A quick refresher. Famously, Wilkie was the only western intelligence officer who resigned in protest before the 2003 Iraq War as he believed the governments of Australia, the US, and Britain were prosecuting the war on a lie. That lie being that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had ties to Al Qaeda. Subsequent events and several inquiries were to prove Wilkie correct.
He paid a steep price for this as most whistle-blowers do when they speak truth to power. Remarkably, however, he is now an independent member of the Australian Federal Parliament. The Truth to Power screenplay is an adaptation of his book Axis of Deceit.
What the book couldn’t tell me, nor the subsequent research, is what the then intelligence analyst’s emotional journey was during this time. All direct communication with Wilkie was conducted through Tim which commenced several years before my involvement. It was an arrangement I was happy to continue though there was talk of trying to organise either a visit to Canberra or a videoconference. Alas, Wilkie’s parliamentary duties made that highly unlikely. I filled in the gaps as best I could and trusted that we weren’t too far off base. There were elements in the script, however, that I wasn’t sure how he would react to. Overall though, I was happy with where we were at.
It was a 7th draft that was dispatched towards the end of October 2017. We wouldn’t get a response until early January 2018. Usually I am not a patient person when it comes to waiting for feedback but I largely put it out of my mind. Tim and I continued to work on the screenplay until Wilkie came back to us.
The results, communicated via Tim, were positive. Wilkie liked the script and the approach we had taken. But there were two areas he disagreed with. One was totally expected – I had used a claim made against Wilkie from his cadet days as the basis of a three beat arc that culminated in a moment of self-reflection during the climax of the script. Wilkie did not recall the alleged incident and therefore it had to go. He understood what we were trying to do by incorporating it though. And that was important to me.
The other issue was far more problematic. While he apparently did not object to the portrayal of the relationship with his then wife Simone, he was adamant he was not in contact with her during the timeframe of the script. Therefore, it too had to go. The emotional spine of that draft! This caused much consternation with Tim mulling the chances of getting Wilkie to change his mind. I suspect that was never a realistic proposition so we set about rewrites and the daunting prospect of reinventing the emotional through line of the screenplay.
My first stab at this was a serviceable scene set well before the events of the story proper… but it didn’t really fit the structure or tone of the screenplay. It was backstory for the purposes of trying to retain a character. It was never going to work. But it was necessary to get that out of our system and discover another way.
Wilkie had given Tim the clue – his concern about what the impact would be on his father if he chose to make a stand. Interestingly, the father had been in the treatment and early drafts. He dropped out as a character as we focussed on Simone. He was about to make a major comeback as these things go in the development of a script.
After three drafts of rewrites that took a couple of months from Wilkie’s initial feedback we sent him the tenth draft on 12 March 2018. His response exactly one month later – “I think it’s very good and happy for you to continue developing it.”
It was now time to start looking for a producer…
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