In Contention

Tag: Tomas Alfredson

  • Gary Oldman writes up Coppola across the pond

    Here’s a nice change of pace. On the occasion of the UK opening of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” London’s Telegraph newspaper has commissioned actor Gary Oldman for his thoughts on director Francis Ford Coppola. It’s kind of random, though. Yeah, Oldman starred in Coppola’s 1992 film “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” but there’s no real connection otherwise. Coppola has “Twixt” at Toronto right now, so there’s that, but whatever, I’m not complaining. It’s always nice to get this kind of perspective from an actor. Here’s a taste:

    For me, Apocalypse Now is the peak of his career. So much so that I used a bit of it when I directed Nil By Mouth [1997] — that sequence when Dennis Hopper goes to Willard, who is Kurtz’s captive, and starts telling him about Kurtz (“What are they gonna say? That he was a kind man? That he was a wise man?”). Francis gave me that footage for free, which was very kind of him.

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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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  • ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’ poster

    Yes, another poster — but it’s a good one, and for a film many of us are awaiting rather eagerly, so hopefully you’ll let it slide. The teaser trailer for Tomas Alfredson’s adaptation of John le Carré’s classic spy novel (previously, and very successfully, filmed for television with Alec Guinness in 1979) debuted to a warm response a few weeks ago, and this tastefully sober one-sheet, playing up the more cerebral qualities of the material,  further supports expectations of a classy package. (Spot the release date, by the way.) Also nice to see Gary Oldman given lone above-the-title billing, despite the presence of supporting names that might currently be more marketable. Full poster, courtesy of Empire, after the cut.

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  • Kidman, Alfredson get ‘Danish Girl’ on track

    Nicole KidmanSay what you like about Nicole Kidman, but the lady’s taste in directors is beyond reproach. Fresh from having imaginatively recruited John Cameron Mitchell to guide her pet project “Rabbit Hole,” she’s teaming up with another arthouse maverick looking to cross over — Tomas Alfredson of “Let the Right One In” fame.

    Alfredson will direct Kidman in “The Danish Girl,” another project the actress has been nurturing for some time, but one that seemed to have stalled for a while. I’ve been intrigued by this one ever since it first popped up on the radar, offering as it does a major thesping opportunity for the actress.

    Kidman will play Einar Wegener, the male Danish artist who in 1931 underwent the world’s first sex-change operation. (The film will, however, be proceeding without Charlize Theron, who was earlier attached to play Wegener’s wife. Pity, that — sounded like a plum role for her, too.)

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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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