ALAN TURING: NOT AN ENIGMA

Alan Mathison Turing
Born: 23 June 1912 in London, England
Died: 7 June 1954 in Wilmslow, Cheshire, England

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Biographies/Turing.html

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Alan Turing was born at Paddington, London. His father, Julius Mathison Turing, was a British member of the Indian Civil Service and he was often abroad. Alan's mother, Ethel Sara Stoney, was the daughter of the chief engineer of the Madras railways and Alan's parents had met and married in India. When Alan was about one year old his mother rejoined her husband in India, leaving Alan in England with friends of the family. Alan was sent to school but did not seem to be obtaining any benefit so he was removed from the school after a few months.

Next he was sent to Hazlehurst Preparatory School where he seemed to be an 'average to good' pupil in most subjects but was greatly taken up with following his own ideas. He became interested in chess while at this school and he also joined the debating society. He completed his Common Entrance Examination in 1926 and then went to Sherborne School. Now 1926 was the year of the general strike and when the strike was in progress Turing cycled 60 miles to the school from his home, not too demanding a task for Turing who later was to become a fine athlete of almost Olympic standard. He found it very difficult to fit into what was expected at this public school, yet his mother had been so determined that he should have a public school education. Many of the most original thinkers have found conventional schooling an almost incomprehensible process and this seems to have been the case for Turing. His genius drove him in his own directions rather than those required by his teachers.

He was criticised for his handwriting, struggled at English, and even in mathematics he was too interested with his own ideas to produce solutions to problems using the methods taught by his teachers. Despite producing unconventional answers, Turing did win almost every possible mathematics prize while at Sherborne. In chemistry, a subject which had interested him from a very early age, he carried out experiments following his own agenda which did not please his teacher. Turing's headmaster wrote (see for example [6]):-

If he is to stay at Public School, he must aim at becoming educated. If he is to be solely a Scientific Specialist, he is wasting his time at a Public School.

This says far more about the school system that Turing was being subjected to than it does about Turing himself. However, Turing learnt deep mathematics while at school, although his teachers were probably not aware of the studies he was making on his own. He read Einstein's papers on relativity and he also read about quantum mechanics in Eddington's The nature of the physical world. An event which was to greatly affect Turing throughout his life took place in 1928. He formed a close friendship with Christopher Morcom, a pupil in the year above him at school, and the two worked together on scientific ideas. Perhaps for the first time Turing was able to find someone with whom he could share his thoughts and ideas. However Morcom died in February 1930 and the experience was a shattering one to Turing. He had a premonition of Morcom's death at the very instant that he was taken ill and felt that this was something beyond what science could explain. He wrote later (see for example [6]):-

It is not difficult to explain these things away - but, I wonder!

Despite the difficult school years, Turing entered King's College, Cambridge, in 1931 to study mathematics. This was not achieved without difficulty. Turing sat the scholarship examinations in 1929 and won an exhibition, but not a scholarship. Not satisfied with this performance, he took the examinations again in the following year, this time winning a scholarship. In many ways Cambridge was a much easier place for unconventional people like Turing than school had been. He was now much more able to explore his own ideas and he read Russell's Introduction to mathematical philosophy in 1933. At about the same time he read von Neumann's 1932 text on quantum mechanics, a subject he returned to a number of times throughout his life.

The year 1933 saw the beginnings of Turing's interest in mathematical logic. He read a paper to the Moral Science Club at Cambridge in December of that year of which the following minute was recorded (see for example [6]):-

A M Turing read a paper on "Mathematics and logic". He suggested that a purely logistic view of mathematics was inadequate; and that mathematical propositions possessed a variety of interpretations of which the logistic was merely one.

Of course 1933 was also the year of Hitler's rise in Germany and of an anti-war movement in Britain. Turing joined the anti-war movement but he did not drift towards Marxism, nor pacifism, as happened to many.

Turing graduated in 1934 then, in the spring of 1935, he attended Max Newman's advanced course on the foundations of mathematics. This course studied Gödel's incompleteness results and Hilbert's question on decidability. In one sense 'decidability' was a simple question, namely given a mathematical proposition could one find an algorithm which would decide if the proposition was true of false. For many propositions it was easy to find such an algorithm. The real difficulty arose in proving that for certain propositions no such algorithm existed. When given an algorithm to solve a problem it was clear that it was indeed an algorithm, yet there was no definition of an algorithm which was rigorous enough to allow one to prove that none existed. Turing began to work on these ideas.

