Interview with John Madden, Director of "Operation Mincemeat"

00:01In five weeks, 100,000 British forces will strike Sicily's southern shore.

00:07Unfortunately, the Nazis know of our intentions.

00:10So we're going to play a humiliating trick on Hitler.

00:14Rogues and scoundrels all around the world.

00:16It is my great, great honor to be joined by the director, the legend, John Madden, whose new film Operation Mincemeat, some of you may know something about.

00:26Thank you so much for joining us, John. Thank you. Thank you.

00:30Yeah, well, I follow in your humble footsteps.

00:35Humbly in your footsteps, I should say, rather than your.

00:39I would say the exact reverse, because most of the folks who are hearing this now have heard us go for hours talking about the outsider's understanding of the story of Operation Mincemeat.

00:50But I have to imagine that you experience experienced unprecedented access and you had to make hard decisions about which parts of the story belong in narrative fiction or narrative based on reality.

01:04And I guess my first question would be, how did this come to you?

01:09And how do you pitch it to people who are unfamiliar with the story?

01:14Well, it's one of those ones where it's fairly easy to to frame a kind of simple picture of the story around one essential prop, which is the dead body, obviously.

01:30That's something that is immediately going to interest people and stick in people's minds.

01:36It certainly stuck in mine in I didn't remember which point I sort of became aware of it as an urban myth, because I was, oh, I don't know, seven or something when the man who never was came out, which is the movie version of you and Montague's own account, which obviously you'll know about, which was a heavily vetted fiction of its own, heavily vetted by the intelligence services.

02:03You didn't really want the story to be told in the first place, but eventually conceded once they realized they could control that narrative and turn it to their own use.

02:13So I came I came to the project via Ben McIntyre's book, which was pressed into my hand by by Michelle Ashford, who wrote the screenplay for the film with whom I was collaborating at that point on the pilot of a series she was making about. She was writing.

02:35It was the show runner on about the sex researchers, Masters and Johnson.

02:41And and it sort of clicked in my head that I somehow knew about that aspect of the story.

02:48But I'd never seen the film, certainly hadn't read the man who never was Montague's own account.

02:56And, you know, in answer to your question, when you read the book, it's kind of a absolutely fascinating, riveting, but sort of overwhelming experience in terms of thinking about it as a possible movie, because it's such an extraordinary, sprawling story with a colossal amount of information, a colossal amount of detail.

03:18And and so as a approaching it as a story, you sort of need to find a door you can knock on to get in, really.

03:28And strangely, Michelle and I both had a similar reaction to it.

03:32She had a very particular conviction about it before all of the other things kind of rose up and enveloped us as well.

03:40It's an extraordinary story and it's kind of unique in terms of World War two cinematic fiction.

03:49It's a world you'd never seen before, really.

03:53You've never looked at as closely as this gets to.

03:56Well, and it is one of those stories that is so out there that that I would imagine.

04:03I know for me trying to express things, we had to we had to break everything into pieces because otherwise it just sounds too fantastic. Yes.

04:11Did you bump up against that?

04:14And and how do you steer around those problems? Well, we did.

04:18But I think I have to pay a tribute at this point to when you say I was right in the midst of it and had, you know, access to everything one could want.

04:30And I mean, the access I had was to Ben's book.

04:33And by one degree of separation, Ben had access to everything he wanted because the significantly that, you know, the Operation Mincemeat files were declassified along with various other documents at the time in 1996.

04:50And that in and of itself allowed things that were never intended to be public.

04:56They were never intended to be known about were suddenly laid out.

05:01Well, actually, in a sort of colossal piles, Ben likes to demonstrate taller than him.

05:09I think it was just an enormous volume of material.

05:13But in particular, the debt I owe to Ben is that he's an incredibly good storyteller.

05:21And you'll know from reading the book, it's both overwhelming in its in its detail and its complexity and the minuteness of the ideas that they thought of to check off and so on and so forth.

05:36The creation of the fiction was extraordinarily meticulous, and it wasn't so much the improbability of it as the sort of nuttiness of embracing that idea in the first place as something that might work.

