MALE SPEAKER: We have some very special guests
to chat to us about Alan Turing and Bletchley Park.
So first of all, Sir John Scarlett.
Sir John was chief of the British Secret Intelligence
Service from 2004 to 2009, and today he
is the chairman of the Bletchley Park Trust.
Sir John.
And Sir John Dermot Turing, who is the nephew of Alan Turing.
He first of all studied genetics at Oxford
and then turned to the law as a partner at Clifford Chance.
And he's a trustee at Bletchley Park.
Sir John Dermot Turing.
SIR JOHN DERMOT TURING: Thank you.
MALE SPEAKER: And first of all, we're
going to be joined by Hangout by two of the guys involved
in making "The Imitation Game."
I'm a little bit worried because I can't see the Hangout.
Oh, there's Graham, and Teddy is there as well.
You can see them, but I can't.
Graham is the script writer and executive
producer of "The Imitation Game."
And the script of the film topped the 2012 Black List,
which is Hollywood's list of the best unproduced screenplays.
And it got the highest score in the history of the Black List.
I'm delighted to see that the script has now
made its way into the film.
And also on the Hangout in the smaller thumbnail
there, Teddy Schwarzman, who is the founder and principal
of Black Bear Pictures, and he oversees all the operations,
the development, the production, and the planning of the films.
So we're going to talk to them in a second,
but first of all we're going to kick off
with a clip from the film.
[APPLAUSE]
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
-That's what you're doing here.
The top secret program at Bletchley,
you're trying to break the German Enigma machine.
-What makes you think that?
-It's the greatest encryption device in history,
and the Germans use it for all major communications.
If the Allies broke Enigma, well, this
would turn into a very short war indeed.
Of course that's what you're working on.
But you also haven't got anywhere with it.
If you had, you wouldn't be hiring
cryptographers out of university.
You need me a lot more than I need you.
I like solving problems, commander.
And Enigma is the most difficult problem in the world.
-No, Enigma isn't difficult.
It's impossible.
And the Americans, the Russians, the French, the Germans,
everyone thinks Enigma is unbreakable.
-Good.
Let me try, and we'll know for sure, won't we?
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
MALE SPEAKER: Right, so over to Graham first,
who wrote the script.
And I understand, Graham, that you've been very interested
in the subject of Alan Turing from a young age.
How did the film come about?
GRAHAM MOORE: I always imagined that I'd end up like you guys
actually working in computer science.
But I didn't.
I ended up being a writer.
And so I think among techy computer-minded kids,
Turing has long stood as inspiration,
someone who thought differently from everyone
around him and because of his differences
was able to see the world in a new way
and do things that other people didn't think were possible.
So it was sort of a dream of mine,
even after I became a writer.
Turing was a subject I always wanted to write about.
And yeah, I feel so privileged that Teddy and I
got involved in doing it.
MALE SPEAKER: How long did it take from screenplay to screen?
GRAHAM MOORE: I just remember [INAUDIBLE]
about four years ago now actually.
Alan Turing was one of the great geniuses of the 20th century,
and I'm not.
So you're sort of like, oh my god, this is a huge story.
This is an important story.
It [INAUDIBLE].
You hope you can add to it.
You hope you can add to Turing's legacy
as a need to be [INAUDIBLE] preserved.
So yeah, after about a year, we found our way
to Teddy and to Morten and developed the script
for another year.
And then we were off into production.
MALE SPEAKER: And over to you, Teddy.
I mean, at first glance, it doesn't
look like the most promising material
for a blockbuster film.
Did you find it easy to get the film off the ground?
TEDDY SCHWARZMAN: You know, really
what we were trying to do was tell a story that we thought
was of great importance and try and protect
the essence of Alan Turing and his legacy
while not shying away from the pain and injustice that
naturally comes with telling the story.
Sort of getting it off the ground
was really more about reading the script and then saying,
OK, how are these pieces going to come together?
