Tinker, Tailer, Soldier…Vampire?
Well no, not really, but fresh off his international success with Let the Right One In, Swedish director Tomas Alfredson is lining up to make his first English language feature, an adaptation of Tinker, Tailer, Soldier, Spy. Author John le Carré brought his famous character George Smiley out of retirement in 1974 to root out a double agent in the British intelligence service. It was the first of a trilogy of novels that also include The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People.
Peter Morgan (The Queen and pretty much everything else British these days) is writing the screenplay on the film set to begin shooting next year.
Tinker, Tailer, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People were already memorably brought to television in mini-series format by the BBC in the late ’70s and early ’80s with the great Alec Guinness in the role of George Smiley.
Source: Screen Daily
Filed under: Development, News
Tags: Alec Guinness, John Le Carre, Let the Right One In, Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy, Tomas Alfredson
Lamenting the flurry of remakes a couple months ago, I’m pretty sure I made a statement about how “there are probably a bunch of old John Le Carre novels that somebody could adapt”. I didn’t know about the BBC miniseries, but hey, we’re at the point where this movie gets automatic props for being the first theatrical movie. And Alfredson’s involvement only adds to it.
That being said, I hope it’s better than the State of Play movie.
You should check out the Beeb miniseries. Not sure how well they’ve aged, but you have to like Sir Alec.
Plus, you have to figure 7 parts will do better justice to a book than a couple of hours.
I wonder how the horror-loving fanboy crowd will respond to this. When I chatted with Mr. Alfredson (in an interview that went so poorly it helped put me off interviews for months and will never see the light of day), he was clearly not interested in horror as a genre. He didn’t see Let the Right One In as horror at all…so it’s not a shock he’s already moving on.
Good for him.
Truthfully, I didn’t much care for Let the Right One In, I thought it was the typical cold-remote-arty-snail’s-paced horror movie that gets overpraised once every year or so. I kinda assume the director will apply all that to a spy movie that will probably get overpraised as well.
“Alfredson has worked miracles in condensing Le Carre’s impenetrable material, blah, blah”
You make ‘cold-remote-arty-snail’s-paced horror movie’ sound like it’s a bad thing.
Haha, my thoughts exactly, Jeff. As a fan of cold-remote-arty-snail’s-paced movies I object.
I thought it followed “how to make a critically acceptable horror movie” play by play. And to clarify, I didn’t hate it, I just thought the critics took it too far, and that they always fall for that sort of thing.
In this case I don’t think it’s a matter of him looking down on horror as a genre, but that what appealed to him about the story existed separately from the horror elements. In that sense, it was an art movie dressed up as a horror movie, but I don’t see that as an inherently bad thing.
It’s no surprise that some of the more outward horror moments were the least effective.
The thing with the cats was ridiculous, but I give him the moment where the vampire walks into the house uninvited. That was unnerving.
I liked the scene where Oskar meets Eli for the first time out on the playground as well. Creepy, but as much creepy because of Oskar as Eli. The kid felt like a future serial killer in the making.
I thought LET THE RIGHT ONE IN was a gem through and through, and a model of its kind. The vast majority of bloggers and nearly all the critics seem to agree, where the reaction has been justly superlative. But its always nice to get that extreme minority position for some perspective.
This director moving on to American films reminds me what happened to Lasse Hallstrom, after he scored big with MY LIFE AS A DOG, a lovely Swedish film about a young boy’s coming of age. But Hallstrom had a few American hits (THE CIDER HOUSE RULES, ONCE AROUND) so there’s precedence here for Mr. Alfredson.
Hallstrom had commercial successes, but I’m not a huge fan of his later work. There aren’t many foreign directors who survive the transition since Hollywood seems to force them to stop doing all the things that made them interesting in the first place.
In this case, I think it’s a Brit production (Working Title is British, no?…or am I confusing it with Handmade Films again?) so there’s a reasonable chance it could work.
True Craig, what you say about Hallstrom, but I did like one single film from his commercial stint and that was THE CIDER HOUSE RULES, which nearly won Best Picture of its year, ultimately losing out to AMERICAN BEAUTY. It pours on the syrup, but it’s still an engaging, well-acted drama, based on one of its author’s most beloved works.