05:52Because I don't remember whether I think we actually sort of underlined this ourselves in the in the story.

06:01I didn't remember if the weather is completely validated within the book.

06:06But the idea of this notion that actually, you know, you needed to find something that was demonstrable and palpable sitting on Hitler's desk that actually pointed unequivocally to what the allies were intending to do was a piece of intelligence that carried enormous risks, which are spelled out in the film.

06:30I don't want to offer too many spoilers here, but it doesn't actually necessarily unravel the film because Admiral Godfrey in our story is the one to point out that if this does go wrong and something leaks in the story, you've blown everything.

06:47Because if it's realized that, you know, if the enemy consumes in such a way and realize that actually it's false, then it points unequivocally to the fact that Sicily is where they're going to attack.

07:01And the whole purpose of the piece of disinformation, I'm assuming your audience knows about this already, is to protect a massive invasion force, which would otherwise meet Armageddon essentially with colossal loss of life.

07:21And had that happened, and again, this is a spoiler, so I don't even want to say.

07:28And again, luckily, most of everybody hearing this is already going to know about it.

07:32I mean, had that happened, we would know this story very, very well.

07:36It's the fact that it didn't happen is what makes it only a story that not everybody knows all even now.

07:42And that's helpful to us, actually, in terms of the movie, because nobody necessarily, as you get right down to the last minutes of the film, you're not quite clear whether or not it did work or it didn't work.

07:58So I think in terms of the improbability of it, it's the idea of taking a dead body is a sort of never.

08:08I mean, it had a sort of validity, as you know, in the 20 committee, which was full of some published novelists and a lot of would be novelists, including one in particular, who sits in the middle of the story and became rather well known after it.

08:25But 10 years later, as you know, the kind of key writer of espionage fiction, there was a kind of attraction to an idea, ideas that in a certain kind of literature, particularly detective literature, keeps on turning up, which is to have a sack.

08:45The idea of a, you know, a poison deal with with significant documents in it, which looked like an extraordinary coup, but of course turned out to be false, which is basically the element of the idea.

08:59I think that's one of the things that struck me very, very much.

09:02I've watched the movie twice now, and there are two storytelling beats that I admire very much.

09:13One is that what to a casual viewer may appear to be military chatter.

09:20All those details are 100 percent accurate.

09:24And what may end up as just one throwaway line is, in fact, its own amazing story in there.

09:31And also, obviously, when at the end of the day, you have to you have to make a compelling narrative.

09:39So in this case, we see a little bit of time flexibility, like all the pieces are there.

09:44There may be just rearranged in order.

09:46Could you tell me about both of those decisions, the decisions to keep the specifics in there and also what it was like to to play a little bit around with it would be a little bit more specific about what those are.

10:00You're obviously very careful about your own spoilers, but go ahead and explain what those are.

10:04Well, I mean, for example, even the casual mention of it, I think Haversack Ruse is it only shows up as one line.

10:10But of course, you know, most people don't even know what that is.

10:13But it just reads as like, oh, military talk, something, something.

10:16But but of course, you know, the Haversack Ruse, which we in our telling of it, we had to explain the whole idea of, you know, false information buried in what appears to be an abandoned bag and so on. Yeah, exactly.

10:28I would love to hear about your process, about figuring out what of those moments made it into the final version.

10:36Well, I think that it's the things that there's two two things, two ways of answering that, which may, you know, one falls sort of slightly outside the genre or the zone that you're dealing with, particularly about, you know, cons and so forth.

10:54But one falls right into it.

10:56So one of the tasks of this was to manage the amount of information that the audience needs to be aware of in order to understand from a standing start.

11:08No knowledge whatsoever of the world we're dealing with, how intelligence operated at that time, what the purpose of intelligence was and so forth.

11:18So you actually had to clear the decks to a degree just to kind of, you know, navigate your way through that or allow an audience to navigate their way through it without getting hung up on the procedure too much.

11:34And the answer is slightly left handed answer to your question.

