Winston Churchill of Darkest Hour a rebuke to Trump, says film's director

The Winston Churchill biopic Darkest Hour will feed into the debate around the nature of President Donald Trump’s abrasive, confrontational form of leadership, says Joe Wright, the film’s director. Wright suggests that Darkest Hour, which stars Gary Oldman as the British prime minister during arguably the UK’s most testing period of the second world war, is directly relevant to the US’s current political turmoil.

“There’s a big question in America at the moment: what does good leadership look like,” says Wright, speaking to coincide with the launch of the latest trailer for the film. “Churchill resisted when it mattered most, and as I travel around America I am really impressed and optimistic at the level of resistance happening in the US at the moment. After George W Bush was elected, it wasn’t the same level; there was more apathy then. Now people are very vocal and that’s really positive.”

“Churchill made terrible mistakes as well as achieving great triumphs, but central to it all was a sense of doubt, and doubt is an important and vital factor of leadership, and democracy itself.”

The significance of Churchill to the Trump White House was underlined soon after Trump took office, when the president was pictured with a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office, having made great play of reinstating it after succeeding Barack Obama. However, Wright says when he began working on the film in January 2016 – pre-Brexit, and pre-Trump – its future political relevance was entirely unguessed at. “There was no sense of it being part of a zeitgeist at all. But as we made the film events came over us like a great wave, and suddenly the film became strangely topical. In the past I had always wanted to make a topical film, so I think it’s a case of be careful what you wish for.”

Wright, whose previous credits include Pride & Prejudice, the Jane Austen adaptation starring Keira Knightley, and the Ian McEwan adaptation Atonement, which was partly set in the same wartime period as Darkest Hour, is sanguine about attempts to hijack his film politically, something fellow British director Christopher Nolan had to endure after the former Ukip leader Nigel Farage endorsed Dunkirk on Twitter.

“I don’t think anything like that will happen when anyone sees the film, to be honest. Churchill may have been co-opted or re-appropriated by certain factions in the rightwing spectrum, but I’m not sure that’s true to who he was and what he believed. There are a lot of his policies I vehemently disagree with, not least his position on women’s suffrage and, later, Indian independence, but there was a moment when he was right, and he resisted. The level of resistance he put up against bigotry and hate and totalitarianism is vital.”

Wright points out that Churchill’s long political career also encompassed liberal breakthroughs, including passing the National Insurance act in 1911 while president of the board of trade, which set up the first social security payments and created the foundations for the welfare state, and a string of speeches after the war that threw his weight behind a European union. “Those things get forgotten,” says Wright. “I tried to be balanced: neither hero-worship him, nor throw him to the gutter.

“He kicked and he screamed and got a lot of things wrong in his career, and in his personal life, but one thing he got right was he resisted the tide of fascism, bigotry and hate. And that seems to speaking to America now, and Britain, too.”