The British secret service trailed my father and grandfather all over London
in the winter of 1952, even though the whole city was coated in a terrible
fog. They kept watch on their house and followed them right to the door of
10 Downing Street. Inside No 10, my grandfather was bent over Winston
Churchill’s ear, adjusting his hearing aid. Outside, MI5 was hovering,
deeply suspicious of my father and grandfather’s Russian background, and
convinced they might well be bugging the elderly prime minister’s hearing
device, which my grandfather had supplied. A few months later, MI5 stopped
my father and grandfather having access to Churchill.
When this story was revealed by The Sunday Times in 2007, I thought it
charming and absurd, but it also excited me: at that moment, I was writing
the movie Glorious 39, a thriller that dramatises how the secret service and
other powerful forces in Britain did their utmost to stop Churchill becoming
our wartime leader. Suddenly discovering I had this family connection to
Churchill only served to galvanise me more.
Over the previous months, I had become fascinated by what was really going on
in the upper echelons of British society during the build-up to the second
world war. Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasing Hitler was not only
supported by the vast majority of members of parliament, the aristocracy,
the royal family and most of the newspaper editors of the time, but
bolstered by a ferocious campaign of dirty tricks conducted by the secret
service. The opponents of appeasement were regarded as enemies of the state:
they were kept under constant surveillance; their phones were tapped, their
private lives monitored; they were attacked in the press and the BBC was
encouraged not to have them on the air. The more I read the more I realised
what an incredibly close-run thing it was that Britain had stood up to
Hitler, how the appeasers had so nearly prevailed. This would have almost
certainly led to the UK becoming a puppet state of the Nazis and none of my
family surviving.I thought this was a really promising setting for a
historical thriller, but I wanted to create a story that would resonate with
a modern audience, that might give them a sense of being in the middle of
this extraordinary time, as if the events were happening to them.
I decided to focus the story on a family and see the action through the eyes
of Anne, the 25-year-old adopted daughter of a senior politician. Anne
stumbles upon evidence of what the secret service is up to when she finds
some mysterious recordings of private conversations stored near the family
home. Her whole privileged existence is turned upside down in a matter of
days. One moment she is part of an aristocratic family, experiencing a lazy
summer holiday in idyllic surroundings, the next she finds herself being
engulfed by the conspiracy as she encounters the full darkness of the secret
state.
The same dramatic contrast was experienced by the country in 1939, when a
golden summer dominated by some of the most lavish parties held by the
aristocracy in the 20th century turned into an autumn when the survival of
democracy was hanging by a thread. As soon as war was declared, 1.5m people
were evacuated from London, and it became a city without children and
without pets. An eerie silence descended across the capital as people had
their pets put down, fearing the city was about to be obliterated from the
air. The high-street vet became a place of death.
To create a summer and autumn of such startling contrasts, I found myself
being drawn to filming in Norfolk. While making my 2003 drama The Lost
Prince in north Norfolk, I had fallen in love with the surrounding
landscape, which seemed to me both beautiful and mysterious. It is a
sparsely populated area with many ancient buildings, such as the spectacular
ruined abbey at Castle Acre or the beautiful town of Little Walsingham. I
thought it the perfect setting for Anne’s family to experience the last
carefree days before war changed everything.
There was one problem: the money for the film was gradually coming together,
but summer was fast slipping into autumn. When the film was finally
greenlit, I found myself facing the considerable challenge of trying to
capture late summer at the beginning of November, in one of the coldest
parts of England. Two things came to my rescue: the sun obligingly shone out
of a freezing but perfectly blue sky, and a new film stock gave the
exteriors the rich hallucinatory glow of early Technicolor. Before my eyes,
late autumn was transforming back into a sultry summer, allowing us to stage
an elaborate picnic on one of the first days of filming.
Spread out across the hillside was a cast of British actors who set off many
different movie resonances. Playing the matriarch Aunt Elizabeth was Julie
Christie, returning to Norfolk, where she was so unforgettable in Joseph
Losey’s The Go-Between. Playing Anne’s mother was Jenny Agutter, for ever
linked to the English landscape by The Railway Children; and watching from
the sidelines as the sinister Balcombe was Jeremy Northam, who memorably
played Ivor Novello in Robert Altman’s Gosford Park. In the centre were Bill
Nighy, as Alexander, the owner of this sumptuous estate, and his children,
played by Romola Garai, Eddie Redmayne and Juno Temple, three of the
fastest-rising stars in British cinema.
It was the third time I had worked with Nighy, and the role of Alexander was
probably the most challenging yet. The atmosphere was electric during the
picnic, not just because it was so cold, but because, in the surrounding
woods, the pheasants were being fattened up for a shoot, and armed
gamekeepers were watching us closely. We were staging the scene in the
grounds of a great house and its traditions, seemingly unchanged since the
1930s, were dominating our filming days.
The past began to pursue us wherever we went. The links between north Norfolk
and the war remain strong, because of all the airbases that were situated
there, and the RAF still dominates the area. When we began filming an
alfresco dinner party where Hector, played by David Tennant, launches a
passionate attack on appeasement, the RAF bombarded us for a full two hours.
It was a strange and unnerving scene, a candlelit dinner next to a beautiful
medieval arch, Tennant’s ferocious assault on those who were hatching a
secret deal with Hitler and the roar of warplanes above our heads.
In the movie, Anne’s family moves back to London just before war is declared,
so halfway through the shoot, we left Norfolk. In London, wherever we went
to re-create the surreal atmosphere that enveloped the capital at the
outbreak of war, there were surprises from the past. In Somerset House,
while the Christmas skaters twirled on the ice rink, we were several floors
below them, filming Anne and her Foreign Office lover discussing the
murderous conspiracy they have unearthed. We were in the intensely evocative
subterranean passages that snake all over the site and are unaltered since
the 1930s. It needed no leap of the imagination to feel we were in the
actual underground bunkers the government retreated into.
Anne has a career as a bit-part actress in the story, so we moved to Ealing
Studios to evoke the atmosphere of British cinema at that time. The
buildings here are a labyrinth of old sound stages, and it is on one of
these that the most disturbing revelation in the movie happens. It was an
odd feeling staging these key scenes on the exact spot where Ealing’s famous
war films were made. I kept thinking what very different movies would have
come out of the studios if the appeasers had won. Their efforts to do a deal
with Hitler became even more intense after the war broke out, and so nearly
succeeded.
The film’s story reaches its climax in the City of London, as Anne
attempts to escape from those who have betrayed her through the narrow
streets in the shadow of St Paul’s. I found Romola Garai utterly magnetic as
Anne, and I began to feel she was as consumed as I was with the sense of the
past invading the set. In one of the last scenes we shot, there was a
spectacular meeting of the past and the present. We were filming in the East
End by an ancient church. In the churchyard was nearly the whole cast,
including, looming into view among the tombstones, a film legend,
Christopher Lee. As I looked up from the camera, I saw that all around this
beautiful church, the landscape had been devastated. As far as you could
see, there was evidence of how the district had been flattened in the Blitz.
The price London paid for standing up to Hitler.
Ten months later, I am in a car, being driven to the premiere of Glorious 39
at this year’s London Film Festival. The driver suddenly begins to share his
memory of the war, how as a child he watched Spitfires tip the wings of the
V-1 flying bombs to stop them reaching their target. It seemed so apt that at
the very moment the film was about to be unveiled, I should be reminded how
recent the events shown in the movie really are.
Glorious 39 opens in London on Friday and nationwide on Nov 27
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