11:38Let's take the example of the Havisack ruse.

11:40There was something that was sort of irresistible in the story.

11:45That was also true, which was that these people were sort of professional spinners of fiction.

11:51I mean, you think of, OK, this is an espionage story.

11:55Most people think of espionage as being a calling, a job for life, you know, people who did nothing else but pass themselves off as somebody they're not supposed to be.

12:05This was an entirely specialized implementation of espionage, which had to do with feeding false information to the enemy to try and confuse the enemy or deceive the enemy of what allied intentions might have been.

12:24But in the midst of all of this, the people who were actually concocting these ideas and dreaming up the schemes and trying to find ways of doing it were themselves involved in the creation of fiction, specifically collective fiction.

12:39That's what the committee was.

12:41It was the nerve center of ideas.

12:44So they would strategize a particular idea about how a piece of information would arrive in enemy hands.

12:50And was that from a trusted spy already established within a network or had that, you know, was there reason to believe that that spy's cover had been blown in some way?

13:04So we realized and picked up on very quickly the kind of irresistible notion that they're all writers.

13:13They're all storytellers in the midst of this.

13:17Even Chumley is the one who is infuriated by the fact that you can't move for writers in the world that he's in.

13:26He was a very meticulous details man who was not in that zone.

13:31Montague hadn't written at that point, but of course became his own novelist once he told the story of it.

13:37And so we sort of came at the idea of establishing the idea for the story via something that was true, which is the Trout Memo, which was compiled by Ian Fleming, who was then working as an assistant to the head of Navy Intelligence, Godfrey.

13:56And so once we decided on that route, the whole idea of the nature of the fiction and the beginning of the fiction rose out of that idea, because our way into it really was that it was actually what the story is.

14:12It's the creation of a fiction that has to be passed off as truth.

14:18And in particular, our film goes into the way in which the creators of the fiction themselves start to govern the way the fiction develops.

14:30And eventually those people get lost in the fiction that they're creating.

14:36And having created the fiction, they lose control of what they're doing completely, because though they've done their damnedest to make the whole idea completely watertight, if that's the correct expression, or an idea that floats, let's put it another way.

14:52They actually can't guarantee that.

14:55And the story starts to unfold in a way.

14:59that again, you couldn't quite make up all the pieces that they meticulously put into place about how the material would land in Adolf Claus's hands because he was such a brilliant operator and had the whole espionage, all of his contacts sewn up in Huelva, which is one of the reasons why they chose Huelva, and so on, he never got anywhere near them because of a different set of circumstances, mainly having to do with the post-mortem and so on and so forth.

15:31So I think that we do, you're absolutely correct, feather into the storytelling certain key elements of it and just feed that into the audience's sort of awareness very early on, you know, the notion immediately of, which is Hester's contribution in the story, that if they're going to create a believable fiction, then there has to be a love interest.

16:03These are ideas that obviously an audience, a cinema audience will immediately click to, just simply apart from anything else, you know, the employment of the terms involved. Sorry, go ahead.

16:15Along those lines, I was really struck by the wonderful inverse parallel because when you're constructing a false narrative that's made up of pocket litter and letters on a dead body washing ashore, one of the things I would imagine that the 20 committee worried about is being too on the nose, having too perfect a narrative, complete with a love story and an incomplete hero's journey and so on.

16:41Whereas meanwhile, as a director, I would imagine that you are strongly pulled to how do we get this to a classic narrative with a love story, something that audiences are going to easily understand.

16:52So, I mean, again, actually, you know, the documents in the aforementioned, you know, four foot high pile of documents that were there actually contained those stories.

17:07There was, you know, a mountain of evidence that certainly, not about a mountain of evidence, there was certainly very clear evidence that the relationship between Bill and Pam was fleshed out in exactly the way that we actually show it in the story, meaning that they kind of role-played the various characters.

17:30He always referred to, Monty always referred to Jean Leslie as Pam long after the whole event was over and so on and so forth.

17:39He had that particular photograph on his shaving mirror, which his mother spotted on his shaving mirror.

