By now, you’ve almost certainly seen Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. In fact, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve watched it more than once, trying to work out what it was you missed the first time round.
It certainly holds up to multiple viewings. We recently attended a discussion of the film with producers Tim Bevan and Robin Slovo, screenwriter Peter Straughan and production designer Maria Djurkovic, and while they kept quiet about plans to adapt further novels in the Smiley series, they did speak about holding steady in face of commercial pressures, working with the talented, if somewhat eccentric director Tomas Alfredson and creating MI6’s HQ, The Circus.
ON THE COMMERCIAL PRESSURES ON THE FILM
BEVAN
I loved the book, and I knew there were a lot of people over the age of 40 who had loved the book, and who hadn’t seen the TV series for 20 years, and there was probably a core audience out of that. I also felt that it was very interesting to look at the Cold War being twenty years away from it. The fact that it was 20 years ago would be a very interesting thing. And the really important thing in adapting this book, and if you’re doing an adaptation of any book – in fact, if you’re doing any movie, what you’re looking for is the most amazing subtext. It could be a film about anything, but what it’s about is men betraying men. And that’s laid very bare in the movie, and that’s laid very bare in the brilliant screenplay that Peter wrote.
When you’ve got that subtext those are the very best movies. Those are the very best movies where you’ve got a very clear ‘A’ story – which is a spy story, but then you’ve got this amazing bit about them betraying one another, and this amazing group of actors betraying everybody. We’ve been told a lot in the last three or four years, ‘you can’t make this sort of movie’, ‘you can’t make that sort of movie’, ‘you can do this and you can’t do that’, and when movies took a dive in 2008 your were told ‘no-one’s going to go and see serious cinema anymore’, and we just thought ‘well that’s complete bullshit’, because they were up until last week, so why would the suddenly stop doing it no? There’s an audience out there who want to go to films that are going to make them think a bit more. I always had confidence in that.
ON ALFREDSON
BEVAN
We had tried the idea of a few British directors who were nervous of the piece because of the TV series preceding that. And actually, thank God they didn’t do it, because in fact Tomas’ journey through the material is the journey of the movie, and the journey for the audience. It’s one of those movies where you get somebody who is very, very smart, but doesn’t really know anything about the subject that they’re making the movie about, and their journey through the material, and their journey of discovery becomes the journey of the film…
He couldn’t speak English actually. He came into this building, and he came upstairs, and he didn’t say anything, so I said, ‘what about the vampire movie?’ and he said, ‘I was bullied at school’. I said, ‘Ok, what about spies?’, and he said, ‘well, the tough guys from school, they were the soldiers. The spies, they were the nerds’.
STRAUGHAN
He wasn’t what we were expecting at all. He was quite odd, and very likeable, and came at things from an odd angle. He said things like, ‘if Tinker Tailor was a fairy story, what fairy story would it be?’ and we worked on that for a little bit. I remember one script meeting we had where he came in with a chess set and said, ‘let’s talk about, if the characters were chess pieces would they be?’ And I remember a little bit of me thinking, ‘this is like theatre wank’, but it actually was very useful. It just freshened the whole process up, you get used to a way of working, and you get used to studio notes, and it didn’t work that way. It was nice. And in fact the chess set made its way into the film in the end.
ON THE CIRCUS
SLOVO
It was actually very difficult for Tomas to find a production designer for this. We probably saw between 12 and 14 designers, which is a lot when you think of designers, because design is so important to him. Once he’d met Maria – we’d sat in a room, Tim and I, with Peter and Tomas, and he’d had a big piece of paper, and he’d drawn on the paper his idea of The Circus. And this had gone on for weeks and weeks and weeks, and he’d drawn this big circle, and then a circle within a circle…
BEVAN
Some friend of his in Sweden too. We gave him a whole lot of money, and they came back with all these circles.
SLOVO
We shot most of the film in a barracks in Mill Hill in North London, and the first proper work meeting we had with Maria was that Tomas and I, a few other members of the crew and Maria went to the warehouse where we actually did the circus. And Tomas had started all this business of the circles within circles within circles, and when Tomas walked away I looked at Maria and said, ‘do you know what he’s talking about?’ and she sent ‘yep’, and then I thought, ‘ok, fine. Over to Maria’.
DJURKOVIC
He had this idea that there’s an outer core to the building, and then within that is the inner core, so we had this contrivance which is the Edwardian building that’s the exterior of the circus, and that’s manipulated with CGI, and there’s this great, Brutalist, 60s block in the middle, and that’s the inner circle. And then within this block, there are the different floors, and the top floor, where most of – it’s the epicentre of the whole thing. And the centre of the epicentre is the conference room, so this had to be in some way the most secret space of all.
Tomas had this notion, we had this huge warehouse space we were going to shoot in, and he was talking about offices being individual blocks within this large space, and in the middle of all these blocks is one super block, which is the conference room, and that has to stand out and be more secret than everywhere else. So we started to think along those lines, and there was this bizarre place where we were shooting everything, there was a very odd little security cabin that was a 70s Portakabin, and I said, ‘actually that’s really interesting. We could use that as a motif to put all of these offices in 70s Portakabins.
Tomas really liked that idea, and then that grew to the notion of the conference room – what is it? The most secret of all spaces – and I had this idea, ‘what would make it really secret?’ and it was the soundproofing foam. That’s quite a bold visual, and I like the idea because it works on several levels. It made complete logical sense because the place is meant to be so secret, so it’s surrounded in soundproofing foam, but also I knew it would be a striking visual, and quite a bold one in that you’ve got 360 degrees of this stuff and not a single picture or a window or anything else interrupting it.
