Interview (Written): Graham Moore (“The Imitation Game”)

A WGA.org interview with Graham Moore, screenwriter of The Imitation Game.

Briefly tell me how this story first entered your life — what age you were and how you came upon it.

I’ve been obsessed with him [Alan Turing] since I was a teenager, when I was a huge computer nerd. I was probably 14 years old at computer programming camp one summer. He was such an object of fascination that campers would talk about him. I remember people would pass around different books about him. [He] was a character in a Neal Stephenson novel called Cryptonomicon, which is great. There have been other fictional treatments of him… it was almost like the legend of Bigfoot, you know? “Did you know there’s a monster in the woods? Did you know that the computer was really theorized by this one dude and no one knew it was him because the government kept it classified and then effectively murdered him for his homosexuality?” It was this tremendous story. I just remember being obsessed with it and always wanting to tell that story, always sort of saying to myself, God, how come there isn’t a movie about this? It has not stopped feeling strange that I was the one who got to write the movie. We would joke when we were on set that I would have been a P.A. on The Imitation Game. I just happened to be the writer.

To that point, tell me how you got the gig.

If you read the script of The Imitation Game, you’ll know brevity is not actually my strong suit. That’s what Billy our editor is for. Basically once a year, I’d go to my agents and say, “There’s this movie I want to write about a gay English mathematician in the ’40s that committed suicide.” And they would say, “Absolutely not! Please don’t write that movie. That is the worst idea for a movie we ever heard!”

What a terrible agent!

We joke about it now.

The movie’s trailer:

For the rest of the interview, go here.