(Photo: Netflix)
John Madden, director of the Oscar-winning 1998 film Shakespeare in Love, knows how to assemble a stellar cast. For 2012's The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its 2015 sequel The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, he brought together Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Dev Patel and Penelope Wilton for two touching stories about a motley crew of Brits living in an Indian retirement hotel.
His latest film Operation Mincemeat tells the story of a real-life motley crew who pulled off an incredible military deception sting during World War II. It would be a shame to give away all the intricate details, but it involved getting a fake Allied battle plan onto Adolf Hitler's desk via a drowned soldier who never really existed.
Captain William Martin, as the fictitious soldier was named, had an elaborate backstory invented for him by intelligence officers Ewan Montagu (Colin Firth), Charles Cholmondeley (Matthew Macfadyen), and ingenious colleagues played by Wilton and Kelly Macdonald. Here, Madden gives an insight into the making of this surprising and deeply poignant film.
Operation Mincemeat is such a strange yet fascinating story. What made you want to make it into a film?
Well, it wasn't until the mid-1990s that the MI5 files on Operation Mincemeat were actually declassified. Ben Macintyre then spent three or four years exploring and researching and compiling it all into his book, which came to me via [screenwriter] Michelle Ashford when we were working on Masters of Sex. She said to me: 'I won't tell you anything about it, but I think it's an interesting read, and let me know if you think there's a film in there.' I got to the end of this amazing, whacked-out story filled with such a bizarre collection of characters and thought there were several films in there! 
How did you decide what to focus on?
I can't pretend we knew exactly how to tell this story after reading the book; it was quite a long developmental process to balance all this material. I mean, it's a story stuffed with real-life writers including one iconic writer, Ian Fleming, who played a peripheral role in Operation Mincemeat 10 years before he wrote the first Bond book. But I definitely thought there was some potential to tell quite an emotional story about how the fictional soldier these people created was shaped by what was going on in their lives at the time. They're a rather odd bunch of characters, in a way, that includes two women who are very close to the center of the story, doing jobs you wouldn't necessarily expect them to be doing. 

After watching the film, it's difficult to imagine any other actors playing these roles. How did you go about assembling the cast?
The first part I offered was actually Winston Churchill, and Simon Russell Beale said yes straight away after reading the script. But the really challenging ones were obviously Montagu and Cholmondeley. We took a leap early on in adjusting Montagu's age because Colin is slightly older than the real-life Montagu. But weirdly, a 41-year-old man in the 1940s would have looked a lot like a 61-year-old man [like Firth] now. Colin just felt like a perfect fit for this character who has this intense integrity and a kind of nobility about him. And I can only tell you that Matthew would always have been the perfect casting [as Cholmondeley], but I was stymied on that because of Succession season three, which was due to shoot at the same time as us. But then it turned out that Succession needed more of a hiatus to get the scripts ready, so suddenly Matthew became available and I sent him the script. He said yes almost immediately; I think he just really understood who that character was. 
The character's moral conflict feels like a perfect fit for him.
It's so much in his wheelhouse. He's such a clever, interesting actor: sort of a cross between a leading man and a character actor. And the combination of Colin and Matthew together just seemed fabulous to me. And from there, we built the cast outwards with Kelly Macdonald and so on. I have to say, Penelope Wilton is a friend of mine and this is the third film I've made with her, so she was installed in my head [as organizational whiz Hester Leggett] from the very start, really.
Was it difficult to know how much Churchill to put into the film? Because he's such an iconic figure and this isn't really his story, I'm guessing too much could have been distracting?
That's a perfectly good question. We were never going to make him a central character because this film isn't about the corridors of power; it's about a hidden war that goes on in a small basement room that doesn't even have any windows. It's a world we don't normally see in World War II movies and quite a strange world to create, actually, because it's not typically cinematic. We never had Churchill appearing in more than two scenes, but because Simon's characterization is so good, I did feel slightly greedy and wonder whether we could have him back at the end of the film. But ultimately we realized we couldn't bring him back because the characters are in a different world by then. So at that point, Churchill is at the end of a telex and that's the way it should be.
Operation Mincemeat is currently available for streaming over at Netflix now.
Are you keen to learn about the behind-the-scenes of moviemaking?