Making the Enigma ciphers for the film "Enigma" by Tony Sale Page 1

Tony Sale's Codes and Ciphers

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The background to Tony Sale's involvement with
"Enigma"

It started in 1994 when Robert Harris thought of writing a book called
"Enigma". He came to Bletchley Park, the home of wartime code breaking
and spent some days with Tony absorbing the history of the code breaking
work in World War Two. This gave him some of the background information
necessary to write the book which eventually became a best seller.

In 1995 Mick Jagger bought the film rights to the book and he also
came to Bletchley Park with Tom Stoppard who was to write the film script
for the film of the book. Thus Tony was involved right from the beginning
with firstly the book and then with the film.

When eventually in 1999 Mick Jagger got together the necessary money to
make the film, he and Tom Stoppard asked Tony to be technical adviser
to the film to help sort out the problems of showing the Enigma cipher
work. Because Tony had been involved with various versions of the script
he was able to plan the coding work which would be needed to make the film work.

The filming was to start in April 2000 and Tony started work on creating the
Enigma cipher sequences in March 2000.