in five weeks a hundred thousand british forces will strike sicily's southern shore
unfortunately the nazis know of our intentions so we're going to play a humiliating trick on hitler
as a young boy actually i first came across this story because it's part of our national legend in
some ways it's it's sort of sewn into it's woven into the kind of post-war mythology this body that
was used for deception but i remember thinking when i was very young actually if even quarter of
this is true it's an amazing story the plan begins in spain where the corpse will wash up on shore
bearing classified letters a corpse carrying fake documents i came at it the best possible way which
is the way ben would always hope which is you know you read the book and the book is such a fabulous
read not just because of the nature of the story but because it is so unusual and so vivid and
so rich prime minister that's too big a risk the fate of the world is at stake the plan is highly
implausible they were there solely to run agents i think and to dream up insane ways to fool the
enemy i mean that's what they would do and they would you know ian fleming was part of it and
it was chaired by a guy called john masterman who was a novelist and oxford don and you know so they
were very sort of creative bunch of people where are his legs the allied had a whole bunch of uh
things called operation barclay which operation ministry was a small part of where they had
created a fake army fake headquarters in cairo a bunch of operations in greece fake
radio intercepts and this one idea uh was going to discover all of it if it was discovered and it
could so easily been discovered he would carry a letter from his wife professing her deep love for
him very good i thought she was wonderfully drawn as i think all all the characters but hester was
particularly interesting because she's um she's she's she's not a romantic character um she's a
woman who's on a level with with the men she's in the room with and the women and she plays a
very integral role in in in the story and coming up with the ideas so i was fascinated to play her
and he would carry her photograph my contribution to the mission for a seat at the table i love
gene i could play a gene forever i i really could have made that film forever quite happily
and i just i just love being in a room with all these people what if the autopsy reveals he didn't
die of drama of course the briefcase is returned to us without the germans seeing its content
the thing that struck me it's a different type of war film to the the kind of uh you know
nationalistic kind of jingoistic uh film obviously there are two sides fighting this war but it's
it's it's about the underground thinking that went into it and so often in the story we're looking at
how these quite amazing eccentric characters are interacting and relating to each other to
come up with these ideas and it's about thinking rather than fighting i like that that side of it
history herself will avert our eyes from the slaughter i may vomit i may vomit with you a
lot of storytelling and indeed the news will tell you about the emotional toll of combat the kind of
work that these men were doing created casualties of a different sort perhaps you know this wasn't
just these weren't just people who were brilliant in terms of their logical um prowess you know
they were very very clever men but they it did have to be very lateral and in in the nature
of its thinking i mean creativity is not something that necessarily does conform to
to logical processes it's they had to really employ this whole business of
corkscrew thinking as as churchill called it it was wild really and uh and absurd this is our war
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