Mick Jagger has swapped music for movies and produced his first film. Enigma is an old-fashioned Second World War adventure story set at Bletchley Park, Britain's top- secret code-breaking station. Alison Jones interrogates actors Dougray Scott and Jeremy Northam and director Michael Apted

How much background research did you do?

DS: I spoke to maths professors. I spoke to a young professor who was an expert in code-breaking and he was the person who finally made it understandable to me. I was stuck in a room at Bletchley Park and made to understand things that I wouldn't normally, such as how to take an Enigma machine apart and put it back together. It was fascinating.

Doing social research and talking to people at Bletchley was wonderful, learning how they lived their lives and what they did in between times.

How did Mick come aboard?

MA: The producers, Mick and Lorne Michaels, were originally competing with each other to buy the rights. Rather than out-bid each other they decided to go into partnership. Jagger is an icon in my life. It was weird to have this annoying producer on my shoulder then look around and think, 'Oh Christ. It's Mick'.

How did scriptwriter Tom Stoppard deal with the book's complexities to make the film easier to understand?

MA: I read the first draft and it made my eyes water. I loved it but I didn't understand a word of it.

We didn't want to get bogged down with technicalities, nor did we want to trivialise it. I was making a film about brilliant people and I wanted everybody to understand what made them so brilliant.

Dougray and I sat with a professor of mathematics at Cambridge and we were a sorry sight, although Dougray did much better than me. He was quite good. I never understood a bloody word.

Tom Stoppard actually figured out how to break the Enigma code. He had all these books he had read on it so to try to calm him down was difficult.

In the book the hero Tom Jericho (Dougray Scott) is a public school-educated, Home Counties type. In the film he is northern and working-class. Why?

DS: There was enough alienation anyway in playing a character who was an intellectual genius and code-breaker at Cambridge University. I just thought it would make more sense to have him come from a different background. I came up with the idea of making him come from Manchester because it worked - grammar school then off to Cambridge.

You lost weight for the part. How did you do that?

DS: After I finished Mission Impossible I lost about 28/30lbs. I was about 12 stone 10lbs when I did that because of the muscles I had, which have since disappeared, unfortunately. When I started filming I was just under 11 stone.

How do you think the people who worked at Bletchley will react to the film?

MA: I would like them to like it. I tried to make it as authentic as we could. We met a lot of people and did a lot of research, so we would be pretty dismayed if they felt we had done it wrong.

Jeremy, your character, the spy master, is like a 40s matinee idol. Who were your influences?

JN: When we screened it at Sundance there was a Q&A afterwards and this guy said: 'You at the back with the purple sweater, I can't remember your name but how many Cary Grant movies did you see before playing this role?'.

My theory is everything goes into the melting pot but I certainly didn't look at any one person's work.

Old movies are not necessarily the best areas for research because acting styles have changed.

There was a Channel Four documentary about Bletchley which said the normal rules didn't apply there.

The military had invited a lot of people who weren't normally espionage types into this high-security game.

The lid came back on resoundingly afterwards, when people anonymously went back to their jobs and weren't able to talk about what they had done.

All the machines were busted up and records destroyed on the orders of Churchill after the war.

Why is there no mention of Alan Turing (a mathematician at Bletchley who invented a devise to decipher the Enigma-encoded messages)?

DS: He is in the book but the script implies it was Jericho who invented the Bombe machine.

In fact, it was Turing, so it would have been a bit confusing to have both characters in it.

MA: So much of this is fictional it would have been odd to put a real-life character in it. It is a fantastic story but Turing has been dealt with and I think to use his name would have been disrespectful.

The film U571 re-wrote the part the Americans played in capturing the Enigma machine. Were they surprised to see in your film that it was a British operation?

MA: They haven't seen it yet so that joy is to come. We showed it at Sundance but that is a tiny proportion of people. U571 was a good action thriller. It was taking something and using it for its own ends. It was fun for us to be able to put the story right.

Dougray, have you been offered James Bond and have you talked the idea over with Michael (who directed the last one)?

DS: I haven't really thought about it.

JN: I thought I was the next James Bond.

DS: I always thought you would be wonderful.

JN: This happened the last time when Pierce wasn't going to do it. I think Emma Thompson was given odds, so were John Cleese, Gwyneth Paltrow - anyone who has ever been in a film.

Why not shoot at Bletchley Park?

MA: Because they have built right up to the wall with new stuff. It would have meant a huge amount of work to restore it to what it would have been. It is also ugly. I had this idea that I wanted to show England at its best, romantically as it were, with the countryside and this beautiful building where all this secret work was going on.

Do you think this war film will seem inappropriate given the current world climate?

MA: There are films being withdrawn or even cancelled because of these events, the ones showing terrorism or things being blown up. I don't think we fall into that area.

There is a huge amount of discussion going on in America about the performance of the intelligence agencies. I am not saying we will profit at all by this, but the fact that this does discuss the importance of intelligence in combat has, I think, been reinforced by events.

How much was Kate Winslet, who was pregnant while filming, able to contribute?

MA: We were lucky to get her. I had asked her to be in this at the start but she had another project.

When she became pregnant she realised she couldn't do that but she could do this before she showed too much.

She didn't ever see this film as a vehicle for her to be glamorous in.

Dougray, why did you borrow an Enigma machine from Mick Jagger?

DS: Familiarity. When I was learning to play the guitar at 14 I carried it around everywhere, just so it became second nature.

When you are filming the last thing you want to be thinking is 'how do I use this machine?' because the character already knows.

Is it true you read Robert Harris's Enigma book ten times?

JN: He didn't understand it for the first nine.

DS: It was a wonderful source of research.

How much influence did Mick have on casting?

MA: He wanted to know what was going on and who was what. He didn't suggest anything. He knew we were doing good work.

It was a learning experience for him. I get the feeling he wants to do a bit of this.

He appears in cameo as an RAF officer in a nightclub. Did he want a speaking role?

MA: I think the realities of him doing the role caught up with him. So he just showed up for one morning, got his hair done, did his bit and left

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