I love William Gibson.
— Morten Tyldum
To me, Alan Turing was a mystery - it was sort of like something I needed to unravel. And he was also obsessed with puzzles. So I wanted to make the movie like a mystery, like a puzzle that you're piecing together.
You find a story - or more importantly, you find some characters - that you want to be around as a filmmaker. The style and how we're going to shoot it and how we're going to design it and how it's all going to feel and look depends on that story. They tell me how I should shoot it.
I left Norway after high school and moved to Manhattan and went to film school in Manhattan. That's when I really found out that this was my calling and what I wanted to do.
Sci-fi is about 'what if this happened,' and 'what would you do.' You can play around with social dilemmas, or look at society or, in my case, relationships, in a very different way.
Love is not selfish. Love is something else.
I don't think you pick your projects; you just fall in love with it, and it just becomes something you have to do.
When you watch a Hitchcock movie, you feel like learning back because there's a master in control.
'The Imitation Game' is a very British film.
Just because someone or something thinks differently than you do, it doesn't mean that it's not thinking.
Trying to explain Turing's work in encryption and decryption? It's complicated.
If I did the structure and had this thing about a straight character, I would never have a sex scene to prove that he's heterosexual. If I have a gay character in a movie, I need to have a sex scene in it - just to prove that he's gay?
It's a blessing to find a project you feel you have to make or you'll die.
I love when people say 'Imitation Game' is such a crowd pleaser.
We're very skeptical of people who are too perfect.
Seeing the first edit is the worst.
I'm from Norway, but I always felt like I'd grown up with British culture.
I love using drama and humour.
In every Kubrick movie, there is so much great thought put into the surroundings. It's almost like the sets are huge characters in the movie at all times.
It's great to try another format and be part of telling a story over ten episodes.
Sometimes I think I don't do anything but make, watch, and talk about films.
Thank God sci-fi has moved away from spaceships fighting aliens! Now it's a place where you can explore contemporary issues or emotional feelings. You can put it all in a different setting.
What you want, as a filmmaker, is to be obsessed with and fall in love with the material.
The most serious problem doing biography is the matter of time because you have to shape events into a narrative of two hours; you have to create a dramatic arc. That can be a challenge.
I'm a Coen Brothers fan - especially their early work.
If you want the human psyche, how we deal with humans in these situations, WWII is a very tangled place to go.
To me, Turing is as much of a philosopher as he is a mathematician because his ideas deal with what it means to think.
I'm very tired, but this is what every filmmaker dreams about: that their $15 million, under-the-radar film is now being seen by so many people.
It's not every actor that can play a genius.
Turing was very strong and driven and, at the same, so awkward and fragile.
The more shaded, flawed characters that are struggling, I think there's something very relatable about that.
I don't think the biggest crime is to not sympathize with people. I think the biggest crime is to not be interested.
I don't see myself directing the same movie twice.
We had everything from the BBC on our TV, so British drama seems very close to home.
As a filmmaker, I don't want to limit myself to one kind of movie. After 'Headhunters,' I went to Hollywood and read a lot of scripts: lots of action thrillers and heist movies, and superhero films.
Bob Dylan is someone that - I don't care how long into the future it is - somebody will still play Bob Dylan. He will always survive.
Making a movie is universal. Directing a movie is universal; it's a universal language.
I didn't know anybody who was a filmmaker - there was no film industry where I grew up. I never knew what a director really did until I was in high school and I started reading up about it. I've always loved films, and I always felt like a storyteller.
As a director, one of my biggest jobs is trying to see what actually works for the actor.
You first do the assembly cut, which is basically the cut that mirrors the script. You've got to start with that.
I love Fincher, as he has a great atmosphere and intensity. Also, I grew up watching Hitchcock movies, and there was something elegant in the way he plays with you and plays with the character and tricks you.
We have to remind ourselves that what we take for granted now is hard-won.
World War II was the last 'pure' war. It was purely heroic. There was someone who tried to conquer the world, who tried to exterminate people.
I thought I knew who Alan Turing was. I've always loved history, and I was actually shocked by how little I actually knew. I was amazed this wasn't common knowledge. Why wasn't he on the front covers of my history books? He's one of the great thinkers of the last century, and he was sort of pushed into the shadows.
I was shocked that I knew so little about Alan Turing. Then I started to read about him, and I got a little obsessed.
I wanted to make a movie that celebrates the outsider, the one who is different, the one who is not normal - and show how important that is.
I always wanted to do a sci-fi movie, but most sci-fi scripts are either about saving the planet or fighting aliens.
We like flawed people.
I don't know if it's a sadistic side or whatever, but you take characters and put them in really awful situations and make them go through that. And it's very satisfying as a director to explore that, to tell those stories and to explore those themes, because it is so human.
Sometimes you read something, and you have to read more and more about the background.
