and stars as half German, half British teacher Thomas Miller.
Courtesy of IFC Films
Eddie Izzard, the wildly-admired and inventive comic, was in a museum in the British resort town of Bexhill-on-Sea, where she spent much time as a child, when historians showed her an old badge from the Augusta Victoria school for girls in the 1930’s. There was a Union Jack on the crest — and a Nazi swastika.
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It planted an idea that has become a film; Six Minutes to Midnight, starring Izzard, Dame Judi Dench, Jim Broadbent, and Carla Juri. Izzard says Bexhill-on-Sea has an aristocratic history and at one time, an astonishing number of schools — including the Augusta Victoria school.
“German girls came over to learn English, get to know the British aristocracy,” she says. “It was a Nazi leaning school that had the Nazi swastika in their emblem, as you mentioned, as well as the Union Jack. And they were trying to make friends, Hitler was trying to make friends with the English because some of the English were into the Nazis, and his idea was that they would be part of the Aryan super race and go on — probably under his jurisdiction — into some sort of future that was a Nazi world. And that’s what we based our thriller on top of.” The thriller parts of the story are artistic license, Izzard adds, “But the story of the school being there is absolutely true.”
I think it’s interesting, the idea that he’s half British, half German, you know — the Germans don’t trust him, he’s half British. The British don’t trust him, he’s half German. He’s kind of like a representative from the modern audience there, who just wants the world to work and not fall into this Armageddon that it’s about to get into. He comes into the school. He’s a teacher. But then you find that things aren’t exactly what they seem.
On the challenges of being a standup comedian writing a screenplay
It is quite different. And my standup, I don’t even write. I sort of develop it from ideas and kind of riff on it, kind of in a jazz way, until I’ve got a piece that works. And so story structure, characters, how they interact, I knew I had to get on top of that and develop an ability in that. And I also needed to work with other writers, and working with my other collaborators we pushed it to this place. And having the head of the school being a Nazi-sympathetic Englishwoman, the idea was why don’t you pitch to Judi Dench? And Judi kind of wants to do roles that she’s not expected to do. So she was up for doing it. And that’s how we got to that position.
On how the Nazis would react to being portrayed by a gender-fluid British comedian
