On the set of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Thirty years after the feted BBC adaptation of John le Carré’s Cold War thriller, George Smiley is back, this time on the big screen
The actor and the spy – think how much they have in common. The blurring of identity, the art of disguise, the ability to become somebody else and to play that part convincingly. Acting, so often said to be an investigation of ‘the truth’ is, like so much intelligence work, actually the concealment of a lie.
Seated in his caravan on the set for the new film adaptation of John le Carré’s seminal Cold War thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the actor Gary Oldman is talking about getting to grips with the role of George Smiley, the master spy.
Smiley is one of the truly great creations of post-war English literature: a nondescript man of late middle age who confounds every stereotype of the spy as man of action; a man, as le Carré has it, with ‘a past so complex that he himself could not remember all the enemies he might have made’, whose weapons are a beady eye and a profound understanding of human fallibility. As Sherlock Holmes is to the world of detection, so George Smiley is to the world of espionage.
Oldman is dressed for the part in a grey tweed three-piece suit, a shirt and tie, and the horn-rimmed spectacles which, it seems, are the key to incarnating the character of Smiley. ‘I tried on hundreds of pairs,’ he says, ‘and then you know in five seconds…’ He pauses, in search of the appropriate metaphor. ‘They are the Aston Martin.’
His manner is pensive, watchful, his movements contained. It is almost as if he is wearing George Smiley. ‘This role is very much about stillness,’ he says. ‘There’s a point in the book where Smiley’s wife, Ann, describes him as being like a swift, that he can lower his body temperature till it’s the same as the environment, then he doesn’t lose energy adjusting. Not to sound all methody, but it’s like my blood pressure’s dropped. Maybe I’m the swift.’
Ostensibly based on le Carré’s own experiences in the intelligence services, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was published in 1974, at a time when the Cold War was at its height, and the betrayals of the so-called Cambridge Five – Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess et al – were still fresh in the nation’s collective memory. The death of a British agent on a botched operation in Czechoslovakia has led to suspicions that a Soviet mole has penetrated the highest echelons of MI6. Smiley, a senior officer who has been forced into retirement with the coming of a new hierarchy, and who has ‘given himself full time to the profession of forgetting’, is approached to surreptitiously root out the mole among his erstwhile friends and associates. ‘It’s the oldest question of all, George,’ as Lacon, the senior civil servant who has brought Smiley in out of the cold, puts it. ‘Who can spy on the spies?’
Tinker, Tailor is a thriller almost devoid of action in the conventional sense. What le Carré describes is a cerebral chess game in which the inner sanctum of ‘the Circus’, as he calls the Secret Service, is a labyrinth of mirrors in which nobody is quite what they seem, everybody’s motives are open to question and nobody can be trusted. In modern spy stories, everybody hurries. Here, when Smiley interrogates someone, time ticks away ‘without anyone using it’. He is a man who ‘preferred to let the silence do its work, and he seemed confident it would’.
For many people, the character of George Smiley is inseparable from Alec Guinness, who played him in the celebrated BBC television adaptation in 1979, and whose mournful, dead-fish eyes and anonymous provincial-bank-manager countenance appeared to make the role wholly and exclusively his own. That series played over seven episodes, each 50 minutes long. Even at that length it was criticised by some for the complexity of the plot. The challenge of both encapsulating le Carré’s story within the confines of a film, and of matching the yardstick established by the television series, is therefore considerable.
The idea of a film adaptation of Tinker, Tailor was first bruited by the screenwriter Peter Morgan, best known for writing the films The Deal, The Queen and Frost/Nixon. ‘He suggested, and we all agreed, that doing a Cold War film 20 years after the Wall coming down was a great idea,’ Tim Bevan, the film’s producer, says. ‘And basing it on one of the great literary pieces that depicted that seemed to be a very sensible proposition.’