17:44We didn't see the mother in our version of the film and actually wrote a letter to her daughter-in-law in America and said, I think it's time you came home.

17:54So, none of that was, but you're absolutely right.

17:58And actually Ben pointed out that, you know, they are almost on the nose, some of those, the sentiments expressed there, but they weren't really in a certain kind of a way.

18:10I mean, I have an angle into this because my own stepmother, who was my mother for a long part of my life, really, because my own mother died very young or relatively young in my life.

18:21And it's a great pity to me that she never lived to see this film.

18:27She died a year and a half ago because she was my witness to all of this and particularly the romantic aspect of it.

18:36You know, one of the most significant war films for me was A Brief Encounter and that is about a relationship that never was, but nevertheless of such vividness that it's sort of unforgettable.

18:50And actually that occupies the space in this film, you know, in exactly that way.

18:57I mean, we're off topic here a little bit in terms of deception, but nevertheless, I love the idea that these people who were spending their lives deceiving people end up deceiving themselves.

19:10So, you know, the characters in the film or at least in terms of Montague and Jean Leslie are not aware of what's happening to them.

19:18It actually is only triggered, their awareness of it is only triggered when the third part of the equation is actually convinced that something is going on, which isn't going on.

19:29And that they're just those sort of layers of the way the story reflects itself emotionally in the kind of deceptions that they're actually intent on creating just made it a very interesting piece.

19:43There's a couple of moments that you happen to mention things that we had discussed in our telling of the story, which would be, we often say here that the con man's gift is the asymmetry of time.

19:57He gets to spend years or months leading up to this tableau, that first impression, but then there's this moment of surrender and then the victim of a con really only has their gut instinct to go on. That's exactly right.

20:11And one of the things I appreciate so much about this movie is that we see just the incredible lengths to which people factor in every possibility.

20:20Was there ever a temptation at any part in production to depict Hitler looking at a stack of papers on his desk and trying to decide?

20:35Well, I suppose we have a surrogate for that in the story, which is an imagined scene.

20:40But in the magic of film, you never have to say whether it's imagined or whether it's actually literally true.

20:48At the moment of existential dread that suddenly envelop the central characters when they fear that actually the deception has been exposed.

21:02I mean, correctly fear it.

21:05In our version of the story, there's a line that Montague, where they essentially grasp at the idea, well, maybe it's fallen into the right hands because if our suspicions or rumors, they're no more than rumors at that point, that there is an anti-Hitler faction.

21:23If they've fallen into the hands of that anti-Hitler faction, then possibly the outcome will be a good one.

21:32And Montague's response to that is the line, that's either true or it's a fiction that we want to be true, which exactly explodes the moment that you're talking about.

21:44And so the question of whether or not we were tempted to show Hitler looking at them, we actually have that at one remove really.

21:56I mean, Hitler is a dangerous character to introduce it to a movie.

22:01And it was not a temptation I was ever wanting to go towards in any way, just simply because you sort of blow your own story out of the water because he's too big an idea to encompass as it also ran in the story, particularly in a very late intervention like that.

22:22But on the other hand, von Roehner is a character you can see, not a character we necessarily know and we know just in the trappings of where he is, how close he is to the center of everything that's going on.

22:34And it always seemed interesting to me not to tell people something is true, let them try and guess whether it's true or not, which is exactly the situation that the characters are in.

22:47Navigating your way through a fiction that you're presented, which is essentially what happens to an audience watching a film, is precisely what the subject of this film is.

22:59It's about guesswork and following hunches.

23:01And, oh, I think that person did it.

23:03No, I think that person did it and so forth.

23:06That's part of the pleasure of watching a film like this is how, what actually happens is not what you'd expect at all.

23:14And the fact that there are so many unanswered questions, like, I mean, even the best historians have unanswered questions at this point.

23:25Of course, there are still unanswered questions, still controversies that are going on.

23:30Was it really a Welsh tramp, the body, and so on and so forth.

