Filmmaker John Madden (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) will direct actor Colin Firth (Paddington 2) in a stranger-than-fiction WWII tale, Operation Mincemeat. The film tells the extraordinary and true story of an idea that altered the course of the war. A leap in the dark with no safety net, risking the lives of countless thousands of men, defying logical analysis to prove the impossible possible, and testing the nerves of its creators to breaking point.
Set in 1943, with the Allied Forces determined to launch an all-out assault on ‘Fortress Europe,’ but they face an impossible challenge – to protect a massive invasion force from entrenched German firepower and avert a potential massacre. It falls to two brilliant intelligence officers, Ewen Montagu (Firth) and Charles Cholmondeley, to dream the most inspired and improbable disinformation strategy of the war – a lunatic and dangerously precarious undertaking centered on the most unlikely of secret agents: a dead man.
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“In the context of WW2 narratives, the story of Operation Mincemeat is unique – a bizarre and seductive cinematic blend of high-level espionage and ingenious fiction, where the stakes could hardly be higher. Michelle Ashford’s script fuses multiple strands and moods: tense, romantic, thrilling, unexpectedly funny, and endlessly surprising. It tells a richly human story of the soldiers we seldom see, who fight a different kind of war in shadows and deception, haunted by the knowledge that certainty and guarantee of success are nowhere to be found,” Madden said in a statement.
Michelle Ashford’s script is based on the book by Ben Macintyre. The film is produced by Charles S. Cohen, Iain Canning, Emile Sherman and Kris Thykier.
