The Courier Movie (2021)

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1. Screenwriter Tom O'Connor found out as much as he could about Greville Wynne and Oleg Penkovsky. Their relationship is mentioned in several books but only in fragments. "There's enough to understand the basics," stated O'Connor. "A lot of the events were and remain classified, and so sometimes, finding out what exactly happened was a challenge because there is active misinformation being put out by both sides. People don't necessarily want everything on the record."Greville Wynne wrote an autobiography that was first published in 1967. It was entitled 'The Man From Moscow: The Story of Wynne and Penkovsky'. However, screenwriter Tom O'Connor was aware that the reliability of this book had been questioned. O'Connor said: "I read a few people who did a point-by-point discrediting of the things that Wynne claimed happened arguing that they couldn't possibly be real." 2. Early in the film, characters mention a CIA's failure with a spy named Popov. They are talking about Pyotr Semyonovich Popov, a Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU) who operated with the CIA during World War II and later became a double agent while stationed in Vienna. Popov provided some valuable counterintelligence information, warning the CIA on the Soviet infiltration on the U-2 spy plane project. Eventually, the Soviet authorities suspected and dismissed him from the GRU in 1958, finally arresting Popov in 1959. By the time the movie begins, in August 1960, Popov had been executed in January the same year. Interestingly, a Serbian spy with the same name, Dusko Popov, served as a double agent for MI6 during World War II and is believed to have inspired the character of James Bond.
3. This film opened in several markets and territories in 2021 on Greville Wynne's birthday of 19th March. He was born in 1919 and passed away on 28th February 1990.
4. Piecing the story together from various sources, screenwriter Tom O'Connor wrote the draft on spec and sent it out to production companies. It landed on the desk of Ben Pugh of production house 42 who immediately knew he wanted 42 to produce the film. "I wanted to make a movie like this for a long time," said Pugh. "I love that period. I loved the idea of an everyday guy in the center of that world with all these thrilling elements and this massive global political backdrop while it's about him and his family, and he ends up trying to save the world."
5. Benedict Cumberbatch's third film concerning British intelligence, and the second of those films to be set during the Cold War. He previously appeared in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) and The Imitation Game (2014).
6.This is the second time actor Vladimir Chuprikov has played Nikita Khrushchev in a film, the First Being in Gagarin, First in Space (2013).
7.On 16th October 1962, President John F. Kennedy was handed high-altitude photographs taken from U-2 planes flying over Cuba that showed Soviet soldiers setting up nuclear-armed missiles on the island. The United States had been tipped off that the Soviet Union was putting nuclear warheads on the Caribbean Island. The Cuban Missile Crisis saw the world on the brink of nuclear war.
8.Star Benedict Cumberbatch said: "[Director Dominic] Cooke came to meet me about the part and the project. I was very keen to work with him again." Cumberbatch became fascinated by Greville Wynne. He said: "I was intrigued by the arc the character went on. As our discussions continued, I said I'd love to augment the process by helping to produce it with SunnyMarch alongside my producing partner Adam Ackland."
9. Oleg wanted to defect from the Soviet Union to the United States and live like a cowboy in Montana. Sam Neill's character Borodin, in The Hunt for Red October (1990) was also defecting to the United States to live in Montana as a cowboy.
10.FilmNation took the packaged film to Cannes in 2018, where it was met with enthusiasm. "The reception was very healthy because it's a spy film that felt like it had something new and timely to say," said producer Ben Browning. "There's a long history of successful great Cold War thrillers, the difference here is that rather than being about inscrutable people with inscrutable motives it has a clear emotional heart, and it's essentially about a relationship between two men who did something extraordinary."
11.Producer Adam Ackland of production house SunnyMarch was excited to be working on this espionage tale. He said: "We were not looking to make a spy thriller," he said. "We just happened to find a great story in that genre featuring good characters, gravitas, and humanity."
12.This film has many similarities to a James Bond film and has been publicized as such - most notably in its television advertising and film reviews. That said, the first scene in which the audience is introduced to the main protagonist, Greville Wynne (played by Benedict Cumberbatch), was shot at Stoke Park - the same golf course that was used in the filming of the James Bond movie, Goldfinger (1964).
13.In the wake of the 2016 Presidential election in the United States, screenwriter Tom O'Connor was very curious about the history of Russian American espionage. He said: "I started reading history books. Oleg Penkovsky, played by Merab Ninidze in the movie, is a legendary source that the Americans had in the Soviet Union. One line of one book said Oleg Penkovsky's contact was a British civilian called Greville Wynne. At that point, my screenwriter cap popped on."
14.In this film, Benedict Cumberbatch plays the role of Greville Wynne, a real-life "Courier" of coded messages between the USSR and the MI6 & CIA. These messages are sometimes encrypted and as one such scene shows are later decrypted by a cipher device. The device used in this film is very similar to that of the "Enigma machine". The original "Enigma" cipher is the subject of the film, The Imitation Game (2014), in which the real-life main protagonist, Alan Turing, is also played by Benedict Cumberbatch.
15.The film was made and first released about seven years after The Imitation Game (2014) which was also a period spy/espionage film that also starred Benedict Cumberbatch. About at least half a dozen cast and crew personnel worked on both pictures.
16.As director Dominic Cooke read the script, he imagined Benedict Cumberbatch playing Greville Wynne. They had worked together several times in the theatre and BBC TV's The Hollow Crown (2012), based on Shakespeare's history plays, in which Cumberbatch played Richard III. Screenwriter Tom O'Connor and producer Ben Pugh also hoped that Cooke would suggest Cumberbatch. "The script jumped out at me," said Cooke. "It was such a well-written and gripping piece about a brilliant story that I didn't know much about." Pugh said: "When Dominic came on board he did a little pass of the script with Tom and then it went straight to Benedict."
17.Producer Ben Pugh pitched production house 42 as the perfect home for the script to screenwriter Tom O'Connor. Once 42 became producers on the project, Pugh sent the script to director Dominic Cooke, who had been artistic director and chief executive of the Royal Court Theatre between 2006 and 2009 and had directed On Chesil Beach (2017).
18.Producer Ben Browning, President of Production and Acquisitions at FilmNation, said: "We do many films in this space, working with high-end talent that tends to have a reach with a global audience. We worked with the writer Tom [O'Connor] on a movie that ultimately we didn't make; we'd worked with Benedict [Cumberbatch] on 'The Imitation Game and I knew Dominic [Cooke]'s work from the theatre, and I enjoyed his first film [On Chesil Beach (2017)]."
19. With the director Dominic Cooke and leading man Benedict Cumberbatch signed, producer Ben Pugh was ready to move production onto the next phase. Pugh said: "With UTA's help, we all sent the script to FilmNation. They're the premier financier in this space in terms of these sorts of movies, and they joined as financiers and producers. It became a very amazing team with those three companies: 42, SunnyMarch, and FilmNation."

• Box office collection

  128.81 Crores

• Filming Location

  United Kingdom and the Czech Republic

• Satellites Rights

  Amazon Prime Video(USA)

• Production Details

  42FilmNation Entertainment , SunnyMarch

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