23:35Well, and even the question of whether or not Glendower or Michael committed suicide or just was so hungry he ate some bread and didn't know that there was rat poison in it. Precisely.

23:45And I suppose when you need to keep things moving along in a film and tell a story of intrigue and affection and storytelling and also the fate of the free world, you don't get to linger as much as I assume everyone would like.

24:03But I think that one of the interesting things about this was definitely the challenge of making it as a screenplay is the way one stage of the situation gives way to another, gives way to another, gives way to another.

24:16And what's happening throughout all of that, of course, is the deepening awareness you have of the stakes that are actually involved and how intense and sort of disorienting the importance of what they're doing is and indeed, most crucially, the risks of it going wrong.

24:39But you're right, you do, we spotted that immediately, that you have to move through this story quickly.

24:48And indeed, it's got a ticking clock. Right.

24:51They had to come up with it and there was nobody more impatient than Churchill to have them getting on with it, to get on with it even before they were possibly completely ready to do it.

25:02But that's very helpful.

25:04I rather adored the kind of, like you said earlier, all the elements are there and they're all accurate, but you have to decide what order to tell them for narrative punch.

25:20And opening with, let's start, let's find a body.

25:24Obviously, I was like, whoop, but I loved what that did.

25:29It made it very visceral and very real, the grim task that Cholmondeley and Montague were about to embark upon. Yes, exactly.

25:38Well, and there's another important thing.

25:40I mean, it's obviously, to some extent, a kind of a comical idea.

25:44It's almost like the finding of the body or particularly the use they try to put the body to to come up with a- And I'm so glad that you actually depicted their attempts to take photos. I know.

25:58Well, it's straight out of a Monty Python story, isn't it, really?

26:03But again, I really liked that about the outlines of the story, really, that, of course, the idea of, why don't you introduce a dead body into the center of a plan?

26:17There's, you know, Gallo's humor is just lurking around every corner all the time.

26:22And, but interestingly, it was a way of putting into the center of the story the kind of emotional make-weight of the whole film, which is the, weirdly, the fiction that they create attaches to a real person, attaches to a man who never had a life.

26:42I mean, never had a life that was worth celebrating or was important or had anything to do with his own volition.

26:50And I think that definitely comes through when his sister, I believe, shows up and reminds us that this is a human being when we have the tender moment of sending the body adrift, when we have the modification of the gravestones and so on. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

27:07It's that, that's the emotional story that sort of lies underneath the whole thing in a funny kind of a way.

27:14And so there was one moment that was in the book and I would imagine that it just wouldn't fit emotionally for where we are in the movie. Yeah.

27:26I personally was fascinated by the tale of, whoopsie doodle, this canister can't be sunk. Yes.

27:32It's this almost slapstick moment at the height of the most important part of the journey.

27:39I know, I know.

27:41It's just a kind of diversion and footnote that of course you could pull off in a book.

27:48And it was ridiculous.

27:49I mean, they, but of course in our story, it's quite obvious that we're gonna go with the body rather than go back to the canister.

27:58They can't get to sink.

28:00You know, it was constructed so brilliantly to keep decomposition out, but they couldn't actually dispose of it.

28:07There are many things like that.

28:10I mean, we had to get rid of the whole character of Spillsbury, for example, who considered himself the only, you know, forensic and not, that's the word I'm looking for, you know, I'm suddenly losing the term for it.

28:28But anyway, the person who could actually study bodies and figure out how they died. Oh, the coroner. Exactly.

28:36Well, coroner, yes, absolutely.

28:37We now call him something different, don't we?

28:40I'm trying to remember what it is.

28:42Anyway, that character was a supremely arrogant man.

28:45He said, well, the only person who would be able to tell how this body died would be me.

28:50And there's nobody like me who exists anywhere in Spain.

28:52So you've got no worries whatsoever.

28:54So it occurs to me that you're in a bit of a unique position at this moment in that most of the people listening to this discussion have already gotten the broad strokes of the story.

29:06What, and obviously most people who are watching it, this is their first exposure to the narrative, but knowing that people are familiar with the facts, what is it that you're hoping most people will discover in your telling of this version?

