In Contention

Tag: John Le Carre

  • 9/19 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Toronto Oscar bounces, threads in ‘Drive,’ adaptng le Carre

    • Anne Thompson talks “Rampart” with writer/director Oren Moverman. [Thompson on Hollywood]

    • Greg Ellwood ponders who got an Oscar bounce out of Toronto. [Awards Campaign]

    • Simon Kinnear on the clothing designs of “Drive.” [Clothes on Film]

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  • REVIEW: “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” (***1/2)

    Venice Film Festival

    An uncharacteristically dark Venetian downpour greeted this morning’s premiere screening of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” and if some flashbulbs of lightning last night hadn’t already previewed the turn in weather, I’d suspect the pervasively, necessarily drab atmospherics of Tomas Alfredson’s artful John le Carré adaptation of bleeding out from the screen and into the beyond.

    Looking for all the world as if the print has been stewed in black tea before being left to gather a few months’ worth of dust in the projection room — and that’s a good thing, I hasten to add — the film proves a happy marriage between two very different brands of understated precision: the British scholarliness of le Carré’s dense espionage lore and the icier Scandinavian calm that Alfredson brought to his breakout vampire drama, “Let the Right One In.”

    In many ways, Alfredson directs le Carré’s self-described “little gray men” of Britain’s MI6 intelligence service as they are themselves vampires of the Cold War: lurking in irremovable half-light, striking efficiently and selectively, and only notionally acquainted with the concept of sunlight, these thickly-tweeded spies appear to bear the burden of their profession as a lifelong alibi for the avoidance of intimacy, social functionality and even standard-issue conversation.

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  • ‘Let the Right One In’ director Alfredson goes British

    Tomas AlfredsonIs a John Le Carré adaptation now some kind of rite of passage for lauded foreign directors crossing over to English-speaking audiences?

    Okay, I’m stretching. Still, it’s interesting that a few years after Fernando Meirelles made the switch with his take on Le Carré’s “The Constant Gardener,” we now have “Let the Right One In” helmer Tomas Alfredson taking on the British author’s defining work “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.”

    ScreenDaily reports that UK stalwart Working Title is shepherding the first big-screen version of Le Carré’s classic espionage novel — which was very successfully adapted for TV in the 1970s, with Alec Guinness famously taking on the role of George Smiley, an elderly spy brought out of retirement to hunt an MI6 mole in the Cold War era.

    No cast has yet been announced for the film, which begins shooting next year. In something of a “Frost/Nixon” reunion, the film is being produced by Working Title heads Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, while Peter Morgan (also an executive producer) is on script duty.

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