OFFICIAL SECRETS
The truth about Keira Knightley’s new whistleblower drama.
In 2003, GCHQ translator Katharine Gun turned whistleblower by leaking documents that shed a new, disturbing light on the invasion of Iraq. Her story is captured in Gavin Hood’s drama Official Secrets, starring Keira Knightley, Matt Smith and Ralph Fiennes. Total Film visits the set to discover a film determined to tell the truth.
Today, the beautiful first-floor interior of Bradford City Hall is awash with crew, cables, cameras and a rather illustrious cast. The film is Official Secrets, Gavin Hood’s stirring account of British whistleblower Katharine Gun. The set is the antechambers of the Old Bailey, the country’s most venerable court of law. And Gun – played by Keira Knightley – is about to learn her fate after spending eight months on bail.
A GCHQ translator, Gun stumbled across a memo in early 2003 from America’s National Security Agency urging its British ally to coerce members of the UN Security Council to vote for the impending war in Iraq. “It was a line that I didn’t think we should cross,” explains Gun, when Total Film speaks with her via Skype. Instinctively, at the time, she smuggled the memo.
“It was a leak that was trying to save lives,” suggests Knightley.
While Gun might be less famous than whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, her actions didn’t go unnoticed. Daniel Ellsberg, the ex-US military analyst responsible for exposing the Pentagon Papers during the Nixon administration, called Gun’s work “the most important and courageous leak I have ever seen”. It was this bravery that first intrigued Hood, a former lawyer whose politically charged credits include Eye In The Sky and Rendition.
“The question the film asks for any of us is, ‘When do you speak up?’” he says. “Any of us. In any circumstance. For most of us, when faced with the question of should we speak up, whether we work for Harvey Weinstein or for a bank we think is doing something wrong or an accounting firm… when do we, as people within an organisation,
speak up at the risk of losing our job? And the truth is, most people tend to support the status quo. We say nothing and say nothing until things are really rotten.”
For Knightley, taking on Official Secrets was a chance to revisit a formative time in her life. She was 17 when the conflict began. “The war in Iraq was the first war I was massively aware of,” she tells TF. “So I think people of my generation – it shaped our world view of politics.” Moreover, her personal fascination with current affairs has not, until now, intersected with her work. “I love a political drama. It’s what I enjoy watching. I’ve always wanted to do something like this and I’ve never been offered anything like [it] before.”
BREAKING COVER
What did she feel when she first read the script? “Anger,” she replies, bluntly. “I think anger’s a big one and I suspect it will be with people that watch it.” Back when Gun’s story broke, Knightley was in the States “and it obviously wasn’t really covered there at all”, but she’s hardly alone. “I thought it was really interesting that there was a story that is such a significant part of modern history that wasn’t really known about or remembered.”
While Gun’s actions were chronicled in Marcia and Thomas Mitchell’s 2008 book The Spy Who Tried To Stop A War: Katharine Gun And The Secret Plot To Sanction The Iraq Invasion, there’s no question that Hood’s film will bring her leak – and the aftermath – to a much wider audience, even spotlighting the reporters who took the story public. In today’s scene, it’s the first time Gun has met Martin Bright (Matt Smith), the Observer journalist who received the leaked memo from a third-party source and must verify its credibility.
In the background stands a glass display case, showing off judicial wigs. But all eyes are on Knightley, dressed in beige trousers and a black coat, as she meets Smith’s character, sporting a navy suit and earnest frown. “All our institutions failed us,” he says, pointing out that even his paper supported the war in Iraq. Hood looks pleased. “We have good stuff. This is a bonus,” he notes, taking time out to adjust a lock of Knightley’s hair after the third take.
Fortunately for Smith, he already knew Bright, a consultant on 2007 BBC drama Party Animals during his time as political editor of the New Statesman. It was Bright who first contacted Smith about playing him in Official Secrets. “He’s got a kind of intensity that is important… that kind of journalism involves a degree of intensity,” says Bright. “There’s a seriousness involved that he was very aware of, so it did strike me that he was someone who could take on that role.”
Smith, who was coming directly off playing Charles Manson in Charlie Says, took his leave from Bright when it came to preparing. “He texted me something, a very interesting text,” he muses in the green room, as he proffers Total Film a packet of Iced Gems. “[It said], ‘All you need to know is the advice of the old Sunday Times hack Nick Tomalin. The main attributes of a good journalist were: rat-like cunning, plausible manner and a little literary ability.’”
