Brendan Gleeson as Winston Churchill, Len Cariou as Franklin Roosevelt and Alexy Petrenko as Josef Stalin in the HBO Film “Into the Storm.” Photographer: HBO / Susan Allnutt

He’s a marvelous person for a dramatist to write about. He’s almost an Everyman.

Into the Storm, a new historical drama about British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill during World War II starring Brendan Gleeson, premiers on HBO May 31 at 9 pm Eastern Time. Presented by HBO Films in association with BBC, a Scott Free production and a Rainmark Films production of a film by Thaddeus O’Sullivan, the script was written by Hugh Whitemore. It is the latest in a long line of scripts Whitemore has written, including the screenplays for the 1983 TV movie Concealed Enemies (about the Alger Hiss case) and The Final Days, a dramatization of the Bob Woodward – Carl Bernstein book about the fall of President Richard M. Nixon. He also scripted The Gathering Storm, a 2002 HBO Films’ drama about Churchill’s life leading up to World War II, for which he won an Emmy for Outstanding Writing and The Writers Guild of America Award. Recently, he talked with HistoryNet from his home in England about his work in historical dramas, particularly those about Churchill.

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HistoryNet.com: The first movie you scripted was All Neat in Black Stockings for Warner Brothers/Pathe in 1969, wasn’t it?

Hugh Whitemore: The first one I actually had a hand in was Evelyn Waugh’s book Decline and Fall – "Additional dialogue by/" It wasn’t much money, but I was credited.

HN: And your first work with the BBC appeared in the 1970s?

Hugh: The 1960s, actually. The BBC then had single plays, a series called Wednesday Play and Play of the Month, which were supposed to be fairly serious, fairly controversial plays. I wrote my first one in 1963.

HN: You also wrote the screenplay for The Gathering Storm, which covers Churchill’s life prior to Britain’s entry into World War II. Into the Storm isn’t a sequel; it is its own film, written several years after The Gathering Storm was scripted. Did those intervening years change anything about your interpretation of Churchill?

Hugh: A number of things happened. We wanted to cover the Second World War period, of course, but didn’t want to cover the entire war. It took a while to figure out how to do it. I realized I was exactly the same age as Churchill was at the end of the Thirties, so I approached the story not as a historical reconstructing, but as the story of a man approaching middle age, on a human level: a husband, a father, a man whose political career had been in decline. I decided to write it as a man at the crossroads of middle age.

HN: And of course, all film scripts are first drafts that undergo many changes during production.

Hugh: Oh, yes, and I love that. I like the collaborative dynamic of writing for TV, for movies. We all work together. I love it when we get into production. Writing a film is difficult; you have to come up with so much visual material.

For me one of most exciting things of all is when the actors are cast. Such creative people, such as Brendan (Gleeson)—they have such insights into characters.

HN: There is a line in the film in which King George VI wistfully says Lord Halifax "would have made the most perfect prime minister" and expresses his discomfort with the idea of Churchill as PM. How much resistance was there to Churchill being given this position?

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