Turing was elected a fellow of King's College, Cambridge, in 1935 for a dissertation On the Gaussian error function which proved fundamental results on probability theory, namely the central limit theorem. Although the central limit theorem had recently been discovered, Turing was not aware of this and discovered it independently. In 1936 Turing was a Smith's Prizeman.
Turing's achievements at Cambridge had been on account of his work in probability theory. However, he had been working on the decidability questions since attending Newman's course. In 1936 he published On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem. It is in this paper that Turing introduced an abstract machine, now called a "Turing machine", which moved from one state to another using a precise finite set of rules (given by a finite table) and depending on a single symbol it read from a tape.

The Turing machine could write a symbol on the tape, or delete a symbol from the tape. Turing wrote [13]:-

Some of the symbols written down will form the sequences of figures which is the decimal of the real number which is being computed. The others are just rough notes to "assist the memory". It will only be these rough notes which will be liable to erasure.

He defined a computable number as real number whose decimal expansion could be produced by a Turing machine starting with a blank tape. He showed that π was computable, but since only countably many real numbers are computable, most real numbers are not computable. He then described a number which is not computable and remarks that this seems to be a paradox since he appears to have described in finite terms, a number which cannot be described in finite terms. However, Turing understood the source of the apparent paradox. It is impossible to decide (using another Turing machine) whether a Turing machine with a given table of instructions will output an infinite sequence of numbers.

Although this paper contains ideas which have proved of fundamental importance to mathematics and to computer science ever since it appeared, publishing it in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society did not prove easy. The reason was that Alonzo Church published An unsolvable problem in elementary number theory in the American Journal of Mathematics in 1936 which also proves that there is no decision procedure for arithmetic. Turing's approach is very different from that of Church but Newman had to argue the case for publication of Turing's paper before the London Mathematical Society would publish it. Turing's revised paper contains a reference to Church's results and the paper, first completed in April 1936, was revised in this way in August 1936 and it appeared in print in 1937.

A good feature of the resulting discussions with Church was that Turing became a graduate student at Princeton University in 1936. At Princeton, Turing undertook research under Church's supervision and he returned to England in 1938, having been back in England for the summer vacation in 1937 when he first met Wittgenstein. The major publication which came out of his work at Princeton was Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals which was published in 1939. Newman writes in [13]:-

This paper is full of interesting suggestions and ideas. ... [It] throws much light on Turing's views on the place of intuition in mathematical proof.

Before this paper appeared, Turing published two other papers on rather more conventional mathematical topics. One of these papers discussed methods of approximating Lie groups by finite groups. The other paper proves results on extensions of groups, which were first proved by Reinhold Baer, giving a simpler and more unified approach.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Turing's work on Turing machines was that he was describing a modern computer before technology had reached the point where construction was a realistic proposition. He had proved in his 1936 paper that a universal Turing machine existed [13]:-

... which can be made to do the work of any special-purpose machine, that is to say to carry out any piece of computing, if a tape bearing suitable "instructions" is inserted into it.

Although to Turing a "computer" was a person who carried out a computation, we must see in his description of a universal Turing machine what we today think of as a computer with the tape as the program.

While at Princeton Turing had played with the idea of constructing a computer. Once back at Cambridge in 1938 he starting to build an analogue mechanical device to investigate the Riemann hypothesis, which many consider today the biggest unsolved problem in mathematics. However, his work would soon take on a new aspect for he was contacted, soon after his return, by the Government Code and Cypher School who asked him to help them in their work on breaking the German Enigma codes.

When war was declared in 1939 Turing immediately moved to work full-time at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. Although the work carried out at Bletchley Park was covered by the Official Secrets Act, much has recently become public knowledge. Turing's brilliant ideas in solving codes, and developing computers to assist break them, may have saved more lives of military personnel in the course of the war than any other. It was also a happy time for him [13]:-

... perhaps the happiest of his life, with full scope for his inventiveness, a mild routine to shape the day, and a congenial set of fellow-workers.

