Graham Moore is having one of those meteoric writing careers that inspires others.
At 33, the Chicago native has already penned a New York Times best-seller with a fanatical following ( The Sherlockian, in 2010 ), written a screenplay that was the Black List's #1 for 2011 and is now hard at work on the highly anticipated The Devil in the White City. Moore's Black List screenplay was for The Imitation Game, which he based on Andrew Hodges' biography of Englishman Alan Turing, the genius mathematician who cracked the Enigma code during WWII and who is often cited as the father of modern computing.
Turing, who was gay ( and who was subjected to chemical castration after being convicted for being so by the British government ), has long been a hero to the LGBT community. His life story, tragic suicide in 1954 and subsequent removal of his sexuality from history helped inspire The Legacy Project's founding by Victor Salvo, its executive director. Turing's plaque on Halsted Street remains the only public memorial that honors Turing and his queer status. Both were very much on my mind when I chatted with Moore about his screenplay when the young writer was in town last month ( along with the film's director, Morten Tyldum ) for an advance screening of The Imitation Game ( which Moore also executive-produced and in which Turing is eloquently portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch ).
Windy City Times: You have long had a love for Alan Turing and his story. Do I understand that it started when you went to space camp? [Laughs]
Graham Moore: Yes! I was this tremendous computer nerd when I was a teenager. I went to space camp and computer-programming camp; I was totally like that kid. So among awkward, nerdy science weirdos, Alan Turing is a sort of patron saint. There's definitely a cult-like fascination for him.
Turing's legend is wrapped up in this sort of secret queer history of computer science; the secret, queer history of World War II; this other story of all these other things you hadn't heard before. I think among high school outsiders Turing was such a patron saint in terms of what someone on the outs of society could accomplish—the wonders that no one else thought were possible. I dreamed my whole life of getting to write about him.
WCT: When you say "queer history of World War II," are you speaking about sexuality or "odd" or "outsider?" I just want to clarify.
GM: No, I'm using it in terms of "gay." It's funny, we've had these screenings for computer programming types or technology types and among computer science people they know the name Alan Turing but they'll come up to me after the screenings sometimes and say, "Oh my God—I didn't know that Alan Turing was gay; I didn't know that the man who invented the computer was gay and, moreover, was so horribly persecuted by the government for it." I think that's a part of the story of computer science that has been whitewashed out of the last 50 years.
WCT: How ironic—coming from the queer community, that's the first thing you know about Alan Turing.
GM: I'm glad to know that but in my experience, to a general, public audience that is something that is not as well-known, and certainly that was sort of the goal behind this film. Turing's story has been told beautifully a number of times on the page and on stage, but his story has never gotten the proper cinematic treatment that I thought it deserved.
WCT: So is the thing that separates your screenplay and your film [the acknowledgement of] his homosexuality?
GM: The last film that was made about this was called Enigma, about 15 years ago, and starred Dougray Scott and Kate Winslet. In that film, Turing is straight and is involved in a love triangle with two different women. They change his name but it's very much based on Turing but, yeah, he's straight in that. I actually think it's a good movie but I don't think it has any relationship to history, per se.
WCT: You're obviously aware—having done a bit of press for the film so far—that people are saying, "Great, you're acknowledging that he's gay in the movie and yet, this third-act section of the film doesn't get as specific as maybe it could in this day and age." We never see him with a lover, you don't see him kiss another man; etc. Is it kind of ironic that you're telling me that you wanted to make this part of the story and you have in many ways but…
GM: It's very funny. I will say that the times that I've heard criticism about the handling of the homosexuality in the film have come from people who haven't seen the movie and so I just say, "Well, see it." We certainly didn't make him straight. He is very much a gay man in the film. If the question becomes, "Why didn't we have a sex scene?," that question seems sort of silly to me because you'd never ask that about a thriller about a straight mathematician. It's [his sexuality] just part of his identity and is assumed. We wanted to make a film about a mathematician who happens to be gay—not the gay mathematician. That was always the goal.
Alan Turing was the outsider from the society around him for so many reasons. First and foremost was that he was a closeted gay man living at a time when a kiss between two men wasn't simply frowned upon but was literally illegal and punishable by two years in prison. On another level, he was an outsider because he was smarter than everyone else in any room that he walked into so it was hard for him to talk to people. And then on a third level he was keeping these secrets for the government that he couldn't share with anyone. So he was like the outsider's outsider, for all of these reasons and we wanted the film to explore all of those.
Turing was also famously celibate during those years [that he worked on the Enigma code during WWII] which encompasses, like, 50 percent of the film and that was not by choice. He wrote in a letter to a friend that Bletchley Park [the locale where Turing and his team worked on the code]was like a "sexual desert," and he knew that if he was caught with a man he'd be kicked out and sent to prison and he didn't want to risk it.
WCT: I'm just curious: In the early section that focuses on his boarding-school days and his ardor for his best friend Christopher, was there an earlier draft that was a little bit more pronounced? It reminded me of Maurice from 1987 with the longing looks and the little touches on the back.
Part of the blowback might because that does seem like it's from 30 years ago. I got that it's coded but we live in this age where the queer community definitely wants to see physicality up front and center. Maybe that's because we've been forced to cinematically be in the celluloid closet for so long. You get that, right? That desire for a "little kissy scene?" [Laughs]
GM: [Laughs] Yeah, I do. We've been having these conversations for years. We've been talking about how to best represent Alan Turing on screen every day for four years.
WCT: And didn't Benedict Cumberbatch himself even say that he was ready and willing to have some "man-on-man" action in the film? [Laughs]
GM: Oh, he never would have objected, no; he would have been happy to do that. But I never wrote a draft that had a gay-sex scene in it. I know that there was some report that there was a draft that had a sex scene that we removed which is simply not true. It did not happen. There was another director that was briefly attached to the movie for a couple of months and he did write a draft in which there was a gay sex scene but when we left that studio, we left that draft. It wasn't my draft; it was something else.
WCT: So it was a conscious choice to make it coded within coded, which I ultimately think works, given the film's focus.
GM: We wanted to show that his sexuality and his love of cryptography were kinda connected. He had to express his love in code. In the 1920s, '30s and '40s, gay love had to be expressed in code. It could not be expressed openly and so we showed scenes of he and Christopher expressing their love for each other in code. We wanted to say that his love for Christopher was part of this code breaking he did during World War II.
His experience growing up as a gay man at boarding school and the terrible abuse he received there were fundamental to his experience as a codebreaker. One of our other goals was historical accuracy—we had a responsibility there—and most people do not believe that Alan's relationship with Christopher Morcom became expressly sexual. They clearly loved each other very much but it seems unlikely that they ever had sex. Obviously, we don't really know.
WCT: What did you conclude?
GM: I'm not sure, and we wanted to leave it a little bit ambiguous. In the same way we didn't to show him with having a lover at Bletchley Park because he didn't. It's not like there's some boyfriend that he had that we cut out of the story. Christopher was the great love of his life and he lost him so young, which is part of the tragedy of the story.
WCT: I think it's fascinating that you're going to go from this piece to The Devil in the White City, which is also about somebody hiding [his] inner self.
GM: I like secrets; I like films about secrets. We are trying [with The Imitation Game] to correct the historical record because Turing's homosexuality had been written out of the official history so much and because he was a gay man, his role in the history of computing was written out. I'm glad to hear about things [like the Legacy Project] that are correcting that.
The Imitation Game opens in Chicago theaters on Friday, Dec. 12.
theimitationgamemovie.com/ .