Working closely with le Carré, Morgan wrote a couple of drafts, before pulling out to concentrate on other things. The script passed into the hands of Peter Straughan and Bridget O’Connor, who more or less started again from scratch. ‘The one thing Peter had proved to us is that you could absolutely tell the story in 120 minutes,’ Bevan says.
Bevan had talks with a number of British directors about the project, but the formidable legacy of the BBC series and what he calls ‘the Alec Guinness of it all’ made them nervous. ‘I never saw that personally,’ he says. ‘I always just thought that this was a fantastic story, and if it was made for television 30 years ago, so what?’
A solution presented itself in the person of Tomas Alfredson, the Swedish director whose film Let the Right One In, a dark meditation on the relationship between a troubled young boy and a vampire girl, became an international success in 2008. ‘He came to see me,’ Bevan says, ‘and I was expecting some 20-year-old cool dude, and in wandered Tomas, who is not a 20-year-old dude, but is a very cool and a very interesting man.’
Alfredson, who is 46, had spent 15 years making films for television before Let the Right One In. A personable figure with a boyish thatch of dark hair, thick-rimmed spectacles and a somewhat idiosyncratic grasp of what he calls ‘Swenglish’ (‘please feel free to translate for the article’), he first read Tinker, Tailor in the 1980s after seeing the adaptation on Swedish television. ‘There, too, it was a very emblematic piece of television,’ he says.
What struck Alfredson then, he says – and what continues to intrigue him now – is the difference between the ‘ideal soldier’ for the Cold War and for a ‘hot’ one. ‘It felt like the spy world was a very feminine world, even though it was mostly men involved. It’s about feelings, intuition, the ability to play around with the imagination – stuff you really don’t need on the beaches of Normandy. Being a foreigner, there’s a fascination for me about this former empire that still lives with the idea that they are rulers of the world, and about the endurance of the British “code” of behaviour and how these people communicate with each other. For instance, in the last scene in the film when Smiley has revealed the mole they still shake hands and they’re very polite and Smiley says, “Anything I can help you with…” And, of course, it’s a brilliant piece of literature,’ he laughs, ‘and totally impossible to put into a film, and that’s something that also makes you want to do it.’
The production has taken over a disused Army barracks in north London, a more economical option than renting studio space, and one that also offers an infinite variety of usage. The old administrative block now houses the film’s design studios and production offices (where a photograph of Kim Philby is pinned on the door like some abiding patron saint of betrayal). Corridors and alcoves have been used for interior shots, and the side of a building has been ‘dressed’ as the exterior of a Wimpy bar.
In le Carré’s book ‘the Circus’ takes its name from Cambridge Circus in London’s West End, where its headquarters are ostensibly located. In the book, and in the TV adaptation, these premises were depicted as cramped warrens of faded Edwardian gentility, with muddy-green walls and scenes of England prints, pervaded by the smell of ‘sweet dust and jasmine tea’. For the film, the production designer Maria Djurkovic has reimagined the HQ as a 1970s block, secreted within a complex of Edwardian buildings, and brought a period hi-tech modernism to the interiors.
In one corner of a warehouse, a conference room has been constructed, padded with sound-insulation foam; on a glass-topped table stands a whisky decanter and an ashtray brimming with cigarette butts. There is a large open-plan office where the admin staff and secretaries (‘the mothers’, as le Carré had it) sit, rows of wooden desks with ancient typewriters and empty wastepaper bins upturned on their surface (in keeping with service protocol), and a single early-model Wang word processor (the 1200 model, introduced in 1974). Authentic period posters are pinned to the wall: remember – telephone talk is not secure; what the hydrogen bomb does.
In another building, Alfredson has been filming a scene where Smiley and his righthand man, Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch), arrive at the shabby terrace house where ‘the mole’ conducts his clandestine meetings with his Soviet contact. It is a short scene, merely showing the two men entering the house; a moment of consternation from the housekeeper, a dog leaping excitedly on to a sofa at the arrival of strangers. ‘Be quiet, dog,’ the housekeeper says. (Actually the dog is, on command, being quiet. The barks will be overdubbed later.)
