Gavin Hood is no stranger to political filmmaking. He won the Oscar™ for TSOTSI, about the question of race in his native South Africa, and in what should have been and Oscar™-nominated turn with EYE IN THE SKY, he brought home the human toll of drone warfare in the Middle East. With OFFICIAL SECRETS, he takes on the true story of Catherine Gun, who put loyalty to her country above loyalty to her government, and ran afoul of Britain’s Official Secrets Act. She did that by leaking a memo asking British participation in blackmailing a yes vote on whether or not to go to war against Iraq in 2002. The issues of fake news and lying government officials feels all too contemporary, and that’s one of the things Hood and I discussed when we talked about his literate, suspenseful film on April 22, 2019.
It stars Keira Knightly as Gunn, and co-stars Ralph Fiennes, Matt Smith, Martin Freeman, Matthew Goode, Rhys Ifans, Indira Varma, and Jeremy Northam. Hood directed from a script he co-wrote with Gregory Bernstein, and Sara Bernstein based on the books “The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War: Katharine Gun and the Secret Plot to Sanction the Iraq Invasion” by Marcia Mitchel and Thomas Mitchell.
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