Together with another mathematician W G Welchman, Turing developed the Bombe, a machine based on earlier work by Polish mathematicians, which from late 1940 was decoding all messages sent by the Enigma machines of the Luftwaffe. The Enigma machines of the German navy were much harder to break but this was the type of challenge which Turing enjoyed. By the middle of 1941 Turing's statistical approach, together with captured information, had led to the German navy signals being decoded at Bletchley.

From November 1942 until March 1943 Turing was in the United States liaising over decoding issues and also on a speech secrecy system. Changes in the way the Germans encoded their messages had meant that Bletchley lost the ability to decode the messages. Turing was not directly involved with the successful breaking of these more complex codes, but his ideas proved of the greatest importance in this work. Turing was awarded the O.B.E. in 1945 for his vital contribution to the war effort.

At the end of the war Turing was invited by the National Physical Laboratory in London to design a computer. His report proposing the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) was submitted in March 1946. Turing's design was at that point an original detailed design and prospectus for a computer in the modern sense. The size of storage he planned for the ACE was regarded by most who considered the report as hopelessly over-ambitious and there were delays in the project being approved.

Turing returned to Cambridge for the academic year 1947-48 where his interests ranged over many topics far removed from computers or mathematics; in particular he studied neurology and physiology. He did not forget about computers during this period, however, and he wrote code for programming computers. He had interests outside the academic world too, having taken up athletics seriously after the end of the war. He was a member of Walton Athletic Club winning their 3 mile and 10 mile championship in record time. He ran in the A.A.A. Marathon in 1947 and was placed fifth.
By 1948 Newman was the professor of mathematics at the University of Manchester and he offered Turing a readership there. Turing resigned from the National Physical Laboratory to take up the post in Manchester. Newman writes in [13] that in Manchester:-

... work was beginning on the construction of a computing machine by F C Williams and T Kilburn. The expectation was that Turing would lead the mathematical side of the work, and for a few years he continued to work, first on the design of the subroutines out of which the larger programs for such a machine are built, and then, as this kind of work became standardised, on more general problems of numerical analysis.

In 1950 Turing published Computing machinery and intelligence in Mind. It is another remarkable work from his brilliantly inventive mind which seemed to foresee the questions which would arise as computers developed. He studied problems which today lie at the heart of artificial intelligence. It was in this 1950 paper that he proposed the Turing Test which is still today the test people apply in attempting to answer whether a computer can be intelligent [1]:-

... he became involved in discussions on the contrasts and similarities between machines and brains. Turing's view, expressed with great force and wit, was that it was for those who saw an unbridgeable gap between the two to say just where the difference lay.

Turing did not forget about questions of decidability which had been the starting point for his brilliant mathematical publications. One of the main problems in the theory of group presentations was the question: given any word in a finitely presented groups is there an algorithm to decide if the word is equal to the identity. Post had proved that for semigroups no such algorithm exist. Turing thought at first that he had proved the same result for groups but, just before giving a seminar on his proof, he discovered an error. He was able to rescue from his faulty proof the fact that there was a cancellative semigroup with insoluble word problem and he published this result in 1950. Boone used the ideas from this paper by Turing to prove the existence of a group with insoluble word problem in 1957.

Turing was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1951, mainly for his work on Turing machines in 1936. By 1951 he was working on the application of mathematical theory to biological forms. In 1952 he published the first part of his theoretical study of morphogenesis, the development of pattern and form in living organisms.

Turing was arrested for violation of British homosexuality statutes in 1952 when he reported to the police details of a homosexual affair. He had gone to the police because he had been threatened with blackmail. He was tried as a homosexual on 31 March 1952, offering no defence other than that he saw nothing wrong in his actions. Found guilty he was given the alternatives of prison or oestrogen injections for a year. He accepted the latter and returned to a wide range of academic pursuits.

Not only did he press forward with further study of morphogenesis, but he also worked on new ideas in quantum theory, on the representation of elementary particles by spinors, and on relativity theory. Although he was completely open about his sexuality, he had a further unhappiness which he was forbidden to talk about due to the Official Secrets Act.