29:23I guess, you know, in a way there is a sense in which it is the story of unsung heroes, you know, people who were working with every sinew of their body and every part of their brain and their own emotional commitment to something that was absolutely as crucial as any other effort, you know, and a war is made up of endless versions of that. stories.

29:57But this is, I suppose, kind of modern sort of story in the sense that it's a part of the war we don't know that much about.

30:08And in a funny kind of a way, what I liked about the story, and which makes it kind of modern to me in a way, is that once they've done this sort of heroic act of creating this extraordinary thing, they're plunged into a world where they're suddenly detached from it, as we talked about, that they don't have any control over it and have to watch aghast as it looks as if it might go wrong in its very first moments.

30:38And until a ghastly possibility seems to occur that actually it's blown.

30:44And therefore, characteristically in terms of war stories, again, this is slightly at a tangent from your particular issue with, you know, exploding cons and so forth, is that you arrive at instead of what we think of as heroes and villains, winners and losers, and mighty feats of combat, you have two people who feel almost irrelevant to what has occurred, because of course, really, the people who are fighting the war physically and on the front line and in the face of the most overwhelming odds, which I think an audience feels at the end of this film, because the contrast with them down in their bunker, unaware of what's going on, leaves them as sort of irrelevant to what they've achieved.

31:47At the end, there's no sense that they're being or able to look upon themselves as heroes, at least in our version of the story that they haven't, don't seem to have saved themselves, even though they saved some other lives, they feel kind of hollowed out by it.

32:05That felt a very interesting emotion to me at the end.

32:08I'm not saying it was necessarily true, you know.

32:11But I would agree.

32:12I think that there is, you know, as we call it that moment of surrender, that moment that it's out of your hands, and this lottery ticket is either going to pay off or not.

32:21And you have to sit there uncomfortably, waiting for a teletype to give you the message.

32:26I adored this movie so much.

32:27I adored the fact that we have these core archetypes of, in Chumlee, we have the sort of nerd mechanic, who maybe is a little bit too on the nose by naming his project, Project Trojan horse.

32:44We have Montague, who brings a sense of heart and poetry, maybe a bit too much as he finds himself entangled with with with Jean, who's the face and joie de vivre of the character, but also the voice of Pam in the form of Hester.

33:03All of it, I think it becomes so approachable so quickly and your ability to tell this story visually is just fantastic. Oh, great.

33:13Well, I'm very pleased to hear it.

33:16Very pleased to hear.

33:17I do have one long standing issue.

33:19We noticed that one of the actors in this story was also in a depiction of a fraud that took place on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

33:35And we looked up online and I just need a final answer.

33:39Is it Matthew McFadian or McFadian?

33:41Because we said it both ways.

33:42We don't know which one is right. McFadian.

33:45Finally, we have a real answer.

33:48Happy to be able to provide it.

33:52John, thank you so much for joining us.

33:55I'm so, so thrilled that you're bringing the story to so many people.

33:58Available on Netflix in the United States, May 11th. Is that right?

34:01I believe that's right. Yeah, absolutely.

34:03Thank you again for your time. No, thank you. Very enjoyable discussion. All right. Take care.

34:10Special thanks to Netflix for hooking us up with a pre-release copy of Operation Mincemeat.

34:22It was just a blast.

34:23Special thanks also to John Madden for spending time out of his busy, busy schedule to chat with us.

34:29I know what you're thinking.

34:31Let's talk And the good news is we are already in pre-pre-production and we are so excited that I can't say a dang thing about it.

34:48You are making it possible for us to do our first boots on the ground investigation, original reporting.

34:55It's going to be big, it's going to be exciting.

34:58It's going to be unpredictable.

35:00And it's all because of you guys.

35:02We're going to keep you updated as soon as we can.

35:06But I'm not gonna lie, we're gonna be quiet for a little bit.

35:10Meanwhile, share with your friends, write us directly at world's greatest con at gmail. com.

35:14And we'll see you next time.

35:17Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

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