Bevan says, ‘You kind of know what the movie would have been like with virtually any English director, and the fact is you didn’t with Tomas. Oftentimes the best films about places are made by people who don’t come from there. I remember Nic Roeg saying that the brilliant thing about making Walkabout was that he didn’t know anything about Australia, and the film was his journey of getting to know the country. And I think for Tomas his journey in getting to know England through making this movie is one the audience will take through the film as well.’
Alfredson has assembled a stellar cast of British actors, including Colin Firth (who plays Bill Haydon, the suave, insouciant agent at the heart of the conspiracy), Cumberbatch, Mark Strong and John Hurt. But it was laying to rest what Alfredson calls ‘the Alec Guinness ghost’ that was to prove the most difficult challenge. ‘It was an almost impossible problem to solve,’ he says. ‘I think we sat nearly a year without any ideas. We couldn’t go with someone almost like Alec Guinness – that would not be fair to that actor, or to Sir Alec. So I felt we needed to have another silhouette, another energy, another body, but yet George Smiley.’
Alfredson says he casts his films by envisaging his principal characters as animals. ‘So this is a fox, this is a snake, this a frog – not the image of a frog, but the soul of a frog. This way you are much freer to choose from different ages and types.’ Smiley, he says, is ‘a turtle, because the turtle has so much of its body hidden inside a shell; it is fixed, and it doesn’t have a lot of different expressions.’
Gary Oldman, an actor for whom the adjective ‘kinetic’ might have been invented, does not seem the most obvious choice to fit this description. Having made his early reputation as one of the outstanding young English actors of his generation with films such as Sid and Nancy and Prick Up Your Ears, in more recent years Oldman has been living in Hollywood, playing villains and larger-than-life roles in ‘franchise’ films such as Batman and Harry Potter.
‘He is a different type, and yet the same soul,’ Alfredson says of Oldman. ‘He has invested a whole career in order to get this face, this voice, to get the experience to play… nothing – which is the hardest thing you can ask an actor to do.’
Oldman says he hesitated about stepping into the shoes of Guinness – ‘but not for long. The chance to play a character that’s internal and quiet was one that ultimately I couldn’t say no to. I’m in no way putting myself in the same league, but you’ve got Guinness and you’ve got Gary, and there’s 30 years or something between them, but there’s a road map that we’re both following; and anyone with a modicum of talent or instinct will walk that path.’
For Oldman, the most important signs on the map have come from le Carré (or to give him his proper name, David Cornwell) himself. ‘You read the book, you read the script and then you meet David, and his signature is in all those characters, but specifically it’s in Smiley. And I’ve taken some things from him – a few mannerisms, a certain inflection in the speech. It began as an impersonation and I’ve worked it through my own filter. I suspect Guinness took something from him, too.
‘Smiley is someone who melts into the furniture. And sometimes you don’t want anything at all to read in the eyes. There are times when he looks almost bored – and that’s when you know he’s interested. So it’s been a great joy in that sense, and challenging, because so much of it is internal.’
Oldman says that Tinker, Tailor is the kind of thoughtful, intelligent, well-crafted film that comes along all too rarely. ‘It’s an intellectual thriller. And I was amazed at the script. It’s very refreshing that it’s as faithful as it can be to the book given that we have two hours to tell it rather than six hours.’
‘You need to choose what to put the magnifying glass on,’ Alfredson explains. ‘This story is about betrayal, in a very private way, between friends and people you’re supposed to trust. So we have done a film that’s extremely close to the characters, and much less about the Cold War or the politics.’
In Alfredson’s film the sense of intrigue and emotional tension – and of time ticking away without anyone using it – is stretched as tight as a piano wire. ‘It’s a tricky thing, this,’ he says with a slight smile. ‘It’s one thing to depict boredom, but what you don’t want is to be boring.’