Scripted by Hood, who worked from a screenplay by Gregory and Sara Bernstein, Official Secrets is unusual in that it dares to pass the baton from one lead character to the next, from Gun to Bright and finally Gun’s lawyer Ben Emmerson, played by Ralph Fiennes. “I think what Gavin is very good at is that he only tells the story he needs to tell,” says Smith. “This is Katharine’s story. But there is a story about getting this to print in a newspaper… it’s like All The President’s Men.”
If this was an American studio film, then undoubtedly the newsroom sequences would have been condensed and characters amalgamated. “That would, I suppose, be the usual Hollywood logic; you’d have to have this superhero journalist who did everything,” says Bright. “But that wasn’t the reality. I think it would have been wrong to represent the story having just been broken by me.”
Instead, Official Secrets presents the team effort it took to authenticate the story before going to print, with guidance from The Observer’s editor Roger Alton (Conleth Hill), foreign affairs editor Peter Beaumont (Matthew Goode) and US correspondent Ed Vulliamy (Rhys Ifans), who has the tricky job of establishing if Frank Koza – the NSA chief of staff who sent the memo – was real.
Hood was scrupulous about his research into a story that touches the very highest levels of government, keen to present it with “as little poetic licence as possible”, as Bright puts it. The director spent five days in London interviewing Gun, who was understandably nervous about seeing this painful portion of her life put on screen. “I was very reassured when I met him,” she explains. “It showed us he really had that drive to get it going.”
Keen to avoid sensationalising Gun’s story into a Hollywood-style thriller, Hood’s big challenge was compressing events that took place over a year into two hours. “What none of us wanted,” says Hood, “was to in any way invent material events that weren’t supported by what actually happened. So that we could legitimately say at the front of the film: this is a true story. Do we say ‘Based on a true story?’ No! This is a true story.”
Knightley, who diligently worked her way through the post-Iraq Chilcot Report to prep, also spent time with Gun, meeting her in a restaurant with Hood before the shoot began. “She’s in quite a tricky position because if you really question her on it, she is still bound by the Official Secrets Act. I’m not a journalist, I’m an actress. So I didn’t feel it was my place to push her into revealing to me any more than she felt comfortable and that she had already revealed to go into the script.”
While Knightley was able to reunite with Fiennes a decade on from their 2008 film The Duchess, there was little time for nostalgia. During postproduction on his film The White Crow, Fiennes carved out some time to meet Emmerson, the lawyer who conjures up an extraordinary defence for Gun. “He has a very strong presence, which can be intimidating if he chooses it to be,” says Fiennes. “You feel the force of someone who will take on tough causes because there is an ethical urgency within his work… I tried to take some of that into the part.”
While the remainder of the 38-day shoot will take the cast and crew across the north of England – Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds – the story spans three continents with scenes in Washington DC and Iraq (a bombed-out site craftily recreated at Pilkington Glass Factory in St. Helens, Merseyside). “It does feel quite pertinent to now,” comments Smith, munching on another Iced Gem. “And also women speaking up, and taking a stand. There’s a lot of things that feel very present.”
After its debut at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, Official Secrets is now set to arrive in UK cinemas, “revisiting the pain of what this country inflicted on others,” as Fiennes succinctly puts it. Sixteen years on, will it bring Gun’s story back into the headlines? “I can’t see it’s going to steer us away from the crisis of Brexit,” the actor adds, wryly, but there’s no question that Official Secrets is an underdog story of huge national importance.
“You look at the story of Katharine Gun and you get it,” says Hood. “It’s not that complicated. It’s very simple. We were lied to. A woman exposed that lie and paid a heavy personal price.” Hood believes his film takes down our leaders “off some mythical, complicated pedestal” and exposes the “astonishing incompetence” that led us to war. “The planning and the management by individuals, like Tony Blair, George Bush, [Donald] Rumsfeld, [Dick] Cheney and Colin Powell is abominably, pathetically bad,” he spits. The anger remains.
‘THIS IS SUCH A SIGNIFICANT PART OF MODERN HISTORY THAT’S NOT KNOWN’
KEIRA KNIGHTLEY