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Interview: Tomas Alfredson, Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, and Peter Straughan on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Alfredson’s and Straughan’s dialed-back, demure technique was also adopted by Oldman and Firth for their performances.

Interview: Tomas Alfredson, Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, and Peter Straughan on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Photo: Focus Features

Gary Oldman is very particular about his glasses. Or, at least, he was very particular about the glasses he’d be wearing as George Smiley, the iconic intelligence expert created by author John le Carré, and the central figure in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the crisp new adaptation of le Carré’s twisty espionage classic, directed by Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In).

“I drove Tomas mad,” Oldman says. “Completely crazy. I tried on more than 300 pairs of glasses. Because, to me, Smiley’s spectacles are as iconic as…well, they’re the Aston Martin to Smiley. They are as important. I was testing a few pairs in England before shooting, and I just couldn’t find the right ones. And then I found them…in Pasadena.”

After uttering that last line like a song lyric, Oldman explains how, in 2009, while driving down Sunset Boulevard, he caught a glimpse of Tinker Tailor co-star Colin Firth on a billboard for A Single Man, for which Firth rocked a pair of vintage horn rims that subsequently pervaded the movie’s marketing.

“I see this poster,” Oldman says, “and first, I think it’s Marcello Mastroianni. Then I get closer, and it’s Colin Firth. And he looks so…period, in that poster. And I thought, ‘I like those glasses.’ Later, I was reading a magazine, and there was this little article about retro glasses that mentioned Colin Firth’s. It said where he got them—this place called Old Focals in Pasadena, where they carry 30,000 pairs of vintage spectacles. I went there, and saw a guy called Russ. And he had Smiley’s glasses.”

Oldman’s dogged quest to hunt down the proper old-school specs is an apt reflection of what makes Tinker Tailor tick. Breezing through New York in promotion of their film, the sharply dressed international quartet of Oldman, Firth, Alfredson, and co-screenwriter Peter Straughan all agree that the secret to the 1973-set thriller’s success is a complete, steadfast dedication to low-tech period detail, scene-setting props and gadgetry, and a comprehensive restraint found in each man’s approach to the material. It’s a sweeping cloak of a force, responsible for both pulling viewers into the meticulously realized, Cold War-era world of le Carré’s “Circus” (the code name for the British Secret Intelligence Service in and around which the story unfolds), and also keeping them at a certain distance from it, as the dense narrative offers only passing clues to the breadth of the story’s moniker-filled, Tolkien-esque lore.

“We knew from the beginning that we were going to hold true to the book in the sense that we wouldn’t spoon feed an audience,” says Straughan, who also co-penned this year’s remake of The Debt. “But it was a complicated balancing act to hold true to that without mystifying an audience completely.”

The balancing act included juggling the story’s many puzzle pieces right along with its era-specific knickknacks, tossing around references to “Karla,” “Witchcraft,” “scalphunters,” and “lamplighters,” and leaving it up to the audience to figure out how it all fits together. It also included the precise placement of deliciously subtle bits of characterization, such as a silent scene in which two characters fuss over a bee in their car, while the aloof and calmly competent Smiley, seated in the backseat, merely rolls down his window to flush the insect out—an offhand nod, also, to Smiley’s chief mission to expel an invading Soviet mole from the Circus’s top ranks.

“For me it’s important to establish a dialogue for the audience rather than just deciding everything,” says Alfredson. “So I give you suggestions to play around with, and that will keep you active. And you sort of want the effect of people wanting to look around the corner. That is the effect I want to accomplish.”

The effects neither Alfredson nor Straughan were ever interested in were those of the slam-bang, multi-million-dollar sort, which most contemporary filmgoers so closely associate with the spy genre, from Bond to Bourne.

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“Going in for the very first meeting,” Straughan says, “[Tomas and I] said to each other, if they want to update it, if they want to put car chases in, if they want to put gun fights in, we’re not doing it. The whole point of the book is it’s the opposite of that stuff. There are lots of movies that do all that; this is the opposite. It gives it a counter vision, and I think for most people it probably feels a lot closer to what they imagine the movie to be. Again, we wanted to stay true to that.”

Adds Alfredson, “I’m not a very useful director for anything like that anyway. I can do a film here and there, but I don’t think I’d be a great action-movie maker.”

Alfredson’s and Straughan’s dialed-back, demure technique was also adopted by Oldman and Firth for their performances as Smiley and Bill Haydon, a revered top officer at the Circus who, like many of his colleagues, is under suspicion as the possible mole. Oldman, who’s been playing villains and outcasts with outsized personalities since blazing onto the scene as Sid Vicious, says Smiley was indeed a kind of departure, but bringing him to life wasn’t much different from the actor’s previous experiences, and he still has that certain Oldman animalism.