The decoding operation at Bletchley Park became the basis for the new decoding and intelligence work at GCHQ. With the cold war this became an important operation and Turing continued to work for GCHQ, although his Manchester colleagues were totally unaware of this. After his conviction, his security clearance was withdrawn. Worse than that, security officers were now extremely worried that someone with complete knowledge of the work going on at GCHQ was now labelled a security risk. He had many foreign colleagues, as any academic would, but the police began to investigate his foreign visitors. A holiday which Turing took in Greece in 1953 caused consternation among the security officers.

Turing died of potassium cyanide poisoning while conducting electrolysis experiments. The cyanide was found on a half eaten apple beside him. An inquest concluded that it was self-administered but his mother always maintained that it was an accident.
_______________

List of References (15 books/articles)
Some Quotations (9)

A Poster of Alan Turing
Mathematicians born in the same country

Additional Material in MacTutor

1. Turing as a runner
2. Alan Mathison Turing song by Steve Pride
3. Obituary: The Times
4. Multiple entries in The Mathematical Gazetteer of the British Isles

Honours awarded to Alan Turing (Click below for those honoured in this way)
1.	BMC morning speaker	1951
2.	Fellow of the Royal Society	1951
3.	Popular biographies list	Number 57

Cross-references in MacTutor

1. History Topics: The real numbers: Attempts to understand
2. History Topics: Word problems for groups
3. Chronology: 1930 to 1940

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Other Web sites

1. Encyclopaedia Britannica
2. NNDB
3. Turing archive for the history of computing
4. History of Computing Project
5. The Turing home page
6. Virginia Tech
7. Steve Pride (a song and video)
8. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (The Church-Turing thesis)
9. Pass magazine
10. Mathematical Genealogy Project
11. MathSciNet Author profile
12. zbMATH entry
13. ERAM Jahrbuch entry

THE IMITATION GAME - Background and Reflection

8 things you didn’t know about Alan Turing

 

An English mathematician, logician and cryptographer, Alan Turing was responsible for breaking the Nazi Enigma code during World War II. His work gave the Allies the edge they needed to win the war in Europe, and led to the creation of the computer. On the PBS NewsHour tonight, Jeffrey Brown interviews Benedict Cumberbatch about his role as Turing in “The Imitation Game.”

Turing took his own life in 1954, two years after being outed as gay. Homosexuality was still a crime in Great Britain at the time, and Turing was convicted of “indecency.” He died from eating an apple laced with cyanide. He was only 41 years old.

At the time of his death, the public had no idea what he had contributed to the war effort. Sixty years later, Queen Elizabeth II officially pardoned Turing.

Andrew Hodges, a mathematician at the Mathematical Institute at Oxford University, wrote the biography “Alan Turing: The Enigma”, which inspired the film. We spoke with Hodges this week about some things many people don’t know about Turing.

1. He was an Olympic-level runner

He participated in a few sports, such as rowing, but he loved running. Turing had “a bit of a ‘smelly trainers’ aspect” to his personality,” Hodges said. To work it into his day, he often ran to the places he needed to go. He used to run the 10 miles between the two places where he did most of his work, the National Physical Laboratory and the electronics building on Dollis Hill, beating colleagues who took public transportation to the office.

He joined running clubs, becoming a competitive amateur and winning several races. In 1948, his best marathon time was 2 hours 46 minutes 3 seconds — only 11 minutes slower than the Olympic winning time that year.

When one of his running club members asked why he trained so vehemently, he replied, “I have such a stressful job that the only way I can get it out of my mind is by running hard.”

2. He embodied some values of the Hippie movement

“He was a hippie before his time,” Hodges said. “He was very casual in those days, and thought very scruffy.” Had he lived a few decades later, he would have worn t-shirts and jeans every day, Hodges added.

It wasn’t uncommon to see Turing dressed rather shabbily, with bitten nails and without a tie, he said. With his youthful face, he was often mistaken for an undergraduate even in his 30s.

He also shared the left-leaning views of many of his Kings College compatriots, who included economists John Maynard Keynes and Arthur Cecil Pigou. Though Turing joined the Anti-War Movement in 1933, he never got deeply involved in politics. But watching Hitler’s rise to power in the late 1930s scared him, Hodges said, and it spurred his interest in cryptography, which would later help Great Britain in the war.

3. He got bad grades and frustrated his teachers

Science was a considered a second-class pursuit in English public schools in the 1920s, Hodges said. Turing’s passion for science embarrassed his mother, who had hoped he would study the classics, which was the most acceptable pursuit for gentlemen.

