Tinker Tailor Soldier Director
Director TOMAS ALFREDSON revisits his excellent John le Carré adaptation, TinkerTailorSoldierSpy, as it turns ten
LEST WE FORGET, thoughtful, bespectacled Swedish director Tomas Alfredson is responsible for two modern genre classics. Clothed in atmosphere, both are haunting studies in loneliness and deception, both adaptations, and both highly personal films.
Rising out of television — “I was known for that oxymoron, Swedish comedy!” — Alfredson awoke to find himself an overnight sensation following vampire hit Let The Right One In, based on John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel about a bullied boy who bonds with a very strange girl in wintergripped suburban Stockholm. Resisting the siren call of Hollywood, he then applied an equally vivid gloom to John le Carré’s whack-a-mole spy masterpiece Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It was if he hadn’t changed genres. He also scored Gary Oldman an overdue Oscar nomination as veteran spook George Smiley sniffing out betrayal in the ranks of the Circus, despite stepping into the weathered brogues of Alec Guinness, who had been so definitive in the part in the BBC adaptation that even le Carré couldn’t shake his grouchy face. Alfredson brought a sly, outsider’s eye to a very British institution. In effect, he was a spy in the camp, satirising the futile chess-game of espionage. On the tenth anniversary of Tinker Tailor, he joins Empire over a safe-line from Sweden to recall his intense sojourn among the Cold Warriors.
Did it feel intimidating to be adapting a classic of British Cold War literature?
You know, I was in a very strange situation, because a couple of years before I had my big international breakthrough with Let The Right One In, this little horror movie. This was quite late in my career. Suddenly I was surrounded by people who thought I was into making zombie movies. I was a bit traumatised. I didn’t know what to do with all these offers coming from all over the world. I refused everything.