“Pulling back was much the same as letting go,” Oldman says. “It’s interesting here, though, where you’re driving it and you are the lead, but you’re doing it from such a reigned-in and passive place. He’s a very interesting leading character in that sense. Normally you motor, and drive, a scene while playing those characters that really physically express their emotions. All the clues to play him were in the material, and certainly the source material. Everything we need to know about George is there in the book. The key into it for me, to unlock the door to it, was a passage in the book where [George’s wife] Ann talks about him. She says, ‘He’s like a swift.’ He can, or must, regulate his body temperature to that of the room, or the situation, like a reptile. That’s where the stillness came from.”

And just because Smiley is Tinker Tailor’s key protagonist doesn’t mean he’s devoid of Oldman’s trademark darkness. Addressing the Smiley performances that preceded his own, including Alec Guiness’s “definitive” turn in the beloved 1979 miniseries, Oldman contends that his Smiley is “a lot less huggable,” as evidenced by the curt turns of phrase his character uses to twist the knife while pressing for information, a move that, of course, is ever so subtle.

“It’s what I call ‘the tickle,’” Oldman says. “Smiley would just give you a little tickle. He can be mean. He’s a bit of a sadist. He knows that it’s a bit of an ugly world, and I think he accepts it. He doesn’t need to say some of the things he says, but he does it to get a reaction. And he just throws it away. It’s dark.”

A similar tickle is employed to hint at the details of characters like Firth’s Haydon, one of at least three supposed homosexuals working within the Circus. Presumably a manifestation of the notion that British Cold War soldiers had a kind of replete sensitivity and “feminine element to them” as opposed to hot war soldiers, a concept called upon by Alfredson, Straughan, and Straughan’s wife and co-writer Bridget O’Connor (who succumbed to cancer in September 2010), Haydon’s sexuality is as “tossed away” as Smiley’s jabs, the cryptic code names, and the clues to the mole’s identity. It’s just another wrinkle in the fabric, and it’s the sort of thing that attracted Firth to the project, rather than, say, a noisy, baldfaced, guy’s-guy action picture.

“I suppose because Tinker Tailor is particularly about a man’s world,” Firth says, “with women barely featuring here and there and only two female roles, that it’s about men. But it’s not about the macho virtues of maleness, it’s not about macho effectiveness, and it’s not about hard-bitten heroism. I think it’s actually much more about fragility and loneliness and disappointed idealism. I haven’t really done a lot of the action stuff, so I can’t really compare. I don’t know what they’re like to act in, and frankly I think there would be too much running for me. But I certainly do think that this film is a wonderful opportunity for an actor, and for very nuanced interaction.”

Firth is also in passionate support of Straughan and Alfredson’s efforts to maintain le Carré’s milieu, and to have as much respect for the dramatic power of a reel-to-reel tape recorder as Oldman did for the aesthetic power of Smiley’s signature glasses. Firth says the allover vintage style serves as fuel for the film’s tension, and it’s what’s pleases viewers who walk out of Tinker Tailor, a proudly, handsomely analogue mystery.

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“There’s always been technology in the spy or detective genre,” Firth says. “There’s always been some gadget, even if you go back to the ’30s or ’40s, where someone would pull out a bit of microfilm. But I think one of the things that people have found refreshing about this, aesthetically as much as anything else, is the low-tech element. I mean, we’re up to here now in iPads and slick designs, which don’t show their inner workings. I think suddenly there’s a poetry to an old typewriter or elevators where you can see the pulleys moving. What that also does is, if you don’t have a machine or a microchip that solves a problem, it’s thrown back on human ingenuity. Just look at the business of mobile phones in films. If you’re going to take a story about how critical it is for one person to get information to another person, and all the things that could go wrong in the meantime, you could make a fantastic story out of that. Except, if the guy has a cellphone, it’s over and the problem’s solved before the first scene ends. Things that do things for you can really conspire against drama, making this movie’s low-tech aspects all the more important.”

And what sorts of low-tech things does an actor like Firth do when he’s not starring in yet another awards contender?

“Oh, there’s a lot of non-technical things,” he says, “but most of it is none of your business.”

R. Kurt Osenlund

R. Kurt Osenlund is a creative director and account supervisor at Mark Allen & Co. He is the former editor of Out magazine.

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