There have been many films over the decades based on the life of Winston Churchill and the momentous things the former Prime Minister did during the war. Indeed, there is a separate film due for release later this year called Darkest Hour, with Gary Oldman in the lead role, but not many have looked inwards at the man himself.
In Churchill, the new film directed by Jonathan Teplitsky (The Railway Man), the story focuses not just on the 96 hours before D-Day but also what Churchill was thinking in the days leading up to it.
It was that exploration of the human behind the man that drew the director to the project:
“When you think of Churchill, you think of all sorts of greatness and what have you but the script wasn’t that – it was more about exploring the human being behind that and the fascinated me because I think there’s plenty out there about the great achievements but what I thought as a filmmaker was that this was very precise and very personal, very intimate little portrait.
Once Teplitsky signed on, he spent many months researching with writer Alex von Tunzelmann about Churchill and trying to find out as much as they could about what was going through his mind, both professionally and privately, and how he was reacting to losing some of his power as the Americans began to take a strong foothold in the war. Indeed that more than anything else was what fascinated the director, saying:
“The more I talked to Alex and the more I read stuff about Churchill, this was a time in the lead up to D-Day he was a very isolated character, both in terms of world leaders and running the war – the Americans and Eisenhower and come in to lead the allied effort – Churchill had been marginalised to a degree and his influence wasn’t what it was four years earlier when he was leading Britain through the Blitz, so that how does someone who has got to the top find a purpose and a will to keep going once all those things were taken away from him.”
At the forefront of the film is a brilliant performance from Brian Cox in the lead role with Scottish actor giving one of the best performances of his career here. One of his inspirations for the role, however, came from an unlikely place: Family Guy‘s Stewie Griffin. The actor saw the Seth Macfarlane creation one day and saw Churchill, and coupled with his want to put on weight for the role rather than wear prosthetics, was enough for Teplitsky to realise he had the perfect man for the role.
“A little bit. He’s been preparing for this for many years, even before this film was there in a way as apparently twenty years ago there was a project that may have happened that didn’t. But he’s obviously been thinking about it a lot and he talked about all those things you mentioned about where to pitch it and there is an element to the film that is a certain Shakespearean quality to it… Doing it with Brian was an amazing experience, it really was.”
Churchill is released in UK cinemas on June 16th.