The sense of period is superbly evoked – a pre-digital world of telephone boxes, clunking great tape-recorders, of rain, austerity and gloom. ‘The gloom is important,’ Alfredson says. ‘But it’s a nice gloom, for some reason. That was a very strong memory for me of coming here for the first time in 1973. If you see London now and at that time, it’s two different cities. Today it’s a white city, then it was black; it was so dirty, and you could still feel the war all around. And I think we’ve captured that.’ Bevan describes Tinker, Tailor as feeling ‘like a film that was made in the 1970s, rather than a film about the 1970s’, the stylistic equivalent to such classic films of the period as Coppola’s The Conversation and Bertolucci’s The Conformist.
Le Carré, who is credited as an executive producer on the film, has played an almost oracular role in its making. All of the principal actors have sat down with him at one time or another, picking his brains about service procedure, slang, the pressures of living in a constant state of anxiety. ‘Waiting for the noise of the shoes on the stairs,’ Oldman says. ‘David talked about that. It’s one of the things he remembers very vividly. The fear of their cover being blown.’
Cumberbatch, who plays Guillam, the young officer who aids Smiley in tracking down the mole, describes his meeting with le Carré as ‘priceless. He has a very full vision of that world and the history of the character, so it’s all there on a plate for you after having a conversation with him.’ In preparation, Cumberbatch had taken himself off, alone, to the Moroccan seaside town of Essaouira. Le Carré makes mention in the book of Guillam having been stationed in Morocco, and Essaouira, with its maze of narrow streets, its long shadows, its window shutters banging in the wind blowing off the Atlantic, provided a perfect setting for the cultivation of feelings of unease. ‘It’s got a slightly nightmare quality,’ Cumberbatch says, ‘and I was wandering around the streets at night, thinking what it must be like to know that every turn could be my last. It was very helpful.’
For Alfredson it was le Carré’s benediction that finally assuaged his early concerns about whether to make the film at all. ‘He said, please don’t do the book and please don’t do the TV series; they already exist. And the man is like a living encyclopaedia – and so friendly, interested, updated; he’s one of the youngest people I’ve ever met, although he’s 80 this year. Just a fantastic person.’ Alfredson recalls one occasion when he was shooting a particularly critical scene in the film where the inner circle of the Circus are gathered around the conference table. ‘When we rehearsed it, it felt as if Bill Haydon should say something, but what would he say? Well, why not call John le Carré and see if he’s in? And we called him and we described the situation. He thought for 15 seconds and he said, grab a pen, here it is. It was a fantastic moment.’
‘I almost expected it to be brought in on a velvet cushion,’ Colin Firth, who plays Haydon, says. He laughs. ‘Your line… fresh from the maestro.’
Firth says he has closely modelled his depiction of Haydon on Kim Philby (whom le Carré once described as ‘spiteful, vain and murderous’). ‘Le Carré doesn’t say that Philby was the inspiration for Haydon, but I’ve decided to tie him to Philby.’ With Alfredson, Firth studied newsreel footage of Philby’s infamous 1955 press conference following the defection of Burgess and Maclean, in which Philby denied he was ‘the third man’ – seven years before he fled to Moscow. ‘You can see the tremendous tension in his body language and in his facial expression, but he cannot hide the sense of mischief. The image of the Russian doll-within-a-doll that Smiley applies to Haydon comes to mind when you look at someone like Philby, because you don’t ever quite get to the bottom of his motivation.’
One of the intriguing things about Tinker, Tailor, Firth says, is that it takes place against the background of the Empire’s decline, and the clash of ideologies which – a mere 40 years on – already seems curiously like ancient history. ‘One can be almost nostalgic about the Cold War now. The idea of it being so complicated, but somehow ideologically seeming so simple, particularly as we look at the West now and question whether capitalism really did win that struggle. The last rites were pronounced on Eastern European communism, but we’ve yet to see who was really the biggest loser.