But he got bad to mediocre grades in school, followed by many complaints from his teachers. His English teacher wrote:

His math and science grades weren’t much better. He was nearly stopped from taking the national School Certificate exams on the subject, for fear he would fail.

4. The father of the computer also dabbled in physics, biology, chemistry and neurology

Turing’s most notable work today is as a computer scientist. In 1936, he developed the idea for the Universal Turing Machine, the basis for the first computer. And he developed a test for artificial intelligence in 1950, which is still used today.

But he also studied physics, especially as a young man. He read Einstein’s theory of relativity as a teenager, and immediately filled a notebook with his own thoughts and ideas on the subject. He dabbled in quantum mechanics, a new field at the time, as well as biology, chemistry and neurology after the war. Much of this work was related to creating machines that could learn and “think”, but some of it came out of simple curiosity about the world.

5. He developed a new field of biology out of his fascination with daisies

Even as a child, Turing saw life through the eyes of a scientist, Hodges said. There is a famous sketch of Turing as a boy “watching the daisies grow” while the other children play field hockey. That sketch would foreshadow Turing’s ground-breaking work in 1952 on morphogenesis, which became a completely new field of mathematical biology. It was a mathematical explanation of how things grow — a great mystery to science, Hodges explained. His work on the subject has been cited more than 8,000 times.

The subject of one of his seminal papers on the topic was called “Outline of the Development of the Daisy.”

6. He stuttered when talking

It is true that he had a bit of a stammer, something dramatic portrayals of Turing have exaggerated, Hodges said. He “took his time finding the right words,” he explained. In his biography he notes that a BBC radio producer had called Turing a very difficult person to interview for that reason.

7. He didn’t keep his sexuality a secret among friends

The laws at the time prevented Turing from being openly gay, but he never kept his sexuality secret either. He was open with his social circles at Kings College in Cambridge, which was “an oasis of acceptance” at the time, Hodges said. Many people would have clung to that oasis, he said, but Turing branched out to continue his work.

In 1952, he was arrested and charged with “indecency” after a brief relationship with another man. Defiant, he did not deny the charges.

“When he was arrested, the first thing he said was he thought that this shouldn’t be against the law,” Hodges said. “He gave a statement that was unapologetic, that detailed what had happened.”

8. He refused to let a punishment of chemical castration stop him from working

The punishment for homosexuality was chemical castration, a series of hormone injections that left Turing impotent. It also caused gynecomastia, giving him breasts. But Turing refused to let the treatment sway him from his work, keeping up his lively spirit.

“He dealt with it with as much humor and defiance as you could muster,” Hodges said. “To his close friends, it was obvious it was traumatic. But in no way did he just succumb and decline. He really fought back … by insisting on continuing work as if nothing had happened.”

He openly talked about the trial, even in the “macho environment” of the computer lab. He mocked the law’s absurdity. In defiance, he traveled abroad to Norway and the Mediterranean, where the gay rights movements were budding.

Homosexuality was considered a security risk at the time, and the conviction cost Turing his security clearance. That was a harsh blow, and Hodges believes that when he was restricted from leaving the country anymore, it ultimately led Turing to suicide.

“After he’d been revealed as gay in 1952, he couldn’t do any more secret work,” Hodges said. “It would have been hard to accept that he was not trusted.”

THE IMITATION GAME

In THE IMITATION GAME, Benedict Cumberbatch stars as Alan Turing, the genius British mathematician, logician, cryptologist and computer scientist who led the charge to crack the German Enigma Code that helped the Allies win WWII.

Actor Robert Capron Visits RWU for Vortex Festival

Actor Robert Capron ("Diary of a Wimpy Kid," "Elementary," et al.) visits the RWU Intro Film Class in Global Heritage Hall as a guest speaker for the 2019 Vortex Festival.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Is an Absolute Marvel

Featuring standout performances from Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, and Sam Rockwell, the writer-director Martin McDonagh’s latest is one of the best films of the year.

Christopher Orr

Nov 17, 2017

A teenage girl is brutally raped and murdered. After months pass without any progress on the case, her mother takes matters into her own hands. She rents three billboards outside of her small town, indicting the local police chief: “Raped While Dying”; “And Still No Arrests?”; “How Come, Chief Willoughby?”