And I think we believed that the importance of the story
would generate it interest from directors and from cast.
I think the interest on the casting side and people
like Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley
and Mark Strong and Charles Dance.
That was something we were so incredibly lucky to have.
MALE SPEAKER: Great that the story
has traveled so far internationally.
So Graham, had you visited Bletchley Park before you
got interested in making the film?
GRAHAM MOORE: I hadn't visited Bletchley
before making the film, but at various stages in the writing
process, at the mid stage, I went and visited Bletchley.
And it's amazing to walk around there.
You can even go in and touch the machines.
And I think that's something as a writer,
that tactile experience of seeing it in front of you,
touching the walls, it reminds you
of the responsibility when you're
telling a story like this.
This is a true story.
This is about real people.
This really happened.
And so we all felt-- and I know Teddy and Morten and Benedict,
Keira, everyone felt this tremendous responsibility
to be able to tell this story accurately and fairly
and do it justice.
MALE SPEAKER: How much of the film
was actually shot at Bletchley Park?
TEDDY SCHWARZMAN: I think it was about four days out
of just a little over 40.
We had looked at it to try to figure out could we
shoot Hut 8, which you'll see in the film there.
But for a variety of reasons, it made sense
to actually build a hut just so we could have flexibility
from a shoot standpoint.
So we ended up finding sort of our hero
at Bletchley Park in Nettlebed, which is just off of Henley.
And we did the exterior huts up around Bicester.
And then we did some of the interiors
that we could at Bletchley.
MALE SPEAKER: Fantastic.
And finally Graham, as we'll see in the film,
the Alan Turing character is actually
very funny and amusing.
What did you draw on to show those little glimpses of humor
from the true story of Alan Turing?
GRAHAM MOORE: Yeah, I think having some humor in the film
was really important to all of us, me
and Morten very much included.
Because I think that Turing's life was funny.
I think that one of the things that I was so fascinated
by in this film was giving a really
three-dimensional portrait of Turing.
Because he was a willful man.
He was a driven man.
He was a passionate man.
And we wanted the film to express
all of that, the sort of awkward situations
that he could experience.
Obviously, his is a story that ends so tragically,
and we wanted the film to show that.
We wanted the film to face full on the tragedy of what
he experienced, but also certainly the beginning
to depict the full spectrum of Turing's life.
MALE SPEAKER: Brilliant.
OK, well thanks very much indeed, gentlemen.
All best wishes for the film.
It's in cinemas from November the 14.
Thank you very much for joining us and all the best.
[APPLAUSE]
Right, so now we're going to see another clip,
and then we're going to turn to the gentleman from Bletchley
Park.
This next clip is called Christopher
and is about the beginnings of the digital computer.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
-Are you trying to build your universal machine?
I read your paper at university.
-Is it already being taught?
-No, no, no, I was precocious.
So, you theorized a machine that could solve any problem.
It didn't just do one thing.
It did everything.
It wasn't just programmable.
It was reprogrammable.
Is that your idea behind Christopher?
-Human brains can compute large sums very quickly.
Even you can do that.
But I want Christopher to be smarter, to make a calculation
and then to determine what to do next like a person does.
Think of it, electrical brain, a digital computer.
-Digital computer.
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
MALE SPEAKER: Well, we'll start there.
So, Sir John Scarlett, you've been chairman of the Bletchley
Park Trust and obviously before that involved
with the Intelligence Service.
How important was what Alan Turing
was doing there for the war effort and subsequently?
SIR JOHN SCARLETT: What was done at Bletchley, which
was actually technically part of MI6,
the secret intelligence service at that time,
although in practice and in reality
it is the antecedent to GCHQ, what was achieved there is--
well, it probably is the single biggest continuous achievement
in intelligence terms ever.
It's hard to underestimate the significance of what
is achieved.
And we need to remember that history
when you watch the personal story in the film.
MALE SPEAKER: Sir John Scarlett gave us
the sort of importance in military terms.