‘John le Carré has been attacked for just writing for men and being “completely unemotional”,’ Firth goes on, ‘but looking at this story now I think it’s profoundly emotional; the sense of melancholy is huge. David has described Smiley as the ultimate disappointed romantic, and one of the things the film picks up very strongly is that he wants to believe in these incredibly simple, and arguably rather sentimental, values, and yet he’s constantly disappointed.’
For Oldman the role of Smiley seems to have taken on a significance beyond the film itself, rejuvenating a spirit that, he admits, after 30 years as an actor was beginning to grow weary. ‘Just the process of filmmaking,’ he says. ‘I think you can learn to hate something. I think I was becoming a little tired of it. But this has really required a focus and a commitment. It’s been wonderful to wake up in the morning and think, I can’t wait to get in the car and get to the set – actually looking at the clock and looking forward to it.’
The call has come for Oldman to be on set. For a moment he sits quite still, as if summoning the spirit of Smiley. It’s odd, he says at last, how over the last few months he has found himself becoming more watchful, more introspective. ‘Not so chatty… My wife said to me the other day, “Are you listening to what I’m saying? I’ve been talking to you for about an hour? Are you going to engage?” Because I think I was sort of drifting away.’
He adjusts his glasses, and rises from his seat. ‘I think I’ll miss him when this ends.’
‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’ is out on September 16. The book is published by Sceptre, £7.99
Tinker, Tailor is a thriller almost devoid of action in the conventional sense. What le Carré describes is a cerebral chess game in which the inner sanctum of ‘the Circus’, as he calls the Secret Service, is a labyrinth of mirrors in which nobody is quite what they seem, everybody’s motives are open to question and nobody can be trusted. In modern spy stories, everybody hurries. Here, when Smiley interrogates someone, time ticks away ‘without anyone using it’. He is a man who ‘preferred to let the silence do its work, and he seemed confident it would’.
For many people, the character of George Smiley is inseparable from Alec Guinness, who played him in the celebrated BBC television adaptation in 1979, and whose mournful, dead-fish eyes and anonymous provincial-bank-manager countenance appeared to make the role wholly and exclusively his own. That series played over seven episodes, each 50 minutes long. Even at that length it was criticised by some for the complexity of the plot. The challenge of both encapsulating le Carré’s story within the confines of a film, and of matching the yardstick established by the television series, is therefore considerable.
The idea of a film adaptation of Tinker, Tailor was first bruited by the screenwriter Peter Morgan, best known for writing the films The Deal, The Queen and Frost/Nixon. ‘He suggested, and we all agreed, that doing a Cold War film 20 years after the Wall coming down was a great idea,’ Tim Bevan, the film’s producer, says. ‘And basing it on one of the great literary pieces that depicted that seemed to be a very sensible proposition.’
Working closely with le Carré, Morgan wrote a couple of drafts, before pulling out to concentrate on other things. The script passed into the hands of Peter Straughan and Bridget O’Connor, who more or less started again from scratch. ‘The one thing Peter had proved to us is that you could absolutely tell the story in 120 minutes,’ Bevan says.
Bevan had talks with a number of British directors about the project, but the formidable legacy of the BBC series and what he calls ‘the Alec Guinness of it all’ made them nervous. ‘I never saw that personally,’ he says. ‘I always just thought that this was a fantastic story, and if it was made for television 30 years ago, so what?’
A solution presented itself in the person of Tomas Alfredson, the Swedish director whose film Let the Right One In, a dark meditation on the relationship between a troubled young boy and a vampire girl, became an international success in 2008. ‘He came to see me,’ Bevan says, ‘and I was expecting some 20-year-old cool dude, and in wandered Tomas, who is not a 20-year-old dude, but is a very cool and a very interesting man.’
Alfredson, who is 46, had spent 15 years making films for television before Let the Right One In. A personable figure with a boyish thatch of dark hair, thick-rimmed spectacles and a somewhat idiosyncratic grasp of what he calls ‘Swenglish’ (‘please feel free to translate for the article’), he first read Tinker, Tailor in the 1980s after seeing the adaptation on Swedish television. ‘There, too, it was a very emblematic piece of television,’ he says.
