by Mark Salisbury

ALLIED FORCES: Dougray Scott and Kate Winslet team up to find a missing woman in the WWII drama Enigma.

After more than 30 years of living a rock star's nocturnal lifestyle, Mick Jagger is having a hard time adjusting to the early call times of film production. "I was there one morning really. really early," Jagger (Freejack) says about a 7a.m. visit to the set of Enigma, which he is producing. “{Director Michael Apted} would say, ‘Morning, Guv’ner,’ when I turned up at four.” That would be p.m.

The World War II drama stars Dougray Scott (M:I-2) as an introverted British mathematician who returns to the team that is trying to crack the famous German “Enigma” code, following a failed affair with a coworker (Saffron Burrows). As he races to decipher a U-boat message in order to save a fleet of Allied ships, he also tries to figure out his paramour’s sudden disappearance, a quest on which he’s aided by her friend (Kate Winslet). Based on Robert Harris’s eponymous best-seller, and co-adapted by Shakespeare in Love’s Tom Stoppard, Enigma marks the first effort from Jagger's production company, Jagged Films, which joined forces with Wayne’s World producer Lorne Michaels five years ago, when both were bidding for the rights. Soon, Jagger was bidding again – for an antique German Enigma code machine he saw in a catalog. “It was a useful tool to show people when I was trying to get the thing off the ground,” he says. Paramount had put the project in turnaround in 1998. The German company Intermedia picked it up for about $25 million.

Enigma-tics: Director Michael Apted and cast.

The irony that German money is financing a movie about Allied involvement in WWII is not lost on Aped (The World Is Not Enough), who grew up in England during the war. Moreover, he says, “It’s just great to look at a time of recent English history where there’s true heroics.” Indeed, Enigma’s hero is an unlikely one. “He’s on the edge all the time,” says Scott, who spent five months researching codes and encryption devices, and even brushed up on his German, to play the emotionally disturbed genius. Apted had been seeking “a British actor with muscle” for the role, and Scott, being Scottish, fit the criteria only too well, especially since he beefed up significantly for his role in M:I-2. Scott, however, preferred a gaunter look: He lost 22 pounds on a drastic cabbage soup diet before the director intervened. “He’d have been two big, bulging eyes if we weren’t careful,” Apted says. Winslet, who was three months pregnant when filming began, posed the opposite problem. “Every day was a day of dread, to see if she’d suddenly exploded,” says Apted, who moved the start date up two weeks and shot her scenes first. A director’s job is full of such decisions. Is it a job that Jagger would even consider for himself? “The hours,” he moans. “I don’t know, maybe one day.”

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© 2000 Premiere Magazine