Mike talks to Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander, co-writers of VALKYRIE

By Michael J Edwards / July 1, 2011

The UK release of VALKYRIE is imminent, so here at OWF we decided to catch up with Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander to get some behind the scenes gossip on this huge release. Enjoy! The film was a bit like those old classics you now see on TV at the holiday season like WHERE EAGLES DARE, THE GUNS OF NAVARONE...

CM: Yup. That was our inspiration. We really liked THE GREAT ESCAPE and WHERE EAGLES DARE. In fact, in the earlier cut when a character walked into the room there would be the titles under them. Unfortunately a contemporary American audience couldn't take that. When we tested it they kept saying 'there's so many characters to keep track of!' and we were just thinking that there aren't a lot of characters in this movie. But when we pulled that out it kind of went away. They must've been thinking that because they were reading it they'd have to remember who that person is!

In some ways the movie sound like the set-up for a bad joke doesn't it? You've got a one-armed assassin, with one eye, and the good hand is missing fingers.

CM: That was our gag on the set, you'd have the war ministry and someone would pick up the phone and say "Let me get this straight. You sent who???"

Are you relying on the presence of Bryan Singer and Tom Cruise to generate the enough publicity so that everyone who was unaware of this story becomes aware of it?

CM: The way we look at it is that, from a commercial standpoint, the movie has so much going against it. It appears to be a World War II movie, it appears to be only about Germans and it appears to not end very well. So at that point we stopped worrying about it and focussed on the fact it's just a really good story. It's interesting though, at the start people were asking 'Why's he wearing that eye patch?', thinking it was some kind of actorly affectation like Tom Cruise is bucking for awards! But we always latch it to the fact that here was Tom playing the protagonist of a movie where he was wearing an eye patch and a German military uniform with a swastika on it, all the villainous iconography, and yet he was this incredibly moral man. He had everything but the hook!

Nathan, from what I read you were the guardian of the historical timeline.

NA: When Chris first approached me with the project I did a great deal of research. Basically our process was that we created a timeline of all the events and started to whittle that down to shape what he script would ultimately become. So there was a lot of research.

With an actor like Tom Cruise attached, did you have to be a little flexible with history? I mean Stauffenberg was kind of the bag man rather than the mastermind.

NA: Well, he was pretty key. When we started out the research we did go into it seeing him as the 'bag man', but as we got more and more into it we realised that he played a much bigger role in the conspiracy, and in the German resistance, than we were aware of. We never set out to make a biopic of Stauffenberg, we wanted to show the German resistance but he became the obvious character to follow this story through.

How deep did you go with your research into the period?

NA: Well we were really helped by our friends at the SS and the Gestapo, they were the original research nuts. They even went as far as to collect pieces of the briefcase and glue it back together. There's an image from their archives of all the pieces put back together, so July 20th is incredibly well-documented. And when we got into Berlin and started to be in the location and meet relatives of people involved, that really helped inform the script. So the script even evolved as we were shooting.

CM: The moment where Haeften walks out and stands in front of Stauffenberg, that was reconstructed from eyewitness testimony and the problem was we were on the exact spot where he died and had reconstructed the scene to be exactly like it was that day from sketches and photographs. But when you had the firing squad stood there shooting at both men they'd have been killed at the same time. So we had to reassess what actually happened and the military advisors were shouting at us telling us that if they said 'fire' they'd shout, and if not they wouldn't. But the truth of the matter was that the military advisors were faced with the fact that however you look at it the firing squad were not following orders, that night military protocol had broken down to such a degree that even the firing squad weren't doing what they were supposed to do. We'd never have known that if we weren't reconstructing that on the spot.

I read that a lot of the film was subject to rewrites, was what you shot significantly different from the original script?

NA: Structurally it's the same movie we originally wrote. What the rewriting was was just refining and making everything as clear as possible. We had a process whereby at weekends we'd read the script leaving out whatever scenes we'd already shot and by focussing on the sections we were going to shoot in the context of what had already been shot it helped us to realise what tweaks and changes needed to be made to make it as effective as it could be.

CM: Bryan also likes to rehearse on set, so we'd get there in the morning and rehearse the scene. The one scene that went through the most analysis and the most rethinking was that first scene in Africa because we wanted to get the historical context correct, we wanted to get the spirit of the resistance correct, we wanted to establish the ongoing disgust in the officer corps, all that stuff you had to get into the first few minutes of the movie. Because most importantly we never wanted it be a history lesson. We never wanted the movie to start with a guy saying '1935...' we wouldn't allow ourselves that. The stuff is in there, we just didn't want it to be in your face.

How did the film go down when you did audience testing?

CM: Surprisingly well! But beyond the test score, which blew us away, what was interesting was that it scored higher with women than with men, and the discussions that broke out in the focus group went completely off message from the questions they were asked. You know, they were asked what scenes were exciting, where did it drag etc, but people were talking about its contemporary relevance and whether they would have participated in the conspiracy, not, as an American audience will do, look at a film and say 'Well they should've done this' or 'I would've done this'.

With all the date changes, were you as producers encouraged by those test scores?

CM: The release date changes were part of that shooting process and assessment. Midway through the movie we were reading all the Africa stuff and Tom said 'I'm really worried that if we get Africa wrong, it's going to look like Stauffenberg tried to kill Hitler because he lost his eye and lost his hand'. The benefit of having the star also being the studio was that Tom decided that we're just going to table Africa, cut the whole movie together and decide what needs to be said with that scene. And that's where a lot of the reshoot rumours came from, because we'd tabled 10 minutes of the movie until it was all cut together. Although it was in the script from the beginning. So the date was just put off as we cut it together, especially as we weren't cutting for a set date - Tom was just like 'it's finished when it's finished'.

Were you ever tempted to adapt any of the characters to fit more traditional hero and villain roles?

CM: No, not really. We wanted to let the events of the history tell the story. We tried to shoot a scene where Stauffenberg witnessed atrocities that he didn't see. Assuming an audience came to this film with no prior knowledge we basically though 'Hitler has to be Darth Vader, how do we make Hitler Darth Vader?' The problem was that we looked all of Hitlers speeches assuming there'd be speeches where he was like 'I'm Hitler!' But his speeches were all about hope and prosperity, he ran on a platform of peace and prosperity and speeches that really made Hitler look like a villain are hard to find. He was very distanced from a lot of the bad stuff he was doing. Stauffenberg was a supply officer but it was not the mass executions he was witnessing, and the concentration camps were still in gestation. What you ended up with was a man reacting to field reports, which is hard to dramatise. But we couldn't open the film with a scene that didn't happen.

VALKYRIE was conceived as a small film, do you think United Artists and Tom Cruise coming on board changed the original vision a lot?

CM: We wanted it to be a small film because we wanted control. I'd spent too much time trying to get much bigger movies made and I've always said that for event million dollars over twenty-five million, that's one more asshole you have to deal with, so when we brought this to United Artists we presented it as a seventeen million dollar movie - without ever really having done a budget on it. And Tom, as the head of the production company before he had ever been discussed in connection with a starring role, said 'guys, you've got the tenth panzer division getting wasted in the first ten minutes of this movie... you understand you need a lot more money.' So it wasn't that Tom Cruise was in the movie that it had to be bigger, it was now that Tom is in the movie we can have the resources to get the movie made. Without Tom having been in it, it never would have been the movie it is. There wasn't another actor that was going to justify the resources to make this the movie that it needed to be.

VALKYRIE IS RELEASED IN THE UK ON JANUARY 23rd