What struck Alfredson then, he says – and what continues to intrigue him now – is the difference between the ‘ideal soldier’ for the Cold War and for a ‘hot’ one. ‘It felt like the spy world was a very feminine world, even though it was mostly men involved. It’s about feelings, intuition, the ability to play around with the imagination – stuff you really don’t need on the beaches of Normandy. Being a foreigner, there’s a fascination for me about this former empire that still lives with the idea that they are rulers of the world, and about the endurance of the British “code” of behaviour and how these people communicate with each other. For instance, in the last scene in the film when Smiley has revealed the mole they still shake hands and they’re very polite and Smiley says, “Anything I can help you with…” And, of course, it’s a brilliant piece of literature,’ he laughs, ‘and totally impossible to put into a film, and that’s something that also makes you want to do it.’
The production has taken over a disused Army barracks in north London, a more economical option than renting studio space, and one that also offers an infinite variety of usage. The old administrative block now houses the film’s design studios and production offices (where a photograph of Kim Philby is pinned on the door like some abiding patron saint of betrayal). Corridors and alcoves have been used for interior shots, and the side of a building has been ‘dressed’ as the exterior of a Wimpy bar.
In le Carré’s book ‘the Circus’ takes its name from Cambridge Circus in London’s West End, where its headquarters are ostensibly located. In the book, and in the TV adaptation, these premises were depicted as cramped warrens of faded Edwardian gentility, with muddy-green walls and scenes of England prints, pervaded by the smell of ‘sweet dust and jasmine tea’. For the film, the production designer Maria Djurkovic has reimagined the HQ as a 1970s block, secreted within a complex of Edwardian buildings, and brought a period hi-tech modernism to the interiors.
In one corner of a warehouse, a conference room has been constructed, padded with sound-insulation foam; on a glass-topped table stands a whisky decanter and an ashtray brimming with cigarette butts. There is a large open-plan office where the admin staff and secretaries (‘the mothers’, as le Carré had it) sit, rows of wooden desks with ancient typewriters and empty wastepaper bins upturned on their surface (in keeping with service protocol), and a single early-model Wang word processor (the 1200 model, introduced in 1974). Authentic period posters are pinned to the wall: remember – telephone talk is not secure; what the hydrogen bomb does.
In another building, Alfredson has been filming a scene where Smiley and his righthand man, Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch), arrive at the shabby terrace house where ‘the mole’ conducts his clandestine meetings with his Soviet contact. It is a short scene, merely showing the two men entering the house; a moment of consternation from the housekeeper, a dog leaping excitedly on to a sofa at the arrival of strangers. ‘Be quiet, dog,’ the housekeeper says. (Actually the dog is, on command, being quiet. The barks will be overdubbed later.)
Bevan says, ‘You kind of know what the movie would have been like with virtually any English director, and the fact is you didn’t with Tomas. Oftentimes the best films about places are made by people who don’t come from there. I remember Nic Roeg saying that the brilliant thing about making Walkabout was that he didn’t know anything about Australia, and the film was his journey of getting to know the country. And I think for Tomas his journey in getting to know England through making this movie is one the audience will take through the film as well.’
Alfredson has assembled a stellar cast of British actors, including Colin Firth (who plays Bill Haydon, the suave, insouciant agent at the heart of the conspiracy), Cumberbatch, Mark Strong and John Hurt. But it was laying to rest what Alfredson calls ‘the Alec Guinness ghost’ that was to prove the most difficult challenge. ‘It was an almost impossible problem to solve,’ he says. ‘I think we sat nearly a year without any ideas. We couldn’t go with someone almost like Alec Guinness – that would not be fair to that actor, or to Sir Alec. So I felt we needed to have another silhouette, another energy, another body, but yet George Smiley.’
