Based on early projections from Christmas Day movie attendance, Valkyrie is looking to be a surprise success, if not flat-out hit. It made $7.35 million yesterday according to Steve Mason which is actually the 11th-highest opening for a Christmas Day release ever.

So I take it that means you want to hear more from the movie's stars? Below read some thoughts from Terrence Stamp, Kenneth Branagh and Bill Nighy, three Brits who play German military men in the movie. Each of them admitted that, coming from England, they may have had different perspectives on those who fought in Hitler's army, but all were thrilled that their movie was telling a story from a different point of view.

Terrence Stamp: I had been to Berlin before, but i had never thought about the war as such. It takes about an hour fifteen from London, and I thought, 'Wow, my uncle Harry did this is in a Lancaster, and it probably took him four hours to get there.' I realized that I had unwittingly had a prejudice about Germans, because I had only really thought of the war as coming up out of the air raid shelter and seeing our house gone, seeing London on fire, seeing my aunts and my mother longing for my dad and my uncles to come home. I had to revise my hidden concept about Germany itself and about Germans.

Kenneth Branagh: It wasn't a problem or an issue that it's a bad thing to present the gray areas in this conflict. [Director] Bryan Singer and [screenwriter] Chris [McQuarrie] didn't want to present them as saintly or self-righteous in some sort of superhuman way. It was just sort of a messy position to be in, difficult and dangerous, so in a way I think possibly 'good Germans' is a misnomer. These were people trying to do something in a difficult situation. It wasn't a simple case of the black and white morality of it.

Bill Nighy: I didn't concern myself with playing a Nazi particularly. I had no difficulty with it whatsoever-- the idea that not the whole of the German nation was deluded, collectively, by the Nazi party. I also think that it's perfectly possible that what happened in Germany could have happened in any country you want to pick. Anti-Semitism has a long and deeply mysterious, terrible history. The circumstances of that time conspired to have it consummate itself.