Enigma
Short description
Enigma is a wartime mystery set in 1943, when the codebreakers at Bletchley Park face a crisis: the German navy has changed the settings used by its Enigma machines, leaving Allied convoys crossing the Atlantic exposed to attack. Tom Jericho, a brilliant young mathematician who had broken the earlier code, is called back to the secret British facility after a breakdown. He is soon drawn into a second, personal problem: Claire, the woman he loves, has disappeared, and a spy is suspected inside Bletchley Park. With help from Hester Wallace, Claire's friend and colleague, Jericho tries to solve both puzzles while a security agent named Wigram pursues his own investigation.
Michael Apted directed the film, the fourteenth of nineteen features in his career in the chronological order given, following The World Is Not Enough and preceding Enough. Tom Stoppard wrote the screenplay, and the producers were Mick Jagger, Lorne Michaels and David Brown. Dougray Scott plays Jericho, Kate Winslet plays Hester, and Saffron Burrows plays Claire; Jeremy Northam, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Tom Hollander appear among the cast of twenty-seven credited performers.
Released in 2001 and running 119 minutes, the film blends drama, mystery, romance, thriller and war elements, and was made across several countries with Miramax, Broadway Video, Intermedia and Senator Film involved. It took about 16 million dollars worldwide. On IMDb it holds 6.4 from roughly 23,000 votes, on TMDB 6.3 from 361 votes, while critics gave it 6.7 from 104 reviews, slightly above the audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- Bletchley Park is a manor house in Bletchley, Buckinghamshire. During World War II, it housed the main codebreaking division of Great Britain, then known as the Government Code and Cypher School. It was here that Operation Ultra was planned to decipher Enigma messages. London officially acknowledged the existence of the division only in the 1970s.
- One of the reasons for deciding to make this film was the indignation of British World War II veterans, both military and civilian, caused by the release of Jonathan Mostow's war drama "U-571" (2000), which attributed the credit for capturing the "Enigma" machine to the Allied forces exclusively to the Americans. (Although the filmmakers indicated that the plot was fictional.)
- When Kate Winslet's character deciphers a long list of Polish surnames, the surname Zygański is shown in close-up. Henryk Zygalski (1908-1978) was a Polish cryptographer who, along with his colleagues, cracked the mechanism of the Enigma cipher machine.
- The character of Dugrey Scott is based on the mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turing (1912-1954).
- The mansion in Bletchley Park is not the same mansion that housed the Government Code and Cypher School during World War II. The filmmakers did not like that particular mansion, so they filmed at a different building.
- During the filming, Kate Winslet was pregnant, so when her character becomes pregnant towards the end of the film, she did not require a prosthetic belly.
- Several women who served at Bletchley Park during the war criticized Kate Winslet for her tasteless outfit and generally unpretentious appearance in the film. The women claimed that, despite the wartime conditions, they always tried to dress impeccably. The actress replied that she had no idea how her character dressed and passed the buck to costume designer Shirley Russell (1935-2002).
- The original Enigma coding device was provided to the film crew by its owner – Mick Jagger.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