Alfredson says he casts his films by envisaging his principal characters as animals. ‘So this is a fox, this is a snake, this a frog – not the image of a frog, but the soul of a frog. This way you are much freer to choose from different ages and types.’ Smiley, he says, is ‘a turtle, because the turtle has so much of its body hidden inside a shell; it is fixed, and it doesn’t have a lot of different expressions.’
Gary Oldman, an actor for whom the adjective ‘kinetic’ might have been invented, does not seem the most obvious choice to fit this description. Having made his early reputation as one of the outstanding young English actors of his generation with films such as Sid and Nancy and Prick Up Your Ears, in more recent years Oldman has been living in Hollywood, playing villains and larger-than-life roles in ‘franchise’ films such as Batman and Harry Potter.
‘He is a different type, and yet the same soul,’ Alfredson says of Oldman. ‘He has invested a whole career in order to get this face, this voice, to get the experience to play… nothing – which is the hardest thing you can ask an actor to do.’
Oldman says he hesitated about stepping into the shoes of Guinness – ‘but not for long. The chance to play a character that’s internal and quiet was one that ultimately I couldn’t say no to. I’m in no way putting myself in the same league, but you’ve got Guinness and you’ve got Gary, and there’s 30 years or something between them, but there’s a road map that we’re both following; and anyone with a modicum of talent or instinct will walk that path.’
For Oldman, the most important signs on the map have come from le Carré (or to give him his proper name, David Cornwell) himself. ‘You read the book, you read the script and then you meet David, and his signature is in all those characters, but specifically it’s in Smiley. And I’ve taken some things from him – a few mannerisms, a certain inflection in the speech. It began as an impersonation and I’ve worked it through my own filter. I suspect Guinness took something from him, too.
‘Smiley is someone who melts into the furniture. And sometimes you don’t want anything at all to read in the eyes. There are times when he looks almost bored – and that’s when you know he’s interested. So it’s been a great joy in that sense, and challenging, because so much of it is internal.’
Oldman says that Tinker, Tailor is the kind of thoughtful, intelligent, well-crafted film that comes along all too rarely. ‘It’s an intellectual thriller. And I was amazed at the script. It’s very refreshing that it’s as faithful as it can be to the book given that we have two hours to tell it rather than six hours.’
‘You need to choose what to put the magnifying glass on,’ Alfredson explains. ‘This story is about betrayal, in a very private way, between friends and people you’re supposed to trust. So we have done a film that’s extremely close to the characters, and much less about the Cold War or the politics.’
In Alfredson’s film the sense of intrigue and emotional tension – and of time ticking away without anyone using it – is stretched as tight as a piano wire. ‘It’s a tricky thing, this,’ he says with a slight smile. ‘It’s one thing to depict boredom, but what you don’t want is to be boring.’
The sense of period is superbly evoked – a pre-digital world of telephone boxes, clunking great tape-recorders, of rain, austerity and gloom. ‘The gloom is important,’ Alfredson says. ‘But it’s a nice gloom, for some reason. That was a very strong memory for me of coming here for the first time in 1973. If you see London now and at that time, it’s two different cities. Today it’s a white city, then it was black; it was so dirty, and you could still feel the war all around. And I think we’ve captured that.’ Bevan describes Tinker, Tailor as feeling ‘like a film that was made in the 1970s, rather than a film about the 1970s’, the stylistic equivalent to such classic films of the period as Coppola’s The Conversation and Bertolucci’s The Conformist.
Le Carré, who is credited as an executive producer on the film, has played an almost oracular role in its making. All of the principal actors have sat down with him at one time or another, picking his brains about service procedure, slang, the pressures of living in a constant state of anxiety. ‘Waiting for the noise of the shoes on the stairs,’ Oldman says. ‘David talked about that. It’s one of the things he remembers very vividly. The fear of their cover being blown.’
