The Imitation Game: Alan Turing's outsider status fuelled his genius What does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to be human? Director Morten Tyldum sips his coffee as we pause to contemplate two of the questions that are at the heart of his latest film. The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley is the first biopic of Alan Turing to hit the big screen. A scientist who made some of the 20th century's most important breakthroughs in fields ranging from computing to molecular biology, before being persecuted for his homosexuality, Turing has been immortalised as the man who broke the Enigma code during the second world war. In doing so, he revolutionised the field of cryptography by developing methods that became so valuable to British intelligence, many were only finally declassified two years ago. Much of the film focuses on Turing and his team of code-breakers at Bletchley Park, but Tyldum also wanted to portray Turing the visionary, laying down the principles of artificial intelligence decades before anyone else. The film owes its title to a 1950 work that captivated Tyldum. In it Turing proposes a game in which you have to guess whether you are conversing with a human or a machine, before going on to suggest that we are only human to the degree that we can convince someone else that we're human. It's a game we now know as the Turing test. "To me Turing is as much of a philosopher as he is a mathematician because his ideas deal with what it means to think," Tyldum explains. Just because someone or something thinks differently than you do, it doesn't mean that it's not thinking. That was something he was occupied by and one of the essences of what I wanted to tell with this movie. Bringing the Turing story to a cinematic audience was a daunting task, not merely because of the sheer scope and complexity of his work across two decades but because the surviving information is so fragmented, especially during the war years. Tyldum and scriptwriter Graham Moore pieced together their narrative after rummaging through diaries, letters, long-forgotten archived material and even some of Turing's original mathematical papers. The film interweaves three distinct threads of Turing's life, including his often overlooked time at Sherborne boy's school in north-west Dorset where he was first introduced to cryptography through his friendship with classmate Christopher Morcam. It was Morcam's death from bovine tuberculosis when Turing was just 17 that began his desire to probe the meaning of what it means to be conscious. "In the film we have him building this early computer and nicknaming it "Christopher" as a dramatic invention to try and convey what Turing's computational and artificial intelligence work meant to him," Moore says. His lifelong fascination with AI actually expressly came from a desire to bring Christopher back to life. Turing wrote a lot about how AI could be used in future to preserve a consciousness past death. That was one of his goals and something he actually lectured about at the time. Input console - part of an early computer model designed by Alan Turing in 1950. It is currently on display at the Science Museum in London Photograph: Alamy The mere notion that machines could be used as a tool to unravel some of the deepest mysteries of the human brain was more than half a century ahead of Turing's time but it was this wildly left-field thinking that characterised his time at Bletchley Park. Both Tyldum and Moore are convinced that Turing's unique perspectives came from the fact that in almost every way - from his hidden sexuality to his reluctance to comply with normal social conventions - he was an outsider. "Peter Hilton, who was 18 when he started working with Alan Turing at Bletchley, once described Hut 8 as being this group of very intelligent guys with lots of ideas constantly being thrown around," Tyldum says. "And most of the time you'd think "That's good, but I could have thought of that." Every time Alan Turing came up with an idea, you always thought, "I could never have come up with that," because it came from such a different perspective. And I wanted to make a movie that celebrates uniqueness and those who are different and odd. Because you need people who can think outside the box and see the world from a completely different angle to generate new ideas. The film doesn't shy away from quirkiness, although time constraints prevented Tyldum from dramatising a famous incident when Turing was found repeatedly cycling round Bletchley's village square with his gas mask on. In Turing's mind he was merely thinking through a problem while avoiding aggravating his chronic hayfever, but the sight unnerved local residents so much they alerted the police. It does, however, emphasise his social eccentricities, portraying him as a man in his own world, oblivious to his increasingly infuriated colleagues. "I don't think he was the easiest man to have running a unit," Tyldum says. He was the leader of Hut 8 but he didn't really care about being a leader. He was concerned about the things he was concerned about. Hugh Alexander (played by Matthew Goode) did actually complain about him constantly, that he was impossible to work with. But then they became good friends and years later he showed up at Turing's trial for homosexuality as a character witness. Despite his reputation, Turing could also be disarmingly charming when he wanted to be. While it would be easy to view his personality through 21st century lenses and place him somewhere on the autistic spectrum, it can be misleading to retrospectively apply a diagnosis that didn't even exist for most of his lifetime. Alan Turing had a reputation for eccentricity but he could also be disarmingly charming when he wanted to be. "We were sitting in a room on the first day of rehearsals," Moore remembers. We were putting the scenes together and Benedict said something very interesting. I don't think that Turing is physically incapable of understanding other people's thoughts and feelings, I think he just doesn't care. I think he just has something more important on his mind. I think that's very true, we can tell from his letters that people were hard for him to talk to. They chattered on about the mundane aspects of life which bored him so much. By all accounts Turing could be distinctly off-putting. He mostly saw conversation merely as a medium to satisfy his voracious appetite for new information and stories abound of him turning and walking away from people when his interest waned. However, he was also keen to ensure his work remained relatively accessible to the layperson, taking great care to get his points across with a degree of clarity not often found in his subject areas. "He was actually a very good communicator when he wanted to be," Moore says. When he could sit down and type it all out, he could explain himself very well, especially when it was important to him to get these big ideas across. He had some particularly wonderful analogies, debating whether a machine can still be intelligent if it doesn't like strawberries, and things like that. We were definitely able to get some of his voice and a flavour of him from his writing. Turing committed suicide at the age of 41 following his decision to choose hormonal therapy over prison, specifically to continue working on his latest design for an early computer at Manchester University. He lost funding for his research following the conviction, as well as being isolated professionally and prevented from either lecturing or attending key conferences in the field. "I think the history of computing was tremendously held back," Moore says. It seems likely that he would have been 10 years ahead of the Americans in terms of developing these early computers. But one of the many things that I love about his work is that he was an optimist about technology. He genuinely believed that technology and these "thinking machines" were going to tremendously improve our lives, even without the huge benefit of hindsight we now have." The Imitation Game opens in UK cinemas on Friday 14 November.