It is easy to imagine the movie that might have emerged from this premise in the hands of a typical writer-director: the noble parent; the inept or uncaring police chief; the slow, orchestrally underscored march toward some form of justice.

 But Martin McDonagh is not a typical writer-director. And Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is assuredly not that movie. Rather, it is a film that continually complicates and recomplicates itself, denying viewers the comfort of easy moral footing. It is by turns heartbreaking, harrowing in its violence, and very, very funny, and it features Oscar-level performances by Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, and Sam Rockwell. It contains both the most moving scene I saw in a theater this year and the most mordant bit of black comedy. Though it’s set in a (fictional) town in the Midwest, it exists very much in the moral terrain of Flannery O’Connor’s bleak, existential humor, as is made clear by the fact that we first meet one character while he is reading “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Even for fans of McDonagh—and I am certainly one—Three Billboards is a revelation, and among the very best films of 2017.

An Anglo-Irish playwright with multiple Tony Award nominations, McDonagh came to filmmaking relatively late. His debut, Six Shooter, won the 2006 Academy Award for Live-Action Short Film; his first feature, In Bruges, was nominated for Best Original Screenplay in 2009. Three Billboards is substantially more ambitious than either. (More ambitious, too, than his second feature, the wickedly subversive 2012 crime-comedy Seven Psychopaths, of which I was an exceptional admirer.)

McDormand stars as Mildred Hayes, whose daughter Angela’s body was found raped and burned by the side of the road. After Mildred puts up her billboards, she receives a visit from Chief Willoughby (Harrelson), who appears to be neither inept nor uncaring. “I’d do anything to catch your daughter’s killer,” he tells her. He also tells her something else, something he believes will persuade her to take the billboards down—something that would persuade almost any normal, decent person to take the billboards down. But Mildred declines to do so, even as the pressure on her rises in town. As the local priest explains to her: “Everybody is with you about Angela. Nobody is with you about this.”

That’s all I think I should say about the plot itself. This is a film best seen with as little foreknowledge as possible, and I would caution against reading too much about it, as not all reviews will be so circumspect. Suffice to say that the story also revolves around Officer Jason Dixon (Rockwell), a low-IQ policemen who lives with his mother and has a record of abusing black suspects in custody. (Accused at one point of being in the “nigger-torturing business,” he replies, “It’s the ‘person-of-color’-torturing business.”)

McDonagh mines his familiar veins here—death, anger, remorse, revenge, ambiguous absolution—but he mines far deeper than in his earlier efforts. Until now, the brutal-yet-ironic combatants in his darkly comic theater of cruelty had been almost exclusively male. In Six Shooter (which, truth be told, did not really merit its Oscar), two men with death in their immediate pasts meet on a train. In In Bruges, two hitmen await their fate at the hands of another, more senior killer. And in Seven Psychopaths, a series of violently unhinged men—and one confused screenwriter—trade McDonagh’s particular brand of diamond-sharp verbal barbs.

But choosing to hinge Three Billboards around a female lead tethers the wilder, more boyish fancies to which McDonagh occasionally succumbs. Mildred Hayes may have the soul of a hitman, but she’s not one: She’s a mother who has lost her only daughter to sexual violence. Moreover, Three Billboards is not merely the story of her interaction with two policemen, but the story of a community struggling to deal with both the horrifying memory of Angela’s murder and the difficult reality of Mildred’s response to it.

This is McDormand’s greatest performance since Fargo, a remarkable portrait of obduracy indifferent to consequences. It is hard to imagine an actress better suited to the role. She is neither vain nor working hard to establish her lack of vanity, and she has a face that has grown ever more interesting with age. I’m reminded of Tommy Lee Jones (though he’s a decade older), another performer for whom every line or wrinkle suggests a lesson learned for good or ill, a level of gravitas that slowly accumulates in tectonic layers. Mildred’s hardening resolve almost seems the flip side of Jones’s growing despair in No Country for Old Men: another face carved by bitter weather.

