postPerspective Update

Official Secrets director Gavin Hood
talks workflow on this real-life thriller
By Iain Blair

South African writer/director Gavin Hood burst onto the international scene when he wrote and directed 2005’s Oscar-winning Tsotsi. The film, which was nominated for a Golden Globe and a BAFTA, won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).

Hood followed that success with the harrowing political drama Rendition, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the sci-fi offering Ender’s Game and the thriller Eye in the Sky.

For his new film, Official Secrets, Hood returns to the murky world of government secrets and political double-dealing with a true but largely forgotten story that could have prevented the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent war. It tells the gripping story of Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley), a British intelligence specialist whose job involves routine handling of classified information. In 2003, in the lead up to the Iraq War, Gun receives a memo from the NSA with a shocking directive: the United States is enlisting Britain’s help in collecting compromising information on United Nations Security Council members in order to blackmail them into voting in favor of an invasion of Iraq.

I recently spoke with Hood about his workflow and making the film — which co-stars Ralph Fiennes as Gun’s lawyer and Matt Smith as journalist Martin Bright, who helped break this incredible story.

What attracted you to this project?
That personal angle. Here’s a person who’s not a big political figure, but just someone going about her job. She comes across something that just smells rotten and decides she must say so. I thought, this could be any of us, in any organization, and who would be brave enough to become a whistleblower and risk losing our job in order to reveal the truth? She also risked losing her freedom as well, so whatever you think politically, she was very brave in following her conscience. I was intrigued right away by this character but not sure I actually wanted to do it.

I flew to London to meet Katharine. I sat down with herfor a few days, and each day we’d just talk and work for hours. I’d take all these notes and over those five days, I think I won her trust. The main thing was, I just let her tell me about the events and what really happened without trying to make it into something more “Hollywood” or more exciting in terms of a movie. After that, I felt like, “OK, we can do this.”