Thirty years ago, Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight heard about a British spy ordered to kill his own wife. Now he has turned the heartbreaking tale into a film
The story of the movie Allied has been sitting outside my office door like a stray dog for 30 years, waiting to get made.
Ever since I heard the tale that underpins it, I have known it would work both as a love story and a story of war. I have repeated the true story many times, pretty much as it was told to me, and it has never failed to put chills down the spine of those who hear it.
I came across the story while bumming around the United States in the early Eighties. I had just graduated from University College London and was working as a dishwasher, a decorator and even a ranch hand in cotton country.
Halfway through my ramble across the country, I found myself working at a cheap motel in Arkansas, painting rooms and cleaning kitchen equipment (it took me weeks to realise the place was also a brothel but I was young and slow on the uptake).
I was lodging with an English woman, a GI bride who’d gone to the US after the war. It was she who told me the story. I remember it was sunset, at the end of a damp, hot Southern day, and we went to sit in her tiny back yard where finches fought for crumbs. We got talking about her brother and the story she told me has never left me to this day.
Her brother worked behind enemy lines in France during the Second World War. He was an officer in the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which carried out intelligence and sabotage missions in German-held territory. He met and fell in love with a French woman who worked for the Resistance. She became pregnant and when his tour of duty ended he asked for special permission to bring her back to England.
Permission was granted. The baby was born. The former SOE agent took a desk job in a small town in the south of England as the Allies prepared for D-Day.
One morning he reported for work to be told by his superior officers that they had absolute proof that his wife, the mother of his child, was a spy working for the Germans. The suggestion was that she had been working for them since they met in France and that she was now passing pillow talk to Berlin by WT transceiver.
The SOE officer, who had left home a happily married man that morning, was ordered to return home and shoot his wife. He was handed a loaded revolver. The execution would be proof that he was not collaborating with his wife’s betrayal.
I was told the man dutifully drove home, took the baby from his wife’s arms, and shot her dead. I should say immediately that this was a story told to me by an individual whose honesty I cannot verify. Also, in the years since, I have tried many times to find any reference to the incident in the many books which have been written about the SOE. and I have always drawn a blank.
In my research I have read that the Germans never breached British security in the British homeland. I have also read that the Germans never used female operatives (although the American biographer Hal Vaughan claimed five years ago that designer Coco Chanel carried out spy and recruitment missions for the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence agency).
So was the story true or not?
At the time, I was not a screenwriter, or indeed a writer of any kind, and so making up a story like that and telling it to me would be a curious thing to do. What would motivate someone to invent a family skeleton?
If she did invent it, then she ought to have been working as a writer herself. I also got the distinct impression that the story was being told from a place of deep emotion, a painful memory being shared.
Her brother had returned to the family home that night in uniform and in tears. She had never forgotten the shock of seeing her buttoned-up brother so undone.
As my career as a writer developed, I tried to figure out a way to put this story on to the screen. My slate was pretty full with more urgent commissions and so the story sat patiently and waited, never once leaving my peripheral vision.
Then, four years ago, I was working on a different project with Brad Pitt, and we met to discuss it in the chilly garden of a London hotel.
The conversation turned to the Blitz and the Second World War, and the story of the SOE officer came out. Brad’s reaction encouraged me to finally get around to writing what would become Allied.
Hollywood screenplays have curious lives. Sometimes you write something and it disappears. Other times you think it’s disappeared then you get a call to say someone has dusted it off and wants to take another look.
Even then, the odds are against it getting made. The Allied story was a little more robust and relatively speaking, its path to screen was smooth. To have someone of the calibre of Bob Zemeckis, the director of Back to the Future and Forest Gump, at the helm was, of course, a huge help.
Brad’s commitment continued from that chilly garden meeting and, in the opinion of both Bob and myself, there was no one else other than Marion Cotillard to even be considered to play the unfortunate wife. So, patience paid off and a cast I could only have dreamt of came together and the film was made.
I love it and am immensely proud of it. I have necessarily changed the story in order to make it work as a movie and so the ending you have read isn’t the ending you will see on screen. I believe the changes I have made to the set-up and the ending do justice to the real people involved.
The movie is an exploration of how a man feels as he drives home to the wife he knows has betrayed him with a loaded revolver in the glove compartment. It is also a study of how two people who are truly in love confront the realities of war.
I just drove down Sunset Boulevard and saw a giant poster for the movie. At last, the stray dog has gone from my office door.
Allied opens on November 25
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