Tell us about the importance in computing
in scientific terms of what went on at Bletchley Park.
SIR JOHN DERMOT TURING: Yeah, this is quite interesting.
There's this rather charming scene
between Keira and Benedict that you
see where they talk about this sort of idea
of a universal computer.
So you might get the sense that this machine that's
built in the movie that's called Christopher-- and I
won't explain why because I don't want to spoil it for you.
But this machine called Christopher
is like the world's first electronic computer.
There's a lot of Anglo-American tension
about who actually made the world's first stored program
electronic computer.
And for stored program computers,
there's lots of first electronic computers and so forth.
So there's many, many claims around this.
MALE SPEAKER: And now we do have a very special guest with us
today.
Ann is related to a Googler, I believe, and worked
on the bombe machine at Bletchley Park in the war.
Can you tell us what you did there?
ANN: When I worked on the bombe at Bletchley Park,
is there anybody else here who worked at Bletchley Park
at that time?
[LAUGHTER]
Oh.
MALE SPEAKER: Just you.
ANN: I'm obviously the oldest person here then.
Well, I think it will be a marvelous film.
I've read about the man who is playing the part,
and it seems to me he will do a very good job.
But we lived outside Bletchley, and we
came in by bus every day.
And we worked three eight-hour shifts,
three times with eight hours.
And there were about 20 of us.
And it was very exciting.
The bombe brought up the right setting.
And we sent off and then occasionally Hut 6
would tell us what we'd done.
Not very often, but just occasionally
we were told what had happened.
MALE SPEAKER: Thank you so much for coming,
and many thanks for what you did.
[APPLAUSE]
And just finally over to Dermot to ask, much debate about why
the bombe was called the bombe.
Can you explain?
SIR JOHN DERMOT TURING: Well, I can't
claim to have the definitive story,
but I've asked lots of people.
And the idea is that the bombe was named the bombe
because the Poles, who had done this amazing work trying
to crack the Enigma in Poland before the German invasion
of Poland in 1939, they'd invented a machine
to try and uncover the settings.
It wasn't as sophisticated as the Turing-Welchman bomb
that you'll see in the movie.
But apparently they called it the bomba, and so then,
well, all right.
You've just restated the question.
You haven't answered it.
Why did the Poles call it the bomba?
Well, we think-- and I'm willing to accept other theories,
by the way, so if anybody's got better ideas than this,
then please do let me know.
But we think it's because, well, first of all it
made this sort of ticking noise, and when
it got to the end of its runs it make a clonking noise.
So it tick, tick, tick, clonk, sounds like a bomb, doesn't it?
But apparently also the Poles used
to go out and have a sort of mid-afternoon snack
where they go around to the local cafe,
and they just order an ice cream, which is like a bombe,
like the French dessert.
It's a bomba in Polish.
So they did that.
But I think the real reason is this,
that if you've got something that's really, really
good, if you're German you say prima
or if you're French you say super.
Sir John and I have this theory that if you're British you say,
"I say that's not bad, not bad at all."
And if you're Polish you don't say any of those things.
You say bomba.
So we think that may be the reason.
MALE SPEAKER: Thank you very much.
Thank you to all our guests, really
fantastic and interesting stuff.
Thank you so much to Ann for coming.
Now, the film begins in 10 minutes' time,
so we're going to take a very quick break.
Go and get yourself an ice cream or a beer.
And we'll reconvene just before 6 o'clock please.
Thank you very much indeed.
[APPLAUSE]
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
-Who are you?
-Alan Turing.
-This war, we're not winning it.
Break the code, you have a chance.
-Enigma is the greatest encryption device in history.
-It is unbreakable.
-Based on the incredible true story.
-What if only a machine can defeat another machine?
-You do not have to do this alone.
-You've got more secrets than the best of them.
-It's a superb thriller, five stars.
-My machine will work.
-The world is an infinitely better place because of you.
-"The Imitation Game" in cinemas November 14.
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]