Cumberbatch, who plays Guillam, the young officer who aids Smiley in tracking down the mole, describes his meeting with le Carré as ‘priceless. He has a very full vision of that world and the history of the character, so it’s all there on a plate for you after having a conversation with him.’ In preparation, Cumberbatch had taken himself off, alone, to the Moroccan seaside town of Essaouira. Le Carré makes mention in the book of Guillam having been stationed in Morocco, and Essaouira, with its maze of narrow streets, its long shadows, its window shutters banging in the wind blowing off the Atlantic, provided a perfect setting for the cultivation of feelings of unease. ‘It’s got a slightly nightmare quality,’ Cumberbatch says, ‘and I was wandering around the streets at night, thinking what it must be like to know that every turn could be my last. It was very helpful.’
For Alfredson it was le Carré’s benediction that finally assuaged his early concerns about whether to make the film at all. ‘He said, please don’t do the book and please don’t do the TV series; they already exist. And the man is like a living encyclopaedia – and so friendly, interested, updated; he’s one of the youngest people I’ve ever met, although he’s 80 this year. Just a fantastic person.’ Alfredson recalls one occasion when he was shooting a particularly critical scene in the film where the inner circle of the Circus are gathered around the conference table. ‘When we rehearsed it, it felt as if Bill Haydon should say something, but what would he say? Well, why not call John le Carré and see if he’s in? And we called him and we described the situation. He thought for 15 seconds and he said, grab a pen, here it is. It was a fantastic moment.’
‘I almost expected it to be brought in on a velvet cushion,’ Colin Firth, who plays Haydon, says. He laughs. ‘Your line… fresh from the maestro.’
Firth says he has closely modelled his depiction of Haydon on Kim Philby (whom le Carré once described as ‘spiteful, vain and murderous’). ‘Le Carré doesn’t say that Philby was the inspiration for Haydon, but I’ve decided to tie him to Philby.’ With Alfredson, Firth studied newsreel footage of Philby’s infamous 1955 press conference following the defection of Burgess and Maclean, in which Philby denied he was ‘the third man’ – seven years before he fled to Moscow. ‘You can see the tremendous tension in his body language and in his facial expression, but he cannot hide the sense of mischief. The image of the Russian doll-within-a-doll that Smiley applies to Haydon comes to mind when you look at someone like Philby, because you don’t ever quite get to the bottom of his motivation.’
One of the intriguing things about Tinker, Tailor, Firth says, is that it takes place against the background of the Empire’s decline, and the clash of ideologies which – a mere 40 years on – already seems curiously like ancient history. ‘One can be almost nostalgic about the Cold War now. The idea of it being so complicated, but somehow ideologically seeming so simple, particularly as we look at the West now and question whether capitalism really did win that struggle. The last rites were pronounced on Eastern European communism, but we’ve yet to see who was really the biggest loser.
‘John le Carré has been attacked for just writing for men and being “completely unemotional”,’ Firth goes on, ‘but looking at this story now I think it’s profoundly emotional; the sense of melancholy is huge. David has described Smiley as the ultimate disappointed romantic, and one of the things the film picks up very strongly is that he wants to believe in these incredibly simple, and arguably rather sentimental, values, and yet he’s constantly disappointed.’
For Oldman the role of Smiley seems to have taken on a significance beyond the film itself, rejuvenating a spirit that, he admits, after 30 years as an actor was beginning to grow weary. ‘Just the process of filmmaking,’ he says. ‘I think you can learn to hate something. I think I was becoming a little tired of it. But this has really required a focus and a commitment. It’s been wonderful to wake up in the morning and think, I can’t wait to get in the car and get to the set – actually looking at the clock and looking forward to it.’
The call has come for Oldman to be on set. For a moment he sits quite still, as if summoning the spirit of Smiley. It’s odd, he says at last, how over the last few months he has found himself becoming more watchful, more introspective. ‘Not so chatty… My wife said to me the other day, “Are you listening to what I’m saying? I’ve been talking to you for about an hour? Are you going to engage?” Because I think I was sort of drifting away.’
He adjusts his glasses, and rises from his seat. ‘I think I’ll miss him when this ends.’
‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’ is out on September 16. The book is published by Sceptre, £7.99
No comments:
Post a Comment