The characters who orbit her, by contrast, are more malleable, more subject to evolution in the face of circumstance. (Here, again, I don’t want to say too much.) Harrelson is as good as I’ve ever seen him, equal parts tough and tender. And Rockwell has found a role that makes full use of his goofy charisma while harnessing it to something more substantial. This may finally be the role that gets him truly noticed—though I’ve believed that before. John Hawkes plays Mildred’s abusive ex-husband, who left her in order to date a 19-year-old—but he, too, is allowed to be more than the sum of his sins. And sound supporting work is done by Sandy Martin, Lucas Hedges, Peter Dinklage, Abbie Cornish, Caleb Landry Jones, Clarke Peters, and Zeljko Ivanek.

McDonagh has a habit of working with his stars more than once: Brendan Gleeson, Colin Farrell, Christopher Walken, and others. Indeed, this is his second collaboration with both Harrelson and Rockwell. But in McDormand, he may have found his strongest partner yet. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is a triumph for director and actress alike. Here’s hoping it is not their last.
 

Christopher Orr is a senior editor and film critic at The Atlantic. He has written on movies for the New Republic, LA Weekly, Salon, and The New York Sun, and has worked as an editor for numerous publications.

The Importance Of Getting Composers Aboard Early on a Film

DreamWorks Animation’s ‘How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World’ & ‘Abominable’ Stress Importance Of Getting Composers Aboard Early – The Contenders L.A.

By Matthew Carey

November 2, 2019 12:13pm

Photo by Rob Latour/Deadline/Shutterstock

Note to would-be directors of animated features: get your composer involved from the start. That was one of the key observations from The Contenders L.A. DreamWorks Animation panel Saturday, that featured filmmaking talent behind How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World and Abominable. “I try to put get [composer] John [Powell] involved as early as possible, sending him scripts from the earliest drafts,” said Dean DeBlois, director of all three Dragon films including The Hidden World.

“This is our third installment of a trilogy so we have honed a partnership over a 10-year period in which I completely trust John and his instincts and know that he is a great storyteller in his own right,” DeBlois added. “He finds themes that I might not be as aware of as I’m writing on the surface and they play like harmonies to the intention that I try to put on screen.”

Powell underscored the importance of getting a jumpstart on the material.

“The composer often comes on very early on animation,” he stated. “It’s one of the things I like about it. You kind of get to be a filmmaker with everybody else. In fact, I think that’s essential.”

The Dragon franchise has earned $1.7 billion since the first film debuted in 2010. Powell has composed each of the movies’ scores.

“Each film, the main idea was to write each one better than the last and finally write good music,” Powell joked.

Rupert Gregson-Williams composed the music for Abominable, the story of Yi, a girl who discovers a Yeti on her rooftop and undertakes a mission to return him to his home in the Himalayas.

“Rupert was on really early because he needed to write a theme for Yi that she played on the violin,” producer Suzanne Buirgy explained. “The animators, to their credit, wanted to animate that perfectly, so he came on quite early to do that. And he really just knocked it out of the park.”

Powell concurred with that assessment.

“Rupert is very good,” he commented. “It’s very annoying.”

Abominable, a co-production between DreamWorks and Shanghai-based Pearl Studios, has made more than $145 million worldwide and is one of 32 animated features to qualify for Oscar consideration this year, along with How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World. Jill Culton directed with Todd Wilderman.

“Jill was the writer-director—first female writer-director on a full-length animated feature from a major studio, so that was quite a coup,” Buirgy noted to applause from the Contenders audience. “And it was her original idea.”

The Hidden World wraps the story of Hiccup, a “ne’er do well” at the start who achieves maturity over the course of the trilogy, and Toothless, the dragon he befriends.

DeBlois addressed one of the key plot developments in the final film.

“I was inspired by the decision of the author’s [Cressida Cowell] decision to explain what happened to dragons and why they aren’t here anymore in her books,” said DeBlois. “Even though the narrative is quite different in the films to the books, that seemed like a very compelling goal. The end would feature the disappearance of the dragons and inevitable separation. That just speaks to a theme I love in films from E.T. to Harold and Maude to Fox and the Hound. It’s just a timeless conceit that you might have two disparate characters coming together for a time and having such a profound impact that even should they separate they will be permanently changed.”

This article was printed from https://deadline.com/2019/11/dreamworks-animation-how-to-train-your-dragon-the-hidden-world-abominable-composers-dean-deblois-the-contenders-la-1202775708/

 
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