which we tried to get in but there wasn’t room for it. Steve Jobs said he wished Alan Turing had been the inspiration for the Apple logo, but it was a coincidence. The other thing is, it turns out it’s not really true. But the whole thing turned into a sort of Apple commercial.
But I shot the apple and Benedict lying there and all that. It was this great link from the inventor of computer science to this device we all carry around in our pockets now. Alan killed himself by taking a bite of this cyanide apple, and the rumor was that that’s where the Apple logo came from. So him turning off the light on the machine and saying goodbye to Christopher, then the movie is over.Īt first, we were fascinated by the apple. To me, it’s all about his relationship to Christopher. We shot Benedict being dead, and in many ways it felt melodramatic and unnecessary. Why did you decide not to show Alan Turing’s suicide? It’s kind of prejudiced to say that if you have a gay character in a movie, you need to show explicit gay sex. You would never do that, even with a straight character. It would be sort of like having a random, unnecessary sex scene with him and another man. To create another love interest for him would be completely meaningless and also not true. The computer came out of the loss of Christopher and the idea to try to recreate a consciousness. To me, the movie is about lost love, unfulfilled love.
We’re not shying away from Alan being gay. He even wanted children with her at that time. His most important relationship he had was his relationship with Joan. He didn’t have any sexual encounters during all that time. His words about his time at Bletchley, he called it a sexual desert-he wrote that in a letter to a friend. One criticism of the film has been that you didn’t delve deeply enough into Alan Turing’s sexuality.įirst of all, it’s very accurate the way it is in the film. It would be as if he was living in the middle of this wartime spy thriller, so that’s what we wanted to convey. And he ends up with all these incredible secrets being dumped on his shoulders and all this incredible pressure.
Here was this man plucked straight out of Cambridge. He was 27 years old when he came to Bletchley. That’s why I wanted it to feel like a thriller. You have to convey the emotional accuracy-how did Alan Turing feel at this time?-and to do that, you sort of have to dramatize events. Of course, you have to compress a lot into two hours, and there’s no way you can be totally accurate. It’s a huge responsibility when you’re dealing with real-life persons and real-life events to do it accurately. How much do you think historical accuracy matters in a biopic? I think it’s impossible to not be fascinated or intrigued or outraged when you hear the story for the first time. Alan Turing was one of the most important individuals in the last century, and he’d been living in the shadows of history far too long. It’s sort of like if Albert Einstein was a little-known mathematician. I’ve always been interested in history, so it shocked me when I read the script how little I knew about Turing. How much did you know about Alan Turing before the film? Tyldum talks his decisions not to delve deeper into Turing’s sexuality and not show his suicide with TIME. Still, The Imitation Game - like every other biopic this Oscar season - hasn’t been without controversy.