Hugh: I think quite a bit. Although Churchill was a member of the Conservative Party, he had been a rebel. He switched parties once, then switched back. He came from an aristocratic family, but was not part of the upper class ordre. He was not a snob; he was a thinking person. I think the upper class found him a loose cannon. They were afraid of him.

Of course, there was also his record from World War I. The Gallipoli campaign was his idea—he was first Lord of the Admiralty. The campaign was badly organized, a ghastly failure. Churchill was held very much to blame. He was fired from his post. He left the cabinet and became a solider and went to France. There was a feeling he had betrayed his class, but by 1939, the working classes, the middle classes were very happy with him.

You also have to remember the king was a personal friend of Lord Halifax. The king gave him the key to the gardens at Buckingham Palace, told him to use the gardens as he wished. So, yes, the king was disappointed that Halifax wasn’t the prime minister.

One of the first things Churchill did when he became prime minister was fire Halifax and make him ambassador to America. He became an outstanding ambassador, but he loved his home in England. His wife went to Churchill and begged him on her knees not to send Halifax away, but Churchill refused.

HN: During one of the scenes when Churchill is waiting to learn if he and his party have been reelected, he ponders how he’ll earn a living if he loses. When his wife suggests writing as a profession, he responds, "And pay my nineteen-and-six-pound income tax? Not bloody likely!" What do you think that scene communicates about him?

Hugh: Income taxes were very high at that time. If you earned a pound, all you got to keep was six pence, which was a 40th of a pound.

There was huge austerity in the 1950s. The war had left the country basically bankrupt. The government had to impose huge taxes to get the money needed.

HN: This film does a good job of depicting Churchill at his best and his worst. How did you go about presenting the complex Churchill we see through your script?

Hugh: He’s a marvelous person for a dramatist to write about. He’s almost an Everyman. He loves his family, yet he treats them roughly sometimes. He blows hot and cold and presents a huge range of emotions. I came to identify with him because he is an Everyman, a mixture of emotions. His daughter, Lady (Mary) Soames, looked at my script and encouraged me to be honest about him.

He said that painting a picture was like fighting a battle. He approached the planning of war like painting a picture. He’s able to use all these disparate parts of his character. He showed a wide range of emotions and talents, and when he focused them on problems of war or finance, he raided all his different experiences and focused his wide range of experience on the problem at hand. He didn’t come at things from a single point of view.

HN: That really set him apart from other members of his class at the time, didn’t it.

Hugh: He had a wide range of friends and talents. He was a wonderful painter, a marvelous wrier. A less attractive side was that he was selfish. He rushed through life like a tornado and left everyone else to pick up the pieces.

But that was what the country needed in the war. It seemed absolute madness in 1940 to think we could fight Germany—they conquered France in 17 days—but he had that madness. He appointed a friend as Minister of Aircraft Production, because he realized we desperately needed weapons to fight the Germans. When Italy offered to broker a peace, Churchill said, "You can’t trust Hitler." He went straight to the heart of the matter—if you can’t trust someone, there’s no use talking